"Secularised" Christianity and the Underside of “Freedom”: The Politics of Belonging in Asylum Adjudications Based on Conversion to Christianity

The question of how the concept of the secular “transfers theological grammars into political meanings” within modern western nation-states, as the CfP poignantly phrases, is particularly pressing in the context of asylum claims based on religious conversion.

Among recent forced migrations to Europe, asylum claims based on conversion to Christianity and fear of religious persecution are especially predominant among claimants from countries shaped by variants of political Islam, such as Iran and Afghanistan. The legal framework for such claims is clear: they invoke the human right to freedom of religion, anchored in international law, specifically the 1951 Refugee Convention, which recognizes the right to change religion as valid grounds for asylum if not protected by one’s country of origin. However, the adjudication of such claims by decision-makers and legal authorities of secular nation-states is far from straightforward, and refugee status determinations based on conversion to Christianity have overwhelmingly negative results. While decision-makers must primarily assess the risk of persecution if claimants were to be returned to their country of origin, they first must be convinced that the conversion itself is “genuine”—as asylum decisions often phrase it, the new religious identity “cannot be shed like a cloak” on return (Rose & Given-Wilson 2021). These credibility assessments are particularly fraught because they must navigate an inherent paradox: the claimants’ conversion is both an assertion of religious freedom and a claim to cultural belonging. How can this tension be resolved?

Drawing on over a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Germany—including court observations, participant observation at church events, and interviews with asylum seekers, legal actors, and religious supporters—this paper argues that legal decision-makers of the secular state do not merely assess religious sincerity (cf. McCrary 2022); they construct a “Christian orthodoxy” (cf. Kagan 2003, 2010) that is far removed from the lived religion of asylum-seeking converts or even their German supporters (cf. e.g. Römer 2024). Thus, asylum adjudications of converts to Christianity render visible a battle over the right place of religion in the modern nation-state. 

These adjudications do not only determine protection from persecution but they function as a struggle over the boundaries of citizenship (Vetters 2022), with courts serving as internal borders that regulate access to the nation-state’s body politic. In asylum claims based on conversion to Christianity, the legal authorities of the nation-state are confronted with claimants who seek belonging to the religious and cultural history of the “us” of the admitting state. However, in Germany—where Christianity functions primarily as an ambient cultural backdrop to yearly festivals and significant life events for the ca. 62% of members registered in one of the two large state churches—adult conversions are highly unusual, if not suspicious. They threaten to lift religion out of a clearly demarcated category and take up more space than it is assigned in the secular state (cf. Mahmood 2006). To prove a genuine conversion, decision-makers therefore expect asylum seekers to prove an internal identity change, thorough rational and intellectual engagement with the new religion, and a continuous religious interest that warrants a switch from one faith system to another. This expectation, however, is often at odds with the actual motivations and experiences of asylum-seeking converts, many of whom describe their conversion in terms of freedom, rights, and equality—values they associate with Western nation-states themselves rather than with Christianity in a strictly theological sense, yet which actually match the ambient Christianity of many German citizens.

Asylum adjudications are instructive because they spell out what often remains vague in general discourse. By defining a 'Christian orthodoxy' as a category of difference, courts paradoxically 'secularize' Christianity—recasting it in terms of fixed criteria that most claimants can never meet.  In this context, the concept of freedom—particularly religious freedom—functions as a tool for defining who can be included in the nation-state and who remains outside, a process that reflects broader geopolitical and colonial patterns of exclusion. Thus, the skepticism of administrative judges toward asylum-seeking converts is not merely about protecting against “fraudulent” asylum claims but also about safeguarding the “cultural security” (Silverblatt 2004), and perhaps racial security, of the nation-state itself. This exposes a deeper paradox at the heart of secularism: while ostensibly upholding religious freedom, the state simultaneously reconfigures and constrains religion in ways that reinforce national and racial boundaries.

References

Kagan, Michael. 2003. “Is Truth in the Eye of the Beholder? Objective Credibility Assessment in Refugee Status Determination.” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 17 (3): 367–415.

———. 2010. “Refugee Credibility Assessment and the “Religious Imposter” Problem: A Case Study of Eritrean Pentecostal Claims in Egypt.” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 43 (5): 1180–1230.

Mahmood, Saba. 2006. “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation.” Public Culture 18 (2): 323–47. 

McCrary, Charles. 2022. “Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Römer, Benedikt. 2024. “The Iranian Christian Diaspora. Religion and Nationhood in Exile.” London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Rose, Lena, and Zoe Given-Wilson. 2021. “ʼWhat Is Truth?ʼ Negotiating the Credibility of Religious Conversion of Asylum Seekers in Germany.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 697 (1): 221–35.

Silverblatt, Sylvia. 2004. “Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World.” Durham: Duke University Press.

Vetters, Larissa. 2022. “Making Sense of Noncitizens’ Rights Claims in Asylum Appeal Hearings: Practices and Sentiments of Procedural Justice among German Administrative Judges.” Citizenship Studies 26 (7): 927–43.