Alternative religion kids: spiritual and cultural identity among children and youth involved with new religious movements

ABSTRACT

The term ‘new religious movement’ (NRM) has come to replace the more provocative term ‘cult,’ however this shift of scholarly language has not resulted in a softening of public perception towards those in religious groups perceived as ‘weird’. This perception leaves a distinct mark on the identities of children raised in these communities.Children from alternative and controversial religions comprise a unique subculture.. The experience of growing up in a new religious movement has an important impact on a young person’s cultural and spiritual identity. Drawing on and expanding Useem and Downie’s model of ‘third culture kids’ (TCKs) the model of ‘alternative religion kids’ (ARKs) is developed. It is proposed that ARKs are a subculture in their own right and share a sense of belonging and identity based on their experience of being religious ‘others’. ARKs may be able to connect through a powerful, shared experience not paralleled with other peers.     

A Religious Experience: A Psychological Interpretation of Kevin Kelly’s Conversion to Christianity

This paper, presented at the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology meeting in October 2012, uses the work of Sigmund Freud and Donald Capps to interpret a religious experience. The religious experience—a narrative about being born again—is recounted from the first story on the first episode of the radio program This American Life, which focuses on the religious conversion of Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine. Using Freud’s “A Religious Experience” as a model for interpretation, I employ psychoanalytic ideas (such as the castration complex) to provide an initial reading of the experience, and I then use Capps’s work on male melancholia and on life cycle theory to further the interpretation. I argue that this young man’s religious experience is reflective of what Capps calls “the religion of honor” and “the religion of hope”; that the timing of his religious experience can be understood by means of life cycle theory; and that, theologically speaking, his experience can be understood using the language of the spirit and the soul.     

Banal is not Trivial: Visibility,Recognition, and Inequalities between Religious Groups in Prison

Recognizing religious groups is not only a question of granting rights, but also a question of the possibility of being perceived as unproblematic, especially in contexts where religion is a contested issue. Spain is a compelling case to examine this proposition. There, the rise of migration-driven religious diversity and the attacks of 11 March 2004 have led religious minorities into the sensitive terrain of ‘supra-visibility’. Drawing upon research conducted in prisons, we show that, in this situation, being classified as a ‘religion’ becomes more a cause for alarm than a sign of normalcy. The most powerful actors in the field have actively distanced themselves from the category of ‘religion’, either because they are presented as spiritual therapies or because they are embedded in cultural traditions—the banal Catholicism that prevails in many southern European settings. Overall, religious inequalities are not only related to the recognition of rights, but also to the (in)visibility of some social and cultural forms over others.     

Perceptions of South African Emerging Adult FET College Students on Sexual Practices in Relation to Religion

HIV and AIDS are rapidly spreading amongst the world’s 15- to 24-year age group, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite vigorous government interventions and campaigns, 10 % of South African youth in the age cohort 15–24 are infected with HIV and AIDS. Furthermore, for the first time in history the world has its largest number of individuals under the age of 30 years. Researchers are desperately seeking a solution and have found religion to play an important role in moderating risky sexual behaviour amongst youth. This exploratory qualitative study aims to increase our understanding of emerging adult Further Education and Training (FET) students’ perceptions of the role of religion and religious beliefs in their sexual decision-making and practices. The qualitative data emerged from five focus group discussions, each consisting of 12 heterosexual emerging adult FET college students aged 18–24 years, selected using random sampling. Participants were representative of all the major South African racial groups (Blacks, Whites, Coloured and Indians) as well as different religious and cultural groupings. Secularisation theory was used as a theoretical framework for this study. These focus group discussions revealed the following themes: Theme 1—religious institutions need to embrace change in order to become effective social agents of change. Theme 2—a need for open discussion and communication concerning current issues related to young people’s sexual health (by religious institutions/religious leaders). Theme 3—perceptions of religion’s negative sanctions towards sexual behaviour. Theme 4—religious leaders’ indifference and abdication of responsibility to the problems that youth face. Theme 5—religion and condom-related beliefs. Theme 6—perceptions of religious leaders as role models. Theme 7—emerging adults general concern for the moral decay of society. Theme 8—perceptions of whether religion has an influence on young people’s sexual decision-making and practices.     

