Stigmatized religion: Belonging to communities that inspire fear

This talk will discuss how it feels to belong to a religious organizations inspiring fear and that may have been at the centre of a moral panic. 

The analysis will prioritise the members’ voices and the tensions with belonging to organizations that are perceived as a threat or potentially dangerous. Members’ voices are crucial for our understanding of the complexity of relations inside these organizations and why members are attracted to certain practices and how commitment is sustained (and also how this commitment is sometimes weakened and lost).

I will discuss these communities as “feeling communities,” emphasising that belonging and communities are constituted by shared emotions and emotional practices. These emotional practices are shared with other members, but also differentiate them from the external society, reinforcing processes of minoritization and marginalization. 

The talk will draw on extensive fieldwork conducted with members of so-called ‘new religions’ and minoritised religious groups in Japan over in the last 15 years. 

Erica Baffelli is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester. A specialist in religion in contemporary Japan, she is particularly interested in religious minorities, media and technology, emotions and violence. She is the author of Media and New Religions in Japan (2016), co-author of Dynamism and the Ageing of a Japanese "New" Religion (2019) and the  co-publisher of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions (2021) and Japanese Religion on the Internet: Innovation, Representation and Authority (2011).