Silent Disagreement: Microinteractional Solutions to Moral Dissent Among Catholic Converts

How do converts manage their disagreements with religious teachings? Previous literature on religious dissent has largely focused on church members advocating change or apostatizing, solutions largely unavailable to initiates. Based on six months of ethnographic observations in a Catholic conversion...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Ellis, Rachel (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Wiley-Blackwell [2017]
Dans: Journal for the scientific study of religion
Année: 2017, Volume: 56, Numéro: 2, Pages: 383-397
Sujets / Chaînes de mots-clés standardisés:B USA / Conversion (Religion) / Catholicisme / Divergence d'opinion / Maitrise
RelBib Classification:CB Spiritualité chrétienne
KBQ Amérique du Nord
KDB Église catholique romaine
Sujets non-standardisés:B Homosexuality
B Catholicism
B Contraception
B Culture Wars
B Conversion
Accès en ligne: Volltext (Verlag)
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Description
Résumé:How do converts manage their disagreements with religious teachings? Previous literature on religious dissent has largely focused on church members advocating change or apostatizing, solutions largely unavailable to initiates. Based on six months of ethnographic observations in a Catholic conversion class and 21 in-depth interviews with converts, sponsors, and teachers, I demonstrate how microinteractional norms encourage an atmosphere of silence around disagreement. I then show how initiates explain this conflict avoidant response by justifying their doubt, engaging in a process of hierarchical deference, in which initiates call upon the top-down structure of the Catholic Church to defer control upward, and faulting human imperfection rather than the institution itself. While “culture wars” debates of the past two decades have investigated a purported moral polarization of the American public, this study contributes to a growing literature on how the moderate majority negotiates disagreements between their beliefs and religious teachings.
ISSN:1468-5906
Contient:Enthalten in: Journal for the scientific study of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/jssr.12332