Exes speak out, Narratives of apostasy

Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology and Soka Gakkai

Authors

  • Nicola Pannofino University of Turin
  • Mario Cardano University of Turin

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsnr.34152

Keywords:

apostasy, narrative, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientology, Soka Gakkai

Abstract

The paper presents a study of the trajectories of apostasy from three religious movements, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Soka Gakkai Buddhist institute and the Church of Scientology, through the analysis of a body of autobiographical narratives posted online by Italian apostates. Even more than being the account of a past religious experience, these narratives are the last stage in the gradual articulation of a voice with which the disaffected believers publicly express a critical view of the organizations they have left, charging them with using practices of interdiction to prevent dissent by their members. The common theme that emerges from these stories is not the loss of faith, but the discovery of a hidden deception, the breach of the implicit pact of trust that bound the narrator to the religious group.

Author Biography

  • Nicola Pannofino, University of Turin

    Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, PhD

References

Adam, Raoul. 2009. “Leaving the fold: Apostasy from fundamentalism and the direction of religious development.” Australian Religious Studies Review 22(1): 42–63.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, 269–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Barone, Carlo. 2007. “A Neo-Durkheimian analysis of a new religious movement: The case of Soka Gakkai in Italy.” Theory and Society 36(2): 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9023-3

Barone, Carlo and Andrea Molle. 2006. “Così vicini, così lontani: i percorsi di adattamento delle tradizioni buddhiste alla religiosità italiana in Soka Gakkai e Sukyo Mahikari.” In Il buddhismo contemporaneo. Rappresentazioni, istituzioni, mondernità, edited by Marta Sernesi and Federico Squarcini, 163–186. Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina.

Barro, Robert, Jason Hwang and Rachel McCleary. 2010. “Religious conversion in 40 countries.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49(1): 15–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01490.x

Berkowitz, Daniel. 1988. “Scholars, sects and shangas, I: Recruitment to Asian-based meditation groups in North America.” Sociological Analysis 49(2): 136–170. https://doi.org/10.2307/3711010

Bibby, Reginald W. and Merlin B. Brinkerhoff. 1974. “When proselytizing fails: An organizational analysis.” Sociology of Religion 35(3): 189–200. https://doi.org/10.2307/3710649

Bisha, Tim. 2011. “Different worlds: Looking at Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Totem: The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology 2(1): art. 4.

Bourdieu, Pierre 1971. “Genèse et structure du champ religieux.” Revue française de sociologie 12(3): 295–334. https://doi.org/10.2307/3320234

Bromley, David. 1998. “Linking social structure and the exit process in religious organizations: defectors, whistle-blowers, and apostates.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37(1): 145–160. https://doi.org/10.2307/1388034

Burnett, Traci K. 2012. “This was the place: Apostasy from the LDS Church.” All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, paper 1145.

Busacchi, Vinicio. 2012. Tra ragione e fede. Interventi buddisti. Milano: Mimesis.

Cardano, Mario and Nicola Pannofino. 2015. Piccole apostasie. Il congedo dai nuovi movimenti religiosi. Bologna: il Mulino.

Carter, Lewis. 1998. “Carriers of faith: On assessing credibility of apostate and other outsider accounts of religious practices.” In The Politics of Religious Apostasy, edited by David Bromley, 221–237. London: Praeger.

Chalfant, Eric. 2011. “Thank God I’m an atheist: Deconversion narratives on the internet.” Unpublished MA Thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Wake Forest University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Cottee, Simon. 2015. The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam. London: Hurst.

Davidman, Lynn. 2011. “The transformation of bodily practices among religious defectors.” In Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules, edited by Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan, 209–219. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Davidman, Lynn and Arthur Greil. 2007. “Characters in search of a script: The exit narratives of formerly ultra-orthodox Jews.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46(2): 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2007.00351.x

Dobbelaere, Karel. 1998. La Soka Gakkai. Un movimenti di laici diventa una religione. Torino: ElleDiCi.

Ebaugh, Helen R. 1988. Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gooren, Henri. 2007. “Reassessing conventional approaches to conversion: toward a new synthesis.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46(3): 337–353. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2007.00362.x

Greil, Arthur L. and David R. Rudy. 1984. “Social cocoons: Encapsulation and identity transformation organizations.” Sociological Inquiry 54(3): 260–278. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1984.tb00060.x

Hall, Deana. 1998. “Managing to recruit: Religious conversion in the workplace.” Sociology of Religion 59(4): 393–410. https://doi.org/10.2307/3712124

Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1999. Le pèlerin et le converti. La religion en mouvement. Paris: Flammarion.

Holden, Andrew. 2002. “Cavorting with the Devil: Jehovah’s Witnesses who abandon their faith.” http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/research/publication/papers/holden-cavorting-with-the-devil.pdf

Introvigne, Massimo and PierLuigi Zoccatelli. 2013. Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia. Torino: ElleDiCi.

