In modern Western societies, disaffiliation frequently occurs within the field of religion. To date, many studies have analysed what motivates people to leave religious institutions. However, whether they face internal conflicts during this process has not been intensely studied. Based on Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance, this paper re-analyses 27 interviews of persons who left the Catholic Church in the diocese of Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia. In 12 out of 27 interviews, such internal conflicts could be reconstructed, indicating that leaving religious institutions is not always an easy process. These conflicts are related to four characteristic core issues evoking dissonant emotions, namely belonging, the social environment, belief, and identity. The analysis also illustrates that disaffiliation not only solves such internal conflicts but sometimes causes new ones. More research is needed to fully understand people’s inner struggles when disaffiliating from religious institutions.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Babajan, T. & Jonsson, P. (2021). Leaving a Folk Church: Patterns of Disaffiliation from the Church of Sweden. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 34(1), 40–55.
Berger, P. L. (Hrsg.). (1999). The desecularization of the world: Resurgent religion and world politics. Eerdmans.
Berghammer, C., Zartler, U. & Krivanek, D. (2017). Looking Beyond the Church Tax: Families and the Disaffiliation of Austrian Roman Catholics. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56(3), 514–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12361
Birkelbach, K. (1999). Die Entscheidung zum Kirchenaustritt zwischen Kirchenbindung und Kirchensteuer. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 28(2), 136–153. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-1999-0204
Bohnsack, R., Nentwig-Gesemann, I. & Nohl, A.‑M. (2001). Die dokumentarische Methode und ihre Forschungspraxis. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-92213-7
Brañas-Garza, P., García-Muñoz, T. & Neuman, S. (2013). Determinants of Disaffiliation: An International Study. Religions, 4(1), 166–185. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel4010166
Bullivant, S. (2016). Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain: A Quantitative Overview. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 31(2), 181–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2016.1152664
Campenhausen A. (2011). Kirchenzugehörigkeit, Kirchenaustritt und Kirchensteuer aus protestantischer Sicht. In E. Güthoff, St. Haering & H. Pree (eds). Der Kirchenaustritt im staatlichen und kirchlichen Recht (S. 59–74). Herder.
Coates, D. D. (2013). Disaffiliation from a New Religious Movement: The Importance of Self and Others in Exit. Symbolic Interaction, 36(3), 314–334. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.60
Davie, G. (1994). Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without belonging. Making contemporary Britain. Blackwell.
Davie, G. (2010). Resacralization. In B. Turner (Hrsg.), Blackwell companions to sociology. The new Blackwell companion to the sociology of religion (pp. 160–177). Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444320787.ch7
Ebertz, M. N., Eberhardt, M. & Lang, A. (2012). Kirchenaustritt als Prozess: gehen oder bleiben? Eine empirisch gewonnene Typologie. LIT.
Faix, T. & Künkler, T. (2017) Dekonversion als postsäkulares Phänomen: Ergebnisse einer empirisch-theologischen Studie. In: Pietismus – Neupietismus – Evangelikalismus. Identitätskonstruktionen im erwecklichen Protestantismus. LIT, 244–272.
Faix, T., Jäkel, M. & Riegel, U. (submitted). The Process of Leaving the Church Revisited. A Replication of Ebertz’ Study on Types of Church Leavers. International Journal of Practical Theology.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford Univ. Press.
Fischer, P., Asal, K. & Krueger, J. I. (2013). Sozialpsychologie für Bachelor. Springer.
Gabriel, K. (Hrsg.). (1996). Religiöse Individualisierung oder Säkularisierung: Biographie und Gruppe als Bezugspunkte moderner Religiösität. Kaiser Gütersloher Verl.-Haus.
Gearon, L. (2019). The Educational Sociology and Political Theology of Disenchantment: From the Secularization to the Securitization of the Sacred. Religions, 10(1), 12. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010012
Griffith, A. (2020). God’s law and order: The politics of punishment in evangelical America. Harvard University Press.
Gutmann, D. & Peters, F. (2020). German Churches in Times of Demographic Change and Declining Affiliation: A Projection to 2060. Comparative Population Studies, 45. https://doi.org/10.12765/CPoS-2020-01
Harmon-Jones, E. & Mills, J. (2019). An introduction to cognitive dissonance theory and an overview of current perspectives on the theory. In E. Harmon-Jones (Ed.), Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology (pp. 3–24). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000135-001
Hoover, B. C. (2021). Evaluating the Moral Framing of Disaffiliation: Sociological and Pastoral Perspectives on the Rise of the “Nones”. Religions, 12(6), 386. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12060386
Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach. (1993). Begründungen und tatsächliche Gründe für einen Austritt aus der Katholischen Kirche. IDA.
Izuma, K., Matsumoto, M., Murayama, K., Samejima, K., Sadato, N. & Matsumoto, K. (2010). Neural correlates of cognitive dissonance and choice-induced preference change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(51), 22014–22019. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011879108
Kecskes, R. & Wolf, C. (1996). Religiöse Sozialisation, konfessionelle Milieus und Generation. In R. Kecskes & C. Wolf (Eds.), Konfession, Religion und soziale Netzwerke (pp. 89–125). VSVerlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-01168-2_7
Kinnaman, D. (2011). You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church …and Rethinking Faith. Baker Publishing Group.
