Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Does the use of social-psychological models in the critical study of religion shed light on the dark corners of human behavior and consciousness? Or do they instead fill in historical gaps with modern-day assumptions, reflecting back to scholars their own beliefs of how the mind works and what experiences it can tolerate? In this paper I describe the strange origins of the theory of cognitive dissonance, a social psychological model applied with great relish to the study of early Christianity, the field I call home. The theory emerged from fieldwork conducted in the 1950s on a North American group expecting the arrival of UFOs and a catastrophic flood. For some, cognitive dissonance explains how the religion of Christianity grew out of the ruins of failed expectations. My paper seeks to place such claims within the context of ongoing critical reassessments of the theory of cognitive dissonance.