Unfortunately, media often confuse two very different categories, ex-members of religious organizations and apostates. Most ex-members are not apostates.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 4 of 5. Read article 1, article 2, and article 3.
An important part of the modern research on disaffiliation is concerned with how exit roles are socially constructed. Starting from earlier methodology developed by the leading academic expert of apostasy, David Bromley, scholars have distinguished between three different kinds of ex-members of new religious movements: defectors, ordinary leave-takers, and apostates.
Different exit roles may co-exist among former members of the same organization (a possibility Bromley also mentions). These types identify the experience of ex-members at a given moment in their personal history (an ordinary leave-taker may eventually decide to become an apostate, and vice versa) and correspond to socially constructed roles. An exit narrative results from the dynamic interaction between the psychological and social experience of the person who leaves an organization and the environment.
The latter is the social context in which former members are situated and by which they are requested (with greater or lesser pressure) to give an account of their former affiliation. Although social-psychological explanations of exit role constructions have been attempted in the past, there is no “pure,” or “photographic” narrative of an exit process. All such narratives are socially constructed, culturally conditioned, and politically negotiated. There are at least three different types of exit narratives.
Type I narratives characterize the exit process as defection. According to Bromley, “the defector role may be defined as one in which an organizational participant negotiates exit primarily with organizational authorities, who grant permission for role relinquishment, control the exit process, and facilitate role transition.
The jointly constructed narrative assigns primary moral responsibility for role performance problems to the departing member and interprets organizational permission as commitment to extraordinary moral standards and preservation of public trust” (“The Social Construction of Contested Exit Roles: Defectors, Whistle-blowers, and Apostates,” in D.G. Bromley, ed., The Politics of Religious Apostasy: The Role of Apostates in the Transformation of Religious Movements, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1998, 19–48 [28]).
In Type I cases, the ultimate responsibility for leaving the organization is attributed solely to the exiting members. The latter accept that they were simply not able to conform to the standards required by the organization. The exiting members tried to merge into the organization but failed because of personal difficulties. The organization and the former members negotiate an exiting process aimed at minimizing the damage for both parties. It is expected that the former members express a certain amount of regret for not having been able to remain in an organization they still regard as benevolent and of high moral standards.
Type II narratives—ordinary leave-taking—are both the most common and the least often discussed. In fact, participants exit a wide variety of organizations every day, and little is heard about the actual exit processes unless they are contested in some way. Non-contested exit processes involve a minimal degree of negotiation between the exiting members, the organization they intend to leave, and the environment or society at large.
In fact, contemporary society offers a readily available narrative of how a person, in what is the normal process of moving from one social “home” to another in different fields, simply loses interest, loyalty, and commitment to an old experience and proceeds to a new one. In this sense, a typical Type II narrative implies that the ordinary leave-taker holds no strong feelings concerning the past experience.
Since loyalty towards it has diminished, and the organization was ultimately exited, the leave-taker’s narrative will normally include some comments on the organization’s more negative features or shortcomings. The ordinary leave-taker, however, may also recognize that there was something positive in the experience. In fact, ordinary leave-taking is not normally seen as requiring any particular justification, and there will be no deep probing into the causes and responsibilities behind the exit process.
Type III narratives define the role of the apostate. In this case, the ex-members dramatically reverse their loyalties and become “professional enemies” of the organization they have left. “The narrative,” in Bromley’s terms, “is one which documents the quintessentially evil essence of the apostate’s former organization chronicled through the apostate’s personal experience of capture and ultimate escape/rescue” (“The Social Construction of Contested Exit Roles,” 36).
The former organization could easily label the apostate a traitor. However, the apostate—particularly after having joined an oppositional coalition fighting the organization—often adopts the narrative of the “victim” or a “prisoner” who did not join voluntarily. This, of course, implies that the organization itself was the embodiment of an extraordinary evil. Having been socialized into an oppositional coalition by the anti-cult movements, the apostate finds a number of theoretical tools (including powerful brainwashing metaphors) ready for use, which help explaining precisely why the organization is evil and able to deprive its members of their free will.
An essential point, indeed, the key to understand this series and something media dealing with new religious movements and minority religions should keep in mind, is that apostates are but a minority of the ex-members. Most ex-members do not become militant opponents of the group they have left, nor do they regard it as extraordinarily evil. They are simply happy to merge back into the mainstream society, and if asked would say that their former religion had both positive and negative features.
There is empirical evidence that this is the case. In 1999, I conducted a survey among former members of an esoteric movement, New Acropolis, in France. Precisely because New Acropolis does not define itself as a religious organization, privacy concerns might be overcome and a list of ex-members acceded, which was used only to send anonymized questionnaires. I collected 120 responses, and found that apostates were 11.7% of the sample, compared to 16.7% of defectors and 71.6% of ordinary leave-takers.
When I published my findings in Nova Religio, the leading journal for the academic study of new religious movements, I noted that my results were similar to those obtained by other scholars in similar studies of ex-members of groups labeled as “cults.”
For larger organizations such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses surveys are more difficult because they count their members in the millions and at the normal rate of disaffiliation from religious organizations this means that ex-members are in turn in the tens of thousands. However, there is a way of concluding that even for the Jehovah’s Witnesses ordinary leave-takers are the majority of those who leave and apostates a small minority.
Critics of the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim that some 70,000 members are disfellowshipped or leave on average every year. Scholars (not only anti-cultists) compile bibliographies of hostile books and articles, media shows, and anti-cult events where apostate ex-Witnesses manifest themselves and attack the organization. New apostates who appear in a given year are in the hundreds, those globally active perhaps a few thousands.
Even if we assume that some apostates only badmouth the Jehovah’s Witnesses privately with family and friends, although the dynamics of apostasy typically imply going public, we are left with the conclusion that only a comparative small percentage of former Jehovah’s Witnesses become apostate. Others are defectors, who remain in good relations with the organization (there are examples of these, willing to testify in favor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in public investigations or court cases), and we do not hear from the large majority, meaning they are ordinary leave-takers.
It is also important to note that, if apostates represents a minority percentage of ex-members, they are even a smaller percentage of those who were part during their lifetime of a religious organization, including not only all ex-members but also these members who never left. Yet, the stories of the latter are regarded as less newsworthy, or dismissed by the media as propaganda.
Even before asking themselves whether apostates are reliable, and their experience is typical of members of a religious organizations, media should bear in mind that apostates stories are not typical or representative of the experience of ex-members. Most ex-members are ordinary leavetakers, with mixed feelings about the Jehovah’s Witnesses or other groups they might have left, and do not share the atrocity stories or captivity narratives spread by the apostates.