The Politics of Religious Heritage: Framing Claims to Religion as Culture in Spain

This article contributes to sociological theorizations of religion as heritage through analyzing the politics of religious heritage in Spain since its transition to democracy during the late 1970s. Our analysis is organized around three historical sequences of critical importance for understanding the political and legal significance of discourses that frame religion as cultural heritage in Spain: (1) negotiations that took place during Spain's democratic transition between 1977 and 1980; (2) discussions that surfaced in the context of the state's decision to recognize Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism in 1992; and (3) more recent debates regarding the incorporation of religious minorities in the context of increasing religious diversity, especially concerning places of worship. We show how framing “religion” using the language of cultural heritage has provided religious actors with a means of defending the connection between religion and national identity—and of protecting the privileges of majoritarian religious institutions without violating core tenets of secularism or pluralism. This scenario has created space for certain religious minorities to claim a place within Spain's evolving socioreligious landscape by invoking alternative heritages from Spain's multicultural past.     

THE POLITICAL NATURE OF DOCTRINE: A CRITIQUE OF LINDBECK IN LIGHT OF RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

This article argues that the power of religion to shape experience presupposes the mobilization of religious identity through social opposition. This thesis is developed through a critique of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine. The article first examines Lindbeck's thesis that religion shapes experience in light of Talal Asad's critique of Geertz's concept of religion. It argues that in order to understand how ‘religion’ shapes experience we must look outside the immanent sphere of cultural‐religious meaning that Lindbeck, following Geertz, identifies with ‘religion’. Religious authority ultimately derives from the recognition of a social group. Next, looking at the nature of doctrine in light of Kathryn Tanner's thesis that Christian identity is essentially relational, it argues that church doctrines function to mobilize group identity through social opposition. In this respect they resemble the mobilizing slogans of political discourse more than, as Lindbeck's theory proposes, the grammatical rules governing Wittgensteinian language games.     

The Intersection of Gender,Sexuality, and Religion in Mormon Mixed-Sexuality Marriages

Mixed-sexuality marriages (MSMs) are defined in the present study as those where one partner identifies as heterosexual and the other partner identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or reports experiencing same-sex attraction. Members of conservative religions, such as Mormonism, may be more likely to enter MSMs given the religion’s stance on homosexuality and doctrinal emphasis on heteronormative marriage. Using data from 56 interviews with individuals who either have been or currently are Mormon and in a MSM, we explore participants’ ideas about gender roles and sexuality in the context of their ideas about Mormonism. We find that couples’ ideas about gender, sexuality, and religion intersect to act as a resource or impediment to marital satisfaction. Among our sample, most couples maintain an outward appearance of heteronormativity; some view their private departure from the traditional gender order as a benefit to their relationship, whereas others view it as a source of strain and work hard to minimize gender deviance in their roles. The findings provide an important example of the way gender and religion are mutually constitutive and illustrate how notions of sexuality are sometimes used to reinforce a traditional gender order and religious beliefs, whereas at other times, the contradictions of MSMs challenge traditional gender norms and religious orthodoxy.     

Desecration,Moral Boundaries,and the Movement of Law: The Case of Westboro Baptist Church

Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting extant laws of behavior. This strategy, in conjunction with the political profitability of opposing the group, explains why the group’s activism triggered extensive legal disputes and modifications at multiple levels of governance. Westboro’s actions and use of symbols—and those of others against the group—lay bare multiple threads in the sacred cultural fabric of American society.     

Religious authority and the transmission of abstract god concepts

According to the Standard Model account of religion, religious concepts tend to conform to “minimally counterintuitive” schemas. Laypeople may, to varying degrees, verbally endorse the abstract doctrines taught by professional theologians. But, outside the Sunday school exam room, the implicit representations that tend to guide people’s everyday thinking, feeling, and behavior are about minimally counterintuitive entities. According to the Standard Model, these implicit representations are the essential thing to be explained by the cognitive science of religion (CSR). It is argued here that this theoretical orientation of mainstream CSR misses a whole dimension of religiosity—the acceptance of certain religious authorities, that is, the acceptance of other people’s superior expertise. Average believers (especially in doctrinal traditions) tend to accept the authority of religious experts who espouse highly counterintuitive ideas that they (the laypeople) understand in a distorted form, if at all. These highly counterintuitive ideas are culturally successful because laypeople see them as being justified by people they have reason to regard as epistemic authorities. The tendency for people to endorse (without fully understanding) highly counterintuitive religious ideas espoused by intellectuals may explain parallels in the development of separate traditions (e.g., Judaism and Hinduism), as religious philosophers follow parallel lines of reasoning.     

