Meaning-making and well-being among exiters of religious fundamentalism

ABSTRACT

The rate of religious disaffiliation has been on the rise in the United States, yet little is known about how religious ‘exiters’ reconstruct meaning in their lives or about their efforts at meaning-making related to perceived well-being. This study applies a meaning-making framework to investigate an understudied sub-group of exiters—individuals who left Christian fundamentalist religions. The qualitative research draws on 24 semi-structured interviews and reveals the meaning-making process through which former religious participants reconstruct meaning after experiencing exiting as a stressful life event. The findings demonstrate that, while there are challenges in the early stages of the process to make sense of their exiting experience and reconstruct meaning, the construction of new meaning-making pathways gradually contributed to participants’ overall positive well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• nonreligion
• disaffiliation
• meaning-making
• well-being

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank David Morgan, emeritus professor affiliated with Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, for extended feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The terms ‘exiter’, ‘exiting’, and ‘exit’ are used to depict a broader, more general definition of leaving religion. For instance, terms such as ‘apostasy’ and ‘apostate’ can carry a stigmatized status and often imply having an oppositional stance toward the religion left (Bromley 1998; Cragun and Hammer 2011, 154).

2 While there has been some debate whether Mormonism is considered a Christian fundamentalist religion, researchers argue its growth and fundamentalist characteristics as being similar to other growing Christian fundamentalist religions such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists (Cragun and Lawson 2010).

3 Morgan and Nica (2020) provide a more comprehensive explanation of the ITI process as well as the way it relates to the development of new and revised meaning-making themes linked to well-being in the religious exiting process.

4 For technical reasons, access to the precise date of each individual interview is no longer possible; hence its omission here and for all other interview extracts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Religious Research Association’s Constant H. Jacquet Research Award.

Notes on contributors

Andreea Nica

Andreea Nica is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Western New Mexico University in the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies in Silver City, New Mexico, USA. She has conducted research on religious exiting and well-being across identity, social support and relationships, and meaning (re)construction. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Western New Mexico University, P.O. Box 680, Global Resource Center 200, Silver City, NM 88062, USA.