Studying SOGICE and Fundamentalist Pastoral Care
Conversion therapy by any other name...
For the “Peer Reviewed” column on “Well Beings News,” I spoke with BJ Ferguson about the social scientific side of understanding and identifying SOGICE.
SOGICE, as I’ve spoken and written about (see more in the archives on this blog), can be difficult to identify because it can be carried out in socially acceptable, covert, or linguistically obfuscated ways.
One way of measuring and operationalizing the study of things that are hard to identify is to do “framing analysis,” and specifically, “ethnographic framing analysis” — which is the ““systematic investigation of the organizational principles which people draw on in interpreting actions and events” (Lowe 2021), and if you can find cogent “frames” that are correlated to your thing-that’s-hard-to-study, this helps you put a finger on difficult problems.
In this case, a “frame” that appears to be correlated to SOGICE (I’m working on putting such correlation into published material over the next few years) is the frame of “fundamentalist pastoral care;” see my 2018 Springer article on this subject.
The is a limited range for what “counts” here — fundamentalisms are found across religions and ideologies. In this case, fundamentalist pastoral care (or FPC) can be identified through beliefs such as infallibility, biblicism, and perspicuity. Together, you’ve likely got FPC; and if you’ve got FPC, you’ve likely got SOGICE on your hands.
Anyways, you can read the interview here: