Religious Disaffiliation - Factors Affecting Psychological and Social Aspects

Factors Affecting Psychological and Social Aspects

According to Meredith McGuire (2002), in a book about the social context in religion, if the religious affiliation was a big part of a leaver's social life and identity, then leaving can be a wrenching experience, and the way in which one leaves a religious group is another factor that may aggravate problems. McGuire writes that if the response of the group is hostile, or follows an attempt by that person to change the group from "the inside" before leaving, then the process of leaving will be fraught with considerable emotional and social tensions.

Marc Galanter, in a study of 237 members of the Unification Church, found that they had had a significantly higher degree of neurotic distress before conversion when compared to a control group, disproving that symptoms of psychopathology have been caused by cult involvement, 30% of these had sought professional help for emotional problems before conversion. Galanter further notes that the process of joining, being a member, and leaving a new religious group is best described not as a matter of personal pathology but of social adaptation. For example, experiences that in a secular setting might be considered pathological may be considered normal within some religious settings. While psychological categories were created to discuss dysfunctional behavior by an individual, the behavior of group members must be seen in light of group norms, meaning that what may be considered disturbed behavior in a secular setting may be perfectly functional and normal within a group context. Galanter's analysis had the effect of reducing the significance of the abnormal behavior reported among ex-members. He also suggested an alternative means of understanding otherwise inexplicable behavior in members and ex-members without considering them as suffering from psychopathology.

The Handbook of Religion and Health describes a survey by Feigelman (1992), who examined happiness in Americans who have given up religion, in which it was found that there was little relationship between religious disaffiliation and unhappiness. A survey by Kosmin & Lachman (1993), also cited in this handbook, indicates that people with no religious affiliation appear to be at greater risk for depressive symptoms than those affiliated with a religion.

Although some of the above studies indicate a positive correlation between religious belief and happiness, in any event it is a separate task to distinguish between alternative causal explanations including the following:

• that religious belief itself in fact promotes satisfaction and that non-belief does not promote satisfaction and/or promotes dissatisfaction;
• that satisfaction and dissatisfaction contribute to religious belief and disbelief, respectively, i.e., that satisfied persons are more inclined to endorse the existence of a traditionally defined deity (whose attributes include omnibenevolence) than are dissatisfied persons, who may perceive their unhappiness as evidence that no deity exists (as in atheism) or that whatever deity exists is less than omnibenevolent (as in deism or maltheism);
• that although religious belief does not itself promote satisfaction, satisfaction is influenced by a third factor that correlates significantly with religious belief, e.g., a) divine providence as bestowed by a deity who shows favor to believers and/or disfavor to nonbelievers or b) sociopolitical ostracism of self-declared nonbelievers and/or fear of such ostracism by "closeted" nonbelievers; and
• that the process of religious disaffiliation involves traumatic stress whose effects limit, to either a subclinical or a clinical extent, a person's later ability to be happy even in the absence of actual or feared ostracism.