There is a substantial difference between the scholarly study of disaffiliation and anti-cult tales which resembles old stories of white maidens kidnapped by Native Americans.
by Massimo Introvigne.
Article 3 of 5. Read article 1 and article 2.
As we mentioned in an earlier article, sociological studies of apostate accounts were scarce until the 1970s. Then, research flourished, driven by the importance of apostates in publications by the anti-cult movement and court cases against “cults.”
Early research studied the phenomenon of disaffiliation in general. Why and how do devotees leave a religious organization? In a study I quoted in an early article of this series, Stuart Wright distinguishes between role theory models, causal process models, and organizational models as three alternative, or complementary, explanations of disaffiliation.
Role theory, as leading scholars of new religious movements such as David Bromley and Anson D. Shupe (1948–2015) argued, explains affiliation and disaffiliation without the need to recur to “exotic” models or dubious science used by anti-cultists. We all perform roles in life, in fact different roles at the same time (spouse, parent, professional, taxpayer, sport fan, etc.), and when we join a religion we learn to perform a certain role. It is possible that performance is not accompanied by total commitment, and is intended as an experiment.
Religious roles are demanding, and may generate role conflicts. For instance, if a spouse does not agree with the other spouse’s religion, the latter will experiment a conflict between the role of spouse and the role of religious devotee. One of the roles may thus be shed, resulting either in divorce or disaffiliation. Or it may just be the case that during one’s “moral career” most roles are perceived as temporary, and the religious one may simply run its course.
Causal process models try to reconstruct the stages of disaffiliation as they follow each other in time. A crisis in a religious affiliation may be determined by a variety of factors, which are less often ideological and more often practical, such as quarreling with local leaders or developing a romantic relationship with somebody hostile to the religion. Studies have proved that ideological motivations (“I realized it was a cult,” “I studied the Bible and concluded theology was false”) are more often added post factum. Crises, if not solved, lead to withdrawal and to a cognitive transition followed by a cognitive reorganization, where former devotees reinvent their identities either as members of another religion or as part of our largely non-religious society.
Organizational models shift the focus from the person who disaffiliates to the religion. The latter may go through organizational crises, or reforms some members do not like. For instance, when the Roman Catholic Church implemented the reforms of the Second Vatican Council a sizable number of “traditionalist” Catholics felt confused and unhappy, and some ended up leaving the church.
All these scholarly models consider disaffiliation as an active process initiated by the person who disaffiliates. Anti-cultists tend to favor a passive model where the apostate is a “victim” who is “imprisoned” in the “cult,” and may only disaffiliate through external “rescue,” sometimes in the extreme form of deprogramming (a practice where “cultists” are kidnapped by professional “deprogrammers” hired and paid by their relatives and submitted to intense and sometimes violent indoctrination until they break down and accept to leave their religion). British sociologist Eileen Barker and others have demonstrated that this theory is statistically false.
Barker proved that in one of the groups most often labeled as a “cult,” the Unification Church founded by Korean Reverend Moon Sun-Myung (1920–2012), most members voluntarily and quietly disaffiliated after five years or less, without anybody “rescuing” or deprogramming them. Unlike the imaginary jails described by the anti-cultists, real-life new religious movements have revolving doors.
Bromley compared the anti-cult “rescue” model of disaffiliation to the “captivity narratives” of American white colonists allegedly kidnapped by Native Americans. In the 19th century books become popular describing how young white women, in particular, were kidnapped and compelled to marry Native Americans and live as they did. Titillating details about alleged Native American sexual mores helped selling these books. However, most of the accounts were fictional. As historian of culture David L. Minter (1935–2017) noted, these stories cross-fertilized themselves with the equally false accounts of Protestant girls kidnapped by nuns and sexually abused in Catholic convents (which we discussed in the previous article in this series). Worse, they became propaganda justifying the massacres of Native Americans.
Several scholars accept that the model of the captivity narratives has been applied by anti-cultists to build narratives where the “cultists” have been “kidnapped” and held “captive” by the “cults,” until they were “rescued.” The propaganda function of these tales is the same.
Unlike anti-cult propaganda, models adopted by scholars also posits that disaffiliation is a gradual process, and “sudden” disaffiliation is as rare as sudden, immediate conversion on the model of Paul the Apostle instantly becoming a Christian on the road to Damascus.
The process of disaffiliation is the starting point to study why not all disaffiliated ex-members become apostates, i.e., not all and not even most of them become militant opponents of the religious organization they have left. We will return to this point in the next article.