Jacobs, Janet. 1987. “Deconversion from religious movements: An analysis of charismatic bonding and spiritual commitment.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26(3): 294–308. https://doi.org/10.2307/1386433

Jamieson, Alan. 1998. “A churchless faith.” Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Canterbury.

Johnson, Daniel. 1998. “Apostates who never were: The social construction of absque facto apostate narrarives.” In The Politics of Religious Apostasy, edited by David Bromley, 115–138. London: Praeger.

Laggia, Alberto and Maria Pia Gardini. 2009. Il coraggio di parlare. Milano: Paoline.

Lakatos, Imre. 1970. “Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, 170–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139171434.009

Lalich, Janja. 2004. “Using the bounded choice model as an analytical tool: A case study of Heaven’s Gate.” Cultic Studies Review 3(2/3): 226–247.

Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands.” Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6: 1–40.

Lewis, James and Nicholas Levine. 2010. “Controversy.” In Children of Jesus and Mary: The Order of Christ Sophia, edited by James Lewis and Nicholas Levine, 83–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lofland, John and Rodney Stark. 1965. “Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective.” American Sociological Review 30(6): 862–875. https://doi.org/10.2307/2090965

Macioti, Maria I. 1996. Il Buddha che è in noi. Germogli del Sutra del Loto. Roma: SEAM.

McAdams, Dan P. 2011. “Narrative identity.” In Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, edited by Seth J. Schwartz, Koen Luyckx and Vivian L. Vignoles, 99–115. New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_5

Perelman, Chaïm and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1958. Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Rambo, Lewis R. and Charles E. Farhadian. 1999. “Converting: Stages of religious change.” In Religious Conversion. Contemporary Practices and Controversies, edited by Christopher Lamb and Darroll Bryant, 23–34. New York: Cassel.

Reitman, Janet. 2011. Inside Scientology. The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Riessman, Catherine K. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Scharp, Kristina and Aubrey Beck 2017. “Losing my religion: Identity (Re)constructions in Mormon exit narratives.” Narrative Inquiry 27(1): 132–148. https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.27.1.07sch

Simmel, Georg. 1906. “The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies.” American Journal of Sociology 11(4): 441–498. https://doi.org/10.1086/211418

Snow, David and Richard Machalek. 1983. “The convert as a social type.” Sociological Theory 1: 259–289. https://doi.org/10.2307/202053

Stark, Rodney and William S. Bainbridge. 1980. “Networks of faith: Interpersonal bonds and recruitment to cults and sects.” American Journal of Sociology 85(6): 1376–1395. https://doi.org/10.1086/227169

----- 1985. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Streib, Heinz. 2005. “Faith development research revisited: Accounting for diversity in structure, content and narrativity of faith.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 15(2): 99–121. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327582ijpr1502_1

----- 2014. “Deconversion.” In Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, edited by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian, 271–296. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stromberg, Peter. 1993. Language and Self-Transformation. A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tajfel, Henri. 1974. “Social identity and intergroup behaviour.” Social Science Information 13(2): 65–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847401300204

Todorov, Tzvetan. 1971. “The two principles of narrative.” Diacritics 1(1): 37–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/464558

Tracy, Jessica and Richard Robins. 2007. “Self-conscious emotions: Where self and emotions meet.” In The Self in Social Psychology, edited by Constantine Sedikides and Steven Spencer, 187–209. New York: Psychology Press.

Trahan, Adam. 2013. “The center holds quite well: An ethnographic study of social structure and control in Jehovah’s Witness religious organization.” Internation Journal of Criminology and Sociology 2: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.6000/1929-4409.2013.02.1

Weber, Max. 1920. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Mohr: Tübingen.

Witten, Masha. 1992. “The restriction of meaning in religious discourse: Centripetal devices in a fundamentalist Christian sermon.” In Vocabularies of Public Life. Empirical Essays in Symbolic Structure, edited by Robert Wuthnow, 19–38. London: Routledge.

Wright, Bradley R. E., Dina Giovanelli, Emily G. Dolan and Mark E. Edwards. 2011. “Explaining deconversion from Christianity: A study of online narratives.” Journal of Religion and Society 13: 1–17.

Wright, Stuart A. 1991. “Reconceptualizing cult coercion and withdrawal: A comparative analysis of divorce and apostasy.” Social Forces 70(1): 125–145. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/70.1.125

----- 1998. “Exploring factor that shape the apostate role.” In The Politics of Religious Apostasy, edited by David Bromley, 95–114, London: Praeger.

Wuthnow, Robert. 2005. America and Challenges of Religious Diversity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400837243

Published

2018-07-27

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Pannofino, N., & Cardano, M. (2018). Exes speak out, Narratives of apostasy: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology and Soka Gakkai. International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 8(1), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsnr.34152