Apostasy in a NON-Islamic context

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My grandad was a Mason. He aged and stopped bothering to attending as there were less of his old friends in it. Then, the year there was a really keen and intensely Masonic lodge master with a domineering personality, he came and visited him and determinedly talked him back into attending. After which he became a keen Mason again for the rest of his life, came to find its black tie dinner old-fashionedness just the niche he wanted. However good grandad felt about this, I never liked hearing the ex lodge master remember about making him come back to them, and not letting go until he said he would. He was shameless and joky about remembering that his own approach had been demanding and pressuring, successfully so.

don't know the ugly truth about Islam, at all. Only about the hardline versions of it, that are condemned by liberal Muslims.

While in Britain they may have to fake being atheist. When there is no already socially accepted religious person around, atheist peer groups get very aggressive and mocking, that anyone who believes in anything supernatural is gullible and childish or a nutter, judged as offending against rational science wot we know is right. Their confidence in being right is just as doctrinal as a religious peer group's. All supernatural beliefs must be bad because they come from religions that told you what to think or else would reject you, therefore unless you let us tell you to think that, we must be right to reject you.

Anglicans are even different religions to each other. Liberal and Evangelical churches with a condemnatorily strong disapproval of each other both exist under the Anglican label, and as close neighbours in the same area. It's a quirk of history that congregations have evolved in different directions at random, both wings think they are entitled to the continuity of Anglican tradition and neither wing wants to let the other drive them out. Liberal Anglican churches serve a refuge function against other churches, against religious rejection. They get a lot of their membership from folks who have left Evangelical taken over churches, including other Anglican ones! in disgust, or maybe have been put under social pressure by the Evangelicals to toe a line that the liberal churches under the same label say is wrong!

The Plymouth Brethren do disfellowshipping too.

What do you say to the ITV special on 'British' imams willing to perform underage marriages?

Is this simply the 'hardline' version of it?

Is Yusuf al-Qaradawi 'hardline'? He's perhaps the most influential Sunni figure in the world today.

They certainly tend to the hardline direction.

In all religions, hardline v liberal is a spectrum, and the graph of who is hardline on what items and not on others is like a band of dots instead of a line. Personality and personal judgments bring a chaos into the pattern.

Liberal Christians are not spoken for by world famous mad evangelicals like Billy Graham. So liberal Muslims who disagree with any particular cleric are not spoken for by him however prominent he is.