True religion in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Many think that the aim of Hume’s Dialogues is simply to discredit the design argument for the existence of an intelligent designer. We think instead that the Dialogues provides a model of true religion. We argue that, for Hume, the truly religious person: (1) believes that an intelligent designer created and imposed order on the universe; (2) grounds this belief in an irregular argument rooted in a certain kind of experience, for example, in the experience of anatomizing complex natural systems such as the eye; and (3) retains this belief, on the basis of these reasons, even after careful scrutiny. We argue that two of the Dialogues’s characters, Philo and Cleanthes, exhibit true religion. A third character, Demea, exhibits false religion and a persistent impiety. Taken as a whole, we see the Dialogues as an educational performance for the benefit of Pamphilus, Cleanthes’s ward, as well as for the benefit of readers of the Dialogues. Specifically, we think, given that its lessons concern theology and the principles of religion, the dynamics of the Dialogues’s discussion and the interplay between its characters can be seen as a demonstration of a method for becoming truly religious.     

Human rights and religious education in the contentious context of conflict-troubled societies: perspectives from human rights education

This article explores some of the tensions that are created from the entanglement of religion and human rights and offers a possible response to these tensions in the context of religious education in conflict-troubled societies. It is suggested that a historicised and politicised approach in religious education in conjunction with human rights education perspectives can promote three important aims: taking power relations between peoples, societies and cultures as sources of problematising the meaning(s) and consequences of both religion and human rights; developing a teaching and learning process in and through which the emphasis is not on identification with religious or cultural identity, but rather a process through which new and productive ways of relationality with the ‘other’ are developed; and, encouraging students to interrogate moralistic discourses of religion or human rights that often prevent the enactment of friendship, compassion and shared fate.     

Religious Belonging,Religious Agency,and Women's Autonomy in Mozambique

Women's autonomy has frequently been linked with women's opportunities and investments, such as education, employment, and reproductive control. The association between women's autonomy and religion in the developing world, however, has received less attention, and the few existing studies make comparisons across major religious traditions. In this study, we focus on variations in levels of female decision‐making autonomy within a single religious tradition—Christianity. Using unique survey data from a predominantly Christian area in Mozambique, we devise an autonomy scale and apply it to compare women affiliated with different Christian denominations as well as unaffiliated women. In addition to affiliation, we examine the relationship between autonomy and women's religious agency both within and outside their churches. Multivariate analyses show that women belonging to more liberal religious traditions (such as Catholicism and mainline Protestantism) tend to have higher autonomy levels, regardless of other factors. These results are situated within the cross‐national scholarship on religion and women's empowerment and are interpreted in the context of gendered religious dynamics in Mozambique and similar developing settings.     

Religious Conflict and the Chain of Command in the American and French Militaries

Analyzing characteristics of the organizational environment, the organization, and its actors recommended by the framework guiding this symposium on the cross‐cultural study of religion in public institutions, we identify common elements of military organization that shape local and national policies surrounding religion cross‐nationally. Comparison of cases from U.S. and French militaries—a secularist group at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and Muslim soldiers in France—demonstrates this framework's utility by directing attention to when, how, and by what logics constitutional protections are afforded to religious (and nonreligious) minorities. This analysis also reveals two additional arenas of investigation important to the study of religion in public institutions. Because religion today is often at the center of disputes over citizens’ conflicting rights, conflicts over religion in the military, and in other public institutions, demand special attention. In addition, our cases call attention to the importance of organizational structures and authority. Military settings make this point obvious, since the chain of command plays a fundamental and powerful role in the operation of militaries cross‐nationally—including in activities and policies surrounding religion and religious groups.     

Identification with Religion: Cross‐National Evidence from a Social Psychological Perspective

Why is religion a more central social identity for some people than for others? Previous studies focus on explaining individual differences in religious affiliation and religiosity, often using the term “identification” in reference to these concepts. Yet, few scholars operationalize—let alone attempt to explain—identification with religion in social psychological terms, i.e., as a construct that captures the subjective psychological centrality of one's religious identity. After underscoring the benefits of exploring religious identification using cross‐national data, we employ an original data set composed of nationally representative surveys in three European countries to model religious identification in two ways: importance (independent strength of attachment) and prominence (prioritization of one's religious identity relative to the others one holds). We document substantial variation in the degree to which individuals define themselves on the basis of their religious identity. We then test predictions drawn from existing theories to model these two measures. Our results extend current understandings of what shapes psychological attachment to religion and raise new questions for future theorization and analysis.     

