Elsevier

Journal of Adolescence

Volume 22, Issue 2, April 1999, Pages 255-267
Journal of Adolescence

Regular Article
Off-road religion? A narrative approach to fundamentalist and occult orientations of adolescents

https://doi.org/10.1006/jado.1999.0217Get rights and content

Abstract

Results of qualitative biographical research on Christian fundamentalist converts and de-converts, and on occultist adolescents are presented and documented using case studies. Research focused on life themes and on biographical processes and transformations. Contrastive comparison of the cases resulted in typologies of Christian fundamentalist biographies and of “ways of dis-enchantment”. These indicate that obligation to a tradition is no longer the model for religious socialization. Its competitors are biographical trajectories which can have the following characteristics: heresy is taken for granted, religious search is like an open life-style preference (accumulative heretic); ritual coping with life themes is predominant; and religious search follows the motive of sensation-seeking. A typology of religious styles is applied as an interpretive framework for (a) explaining the formation of fundamentalist orientations and (b) understanding development and transformation in religious biographies.

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  • f1

    Reprint requests and correspondence should be addressed to H. Streib, Universitat Bielefeld, Postfach 100131, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany (E-mail: [email protected]).

    f2

    The Shell youth survey (Shell, 1992) documents declining church participation and the surprising private prayer practice of 30% of adolescents who do not go to church. The recent membership survey of Protestants (Engelhardt et al ., 1997) documents that about 20% of the people who terminate membership in the Protestant church deny that their reason for termination of membership is that they do not need religion any more.

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