Phantoms of Faith—Experiences of Rupture and Residue of Amputated Religiosity among Norwegian Ex-Charismatic Christians

Abstract

This article explores non/religious emotions and experiences among a group of high-cost Christian charismatic disaffiliates in Norway. It is a case study of members of the Facebook community “The Journey” (no. “Reisen”). With a qualitative approach, it uses lifestory interviews from 24 ex-Charismatics to describe their experiences of what I call phantoms of faith. The article gives thick descriptions of the disaffiliates’ negotiations between current and past emotions and experiences and the explanations they have for these. It uses the metaphor of phantom to explore embodied and emotional religiosity, for which the analysis is inspired by the conceptual framework of Pagis and Winchester’s somatic inversions. The analysis shows how phantom faith experiences create ruptures and dissonance in the disaffiliates’ everyday lives and thus produce interpretative demands. The article argues that leaving charismatic Christianity, in this material, on an embodied and emotional dimension is much more complex than the cognitive and social dimensions of disaffiliation. Scholarly understandings of this phenomenon have implications for the disaffiliates who experience them, as well as the scholarly constructions of the spaces and categories between religion and non-religion. It argues that such experiences have been somewhat understudied in the literature and that current conceptualizations should be further developed.