Conversion experience unbounded and standardized: How the autobiographical remembering enables the affiliation process
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Religious conversion is considered a highly individual and private experience. At the same time, in many groups, mainly of the Evangelical tradition, personal conversion experience is a membership requirement that needs to be displayed and is subject to specific criteria before it is acknowledged as authentic by the leaders and the group members. In this regard, the individual conversion experience is less idiosyncratic, unbounded, and private and becomes highly patterned, ritualized, and public. To understand the seemingly contradictory nature of the conversion as intimate as well as public, unbounded as well as standardized, I analyzed the social functioning of autobiographical memory systems in the process of affiliation in the specific Evangelical community in the Czech Republic. Starting with the false memory phenomenon, I focus on its capacity to influence remembering by social authority. This "error" enables the high sociality of our cultural species helping to build hierarchical and close-knit communities. Next, I discuss how the social nature of autobiographical memory systems allows us to connect collectively relevant schemas to our memories thus making conversion personally meaningful, genuine, and palpable in a particular socio-cultural environment. Finally, recollecting and sharing conversion experiences while encountering conversions of others enhances and renews members' mutual social and emotional ties working as an affiliative mechanism. |