Knobloch-Westerwick, S. (2007). Kognitive Dissonanz »Revisited«. Publizistik, 52(1), 51–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-007-0005-2
Maraldi, E. d. O., Toniol, R. F., Swerts, D. B., Lucchetti, G., Leão, F. C. & Peres, M. F. P. (2021). The dynamics of religious mobility: investigating the patterns and sociodemographic characteristics of religious affiliation and disaffiliation in a Brazilian sample. International Journal of Latin American Religions, 5(1), 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-020-00107-1
McSkimming, J. (2017). Documenting stories of disaffiliation from Christian fundamentalism: The challenge of reflexivity and coconstruction. Qualitative Psychology, 4(2), 165–184. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000036
Meyer, T. (2005). Die Ironie Gottes: Religiotainment, Resakralisierung und die liberale Demokratie. VS Verl. für Sozialwiss.
Müller G. (2011). Kirchenzugehörigkeit und Kirchenaustritt aus dogmatischer Perspektive. In E. Güthoff, St. Haering & H. Pree (eds). Der Kirchenaustritt im staatlichen und kirchlichen Recht (S. 77–89). Herder.
Niemelä, K. (2007). Alienated or Disappointed? Reasons for Leaving the Church in Finland. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 20, 195–216.
Niemelä, K. (2015). ‘No longer believing in belonging’: A longitudinal study of Finnish Generation Y from confirmation experience to Church-leaving. Social Compass, 62(2), 172–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768615571688
Pens, C., Frey, D. & Stöger, H. (2006). Theorie der kognitiven Dissonanz. In H.-W. Bierhoff & D. Frey (Eds.), Handbuch der Psychologie. Bd. 3: Sozialpsychologie und Kommunikationspsychologie (pp. 373–379). Hogrefe.
Pickel, G. (2010). Säkularisierung, Individualisierung oder Marktmodell? Religiosität und ihre Erklärungsfaktoren im europäischen Vergleich. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 62(2), 219–245.
Piesbergen, C. & Sarubin, N. (2011). Erfassung von kognitiver Dissonanz nach Kaufentscheidungen. (http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-12415-9)
Riegel, U. & Faix, T. (2019). Disaffiliation Motives as Indicator to Better Understand the Relationship between Religious Institutions and Individuals in Modern Western Society. In U. Riegel, S. Heil, B. Kalbheim & A. Unser (Eds.), Understanding religion: Empirical perspectives in practical theology (pp. 179–193). Waxmann.
Riegel, U., Kröck, T. & Faix, T. (2018). Warum Menschen die katholische Kirche verlassen: Eine explorative Untersuchung zu Austritten im Mixed-Methods Design. In M. Etscheid-Stams, R. Laudage-Kleeberg & T. Rünker (Hrsg.), Kirchenaustritt – oder nicht? Wie Kirche sich verändern muss (pp. 125–207). Herder.
Schmidtchen, G. (1979). Protestanten und Katholiken: Soziologische Analyse konfessioneller Kultur. Francke.
Streib, H. u.a. (2009). Deconversion. Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States of America, Göttingen.
Streib, H. (2012). Deconversion, in: Oxford Handbook on Religious Conversion. Ed. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian, Oxford, 271–296.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard University Press.
Te Grotenhuis, M. & Scheepers, P. (2001). Churches in Dutch: Causes of Religious Disaffiliation in The Netherlands, 1937–1995. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40(4), 591–606. https://doi.org/10.1111/0021-8294.00079
Thiessen, J. & Wilkins-Laflamme, S. (2017). Becoming a Religious None: Irreligious Socialization and Disaffiliation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 56(1), 64–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12319
Vermeer, P. & Scheepers, P. (2017). Umbrellas of Conservative Belief: Explaining the Success of Evangelical Congregations in the Netherlands. Journal of Empirical Theology, 30(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1163/15709256-12341352
Vogrincic-Haselbacher, C., Asal, K., Fischer, P. & Frey, D. (2016). Theorie der kognitiven Dissonanz. In H.-W. Bierhoff, D. Frey, N.-P. Birbaumer, J. Kuhl, W. Schneider & R. Schwarzer (Eds.), Enzyklopädie der Psychologie. Sozialpsychologie: Band 2. Soziale Motive und soziale Einstellungen (pp. 469–495). Hogrefe.
Witzel, A. (2000). The problem-centered interview. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(1), Art. 22.
Woodhead, L., Partridge, C. H. & Kawanami, H. (Hrsg.). (2009). Religions in the modern world: Traditions and transformations. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Zuckerman, P. (2012). Faith no more: Why people reject religion. Oxford University Press.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 712 | 218 | 12 |
Full Text Views | 58 | 12 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 137 | 31 | 0 |
In modern Western societies, disaffiliation frequently occurs within the field of religion. To date, many studies have analysed what motivates people to leave religious institutions. However, whether they face internal conflicts during this process has not been intensely studied. Based on Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance, this paper re-analyses 27 interviews of persons who left the Catholic Church in the diocese of Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia. In 12 out of 27 interviews, such internal conflicts could be reconstructed, indicating that leaving religious institutions is not always an easy process. These conflicts are related to four characteristic core issues evoking dissonant emotions, namely belonging, the social environment, belief, and identity. The analysis also illustrates that disaffiliation not only solves such internal conflicts but sometimes causes new ones. More research is needed to fully understand people’s inner struggles when disaffiliating from religious institutions.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 712 | 218 | 12 |
Full Text Views | 58 | 12 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 137 | 31 | 0 |