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

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

* The research question is very descriptive for an article that has such a rich theoretical discussion, might be worth changing.

* I would suggest that the last two paragraphs of section 1.1 The phantom metaphor to be moved towards the beginning of that section. This will center the interviewees earlier in the text and make it clear to the reader why we're reding this section.

* I saw no notes on anonymity, is there any issues in mentioning the specific Facebook-group? Are the names randomly assigned ones? Just a short sentence addressing those would be good.

* When reading section 2.2.1. The non-transcendent factors  I thought of Jon Lanman's work:

Lanman, Jonathan A. “The Importance of Religious Displays for Belief Acquisition and Secularization.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 27, no. 1 (2012): 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2012.642726.

Lanman, Jonathan A., and Michael D. Buhrmester. “Religious Actions Speak Louder than Words: Exposure to Credibility-Enhancing Displays Predicts Theism.” Religion, Brain & Behavior 7, no. 1 (2017): 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2015.1117011.

I think the following article might also be of interest here:

Bullivant, Stephen. “Introducing Irreligious Experiences.” Implicit Religion 11, no. 1 (2008): 7.

I'm not saying you must cite these articles, but I think especially Lanman's work might be interesting to you.

* "His findings of Muslim apostates who are still physically disgusted by the smell and taste of bacon show this bodily and deeply embedded religiosity (Cottee 2015), and hence something that cannot easily be unlearned."

I think the conclusion that this is a form of religiosity takes it a bit too far, I think you have enough theory already otherwise I would have suggested using something like habitus to conceptualize this instead. Regardless, if you want to make the argument that being disgusted by bacon is a form of embedded religiosity I think you need to provide a clearer definition of religion, for starters. (My suggestion, however, would just be that you rephrase this!)

* "I am not convinced framing it as an unlearning process is the best way to understand this phenomenon. For some it would also require an unfeeling process."

This argument is clearer, though the relationship between a reaction (like disgust) and emotions (like longing for home) could be clarified somewhat. I think that instead of relying purely on Cottee as a conversation partner, your article would benefit from (at least) touching upon the broader discussion of a bias towards the cognitive within religious studies and a turn towards the embodied or the material, for example:

Vásquez, Manuel. More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion. USA: Oxford University Press, 2011.

*This is a conversation between you and the editors, but I'm not sure the final section needs to be quite so long, so if you need more space I would suggest making cuts there.

  Comments on the Quality of English Language

The english is good overall, some of the sentence structures seem a bit off to me but overall it's clear enough.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 1.

 

First of all, thank you for your time and work in reviewing the manuscript “Phantoms of Faith—Experiences of Rupture and Residue of Amputated Religiosity among Norwegian Ex-Charismatic Christians.”

I’m grateful for generous encouragement, specific critiques, suggestions on literature and comments and questions for me to reflect further on. I have attempted to accommodate your comments in the article. What follows are my responses to these.

 

Comment 1: Thank you for pointing out the descriptive skew in the RQ. I have added the theoretical perspective in a sub-question

Comment 2: Thank you for this important comment. I can say this has been an important concern both in the process of sampling, interview and transcription and now in the article. The ex-charismatic milieu in Norway is relatively small. Both the podcast and the FB-group have been visible in national media and public debates, hence, given my topic, it would be relatively easy to find the group online for those who would be interested in that. Privacy protection measures have thus been taken in altering details and personal information about the individual informants in the transcription and how I describe them in the analysis. I have now added a sentence on this in the method section.

Comment 3: Thank you for the three articles. I had not read Lanman before, while Bullivant´s work I am familiar with. I found it relevant to add a reference to Bullivant´s concept of irreligious experience in the discussion of non/religious framing of phantoms. From (briefly) reading Lanman now, I see the relevance to my project. I chose not to include him due to the word limitation. However, I expect to develop the discussion on cognitive bias and emotional turn in my overall thesis-discussion, so again thank you for making his work known to me.

Comment 4: I admit that my argument on “embedded religion” comes across too strong, at least without the basis of a clear definition of religion. I have rephrased this argument in the text.

Comment 5: This is a good distinction. Thank you. I have added a sentence on the temporality distinction between reactions and emotions; and how phantoms overlap and differ from somatic inversions (Pagis). Also, I included a reference to Vásquez and the discussion of bias towards the cognitive, but see going further into the debate here will take too much space.

Comment 6: You might be right that the last section is too long. I will await further response from the editors if we need to cut words and if so, this might be a good suggestion.

I have also had a language edit of the manuscript with the help of a colleague.

These revisions aim to answer both your comments and the areas that you suggest can be improved in the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Innovative approach deploying "phantom-limb" perspectives exploring disaffiliation specifically of charismatic Christians; methodologically cohesive and well written; engages with the relevant literature - maybe should cite the work of Henri Gooren on disaffiliation particularly is some of the latter's research involves pentecostal Christians.

As I do not read Scandinavian languages but the dearth of English-language scholarship on pentecostal-charismatic Christianity specifically in Norway is noticeable; there may be a verb missing in line 648 before "relevant"?

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2.

First of all, thank you for your time and work in reviewing the manuscript “Phantoms of Faith—Experiences of Rupture and Residue of Amputated Religiosity among Norwegian Ex-Charismatic Christians.”

I’m grateful for generous encouragement, suggestions on literature, and comments and questions for me to reflect further on.

Regarding your suggestion on including Gooren, I had already considered using his work on conversion (and disaffiliation) careers and on Pentecostalism. For the purposes of this article, I chose instead to bring in Teemu Mantsinen whose study on Pentecostalism and disaffiliation in Finland was both more similar in its cultural context and also emphasized the distinctions between emotional and cognitive experiences. I might still use Gooren in my next article which is more concerned with comparing Scandinavian and American disaffiliation-narratives. So thank you for that idea.

Regarding line 648, it is quite correct that a word has gone missing. Thank you so much for pointing that out. It has now been corrected.