The case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Norway and the emotional implications of eschatological expectations and membership: Non-individualized doctrinal beliefs within a highly individualized mainstream society

Ringnes, Hege K.; Demmrich, Sarah

Zusammenfassung

Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) is a worldwide end-time-oriented religious sect with a strong Christian fundamentalist connotation, characterized by a unitary doctrinal context, which creates a non-individualized religious environment for individual adherents. In contrast, the Norwegian context, which is considered here, is characterized by secularization and individualization, also with regard to afterlife beliefs since only one-third of the population believes in any life after death. Being member of a religious sect that is in constant conflict with mainstream society, such as JW, may lead to negative emotions and therefore, our studies applied an emotion-regulation perspective to outline the most significant emotional implications of eschatological expectations and active membership in this group. One such implication is that individual JWs show emotion goals, which are tied to the religious goals of surviving death and living forever in a paradise on earth where the emotion of happiness will predominate. In addition, JWs predominately use the group-based regulation strategy of social sharing (i.e., sharing emotion-eliciting events with other ingroup members) and cognitive emotion regulation (i.e., positively redefining difficult situations), in which emotional forecasting plays a central role. In conclusion, being a JW in a Western individualistic context is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it implies meaning through its exclusivist and superior claims, and on the other hand, the mismatch with broader society may lead to a disturbed self-image.