The Enduring Influence of Religion on Senators’ Legislative Behavior

Does a senator's personal religion influence their legislative behavior in the Senate? To date, empirical research has answered this question only using senators’ religious traditions, while more concurrent work implies that religion should be measured as a multifaceted phenomenon. This study tests this proposition by compiling a unique data set of senators’ religion, conceptualized and measured by three different elements—belonging, beliefs, and behavior. The study estimates the association between these three religious facets and senators’ legislative behavior on economic, social, and foreign policy issues, while controlling for their constituencies’ political and religious preferences. It finds that religious beliefs are a strong predictor of senators’ legislative behavior, while religious tradition and behavior are mostly not. Furthermore, it finds that religious beliefs are associated with legislative behavior across a wide array of policy areas and are not confined to sociocultural issues.     

Was Hirschi Right?: A National-Level Longitudinal Examination of Religion as a Social Bond

The current research re-examines Hirschi’s (1969) omission of religion as a social bond by examining the impact of religious commitment and religious salience on substance use in National Youth Survey Family Study respondents, both in adolescence/early adulthood, and again in middle adulthood. This approach allows for a longitudinal examination of a large, nationally representative sample of respondents. Results challenge Hirschi’s decision, and suggest that, particularly in adolescence, a person’s religious service attendance, and belief in religion, do affect their likelihood of substance use. Further research is suggested.     

Crafting Mosaics: Person-Centered Religious Influence and Selection in Adolescent Friendships

This research addresses the intersection of two key domains of adolescents’ lives: religion and peer networks. Religion scholars argue that religion is multi-faceted and better understood by focusing on combinations of indicators (i.e., mosaics), versus a variable-centered approach. We adopt this framework and investigate the interplay between religion and peer networks, both in how religious mosaics are shaped by friends and how religious profiles affect friend selection dynamics. With data from two schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate religious mosaics using latent class analysis (LCA) to identify profiles consisting of combinations of commonly available survey-based measures of religious attitudes, behaviors, and identities. Finding evidence of theoretically expected profiles, we then use stochastic actor–based models (SABMs) to investigate network dynamics for these LCA-based religious profiles. We demonstrate how the profile data can be integrated within the SABM framework to evaluate processes of friend selection and influence. Results show evidence of adolescents influencing one another's religious mosaics, but not selecting friends on that basis.     

Peering into the opaque mind

Abstract

Carolyn Saarni’s pioneering research showed that young children learn how to hide their feelings—to conceal disappointment with a smile or to conceal amusement with a neutral expression. By 6 years of age, children understand the implications of such concealment. They can distinguish between: (i) an individual’s true but hidden emotion; (ii) the emotion that the individual overtly expresses; and (iii) the emotion that other people might mistakenly attribute to the individual. Effectively, young children grasp that the mind is opaque. Its contents can remain hidden from others. We examine two issues raised by this important conceptual insight. First, we ask how it emerges in young children—what experiences lead them to acknowledge the mind’s opacity? Second, in light of Saarni’s emphasis on the impact of cultural beliefs and practices, we discuss anthropological evidence that in certain cultures the mind’s opacity is regarded as a social desideratum so that enquiries into, or speculations about, a person’s private mental states are regarded as inappropriate. We consider the understanding of hidden emotion that children will acquire if they grow up in such a culture. We propose—paradoxically—that they will readily differentiate between what is actually felt and what is overtly expressed. We conclude by reviewing recent cross-cultural evidence lending initial support to that prediction.     

Religion and pseudo-religion: an elusive boundary

This paper examines the possibility of setting a boundary between religion and “pseudo-religion” (or superstition). Philosophers of religion inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas, in particular, insist that religious language-use can be neither legitimated nor criticized from the perspective of non-religious language-games. Thus, for example, the “theodicist” requirement that the existence of evil should be theoretically reconciled with theism can be argued to be pseudo-religious (superstitious). Another example discussed in the paper is the relation between religion and morality. The paper concludes by reflecting on the issue of relativism arising from the Wittgensteinian contention that the religion vs. pseudo-religion division can only be drawn within a religious framework, and on Wittgenstein’s own suggestion that the religious person “uses a picture”.