“Some days Iʼm an Atheist and Other Days Iʼm a Believer”: Variations of Ambivalence among Disaffiliates from Norwegian High-Cost Charismatic Christianity

Gilsvik, Espen

doi:10.18261/njrs.36.1.3

NJRS

2023

DOI: 10.18261/njrs.36.1.3

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“Some days Iʼm an Atheist and Other Days Iʼm a Believer”: Variations of Ambivalence among Disaffiliates from Norwegian High-Cost Charismatic Christianity

Espen Gilsvik

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Cited by 2 publications

References 25 publications

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Longing for Humanity: The Process of Leaving a Context of Perceived Spiritual Abuse

Vigdel,

Nygaard,

Kleiven

2024

Pastoral Psychol

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This study provides an account of leaving a context of perceived spiritual abuse within some Pentecostal fellowships in Norway. We discuss how our 16 informants discovered the need for change and sought support to navigate challenging departure processes characterized by emotional strain. Three empirical themes emerged: (1) God’s will, as conveyed by leaders, evoked shame, (2) there were various sources of help in leaving a context of perceived spiritual abuse, and (3) the acknowledgment of vulnerability provided space for new images of God. Throughout the leaving process, many informants underwent a profound shift in their perceptions of God, marked by a heightened awareness of their vulnerability. This transformation encompassed a deep-seated desire to embrace their humanity and to accept the relevance of their thoughts and feelings. Acknowledging their own vulnerability allowed them to have more humanized images of God. Our analysis employs Kenneth Pargament’s notion of orienting systems and his theory of religious coping to elucidate how their images of God changed. The process led to a perceived sense of freedom from spiritual abuse. We understand the informants’ experiences of leaving the church and affiliated organizations as instances of deconversion through what empirically emerged as “deprogramming” processes in our material. Deprogramming involves disentangling individuals from what they perceived was conveyed and thus “programmed” by spiritual leaders. Deprogramming processes emerged as a new exploration of images of God, shame, power, and human vulnerability.

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Longing for Humanity: The Process of Leaving a Context of Perceived Spiritual Abuse

Vigdel,

Nygaard,

Kleiven

2024

Pastoral Psychol

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Phantoms of Faith—Experiences of Rupture and Residue of Amputated Religiosity among Norwegian Ex-Charismatic Christians

Gilsvik

2023

Religions

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This article explores non/religious emotions and experiences among a group of high-cost Christian charismatic disaffiliates in Norway. It is a case study of members of the Facebook community “The Journey” (no. “Reisen”). With a qualitative approach, it uses lifestory interviews from 24 ex-Charismatics to describe their experiences of what I call phantoms of faith. The article gives thick descriptions of the disaffiliates’ negotiations between current and past emotions and experiences and the explanations they have for these. It uses the metaphor of phantom to explore embodied and emotional religiosity, for which the analysis is inspired by the conceptual framework of Pagis and Winchester’s somatic inversions. The analysis shows how phantom faith experiences create ruptures and dissonance in the disaffiliates’ everyday lives and thus produce interpretative demands. The article argues that leaving charismatic Christianity, in this material, on an embodied and emotional dimension is much more complex than the cognitive and social dimensions of disaffiliation. Scholarly understandings of this phenomenon have implications for the disaffiliates who experience them, as well as the scholarly constructions of the spaces and categories between religion and non-religion. It argues that such experiences have been somewhat understudied in the literature and that current conceptualizations should be further developed.

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“Some days Iʼm an Atheist and Other Days Iʼm a Believer”: Variations of Ambivalence among Disaffiliates from Norwegian High-Cost Charismatic Christianity

Cited by 2 publications

References 25 publications

Longing for Humanity: The Process of Leaving a Context of Perceived Spiritual Abuse

Longing for Humanity: The Process of Leaving a Context of Perceived Spiritual Abuse

Phantoms of Faith—Experiences of Rupture and Residue of Amputated Religiosity among Norwegian Ex-Charismatic Christians

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