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This article deals with an aspect of religious behavior that has remained in the shadows, both in the scientific literature and in public discourse: deconversion from New Religious Movements. The article analyses the deconversion from a magico-esoteric community located in Northern Italy: Damanhur. Founded in the 1970s, Damanhur is one of Europe’s major spiritual communities that counts about 400 devotees. The article starts with an outline of the process of deconversion, followed by a brief description of the religious organization studied. Lastly, the process of disaffiliation from Damanhur, is reconstructed, through the close reading of twenty narratives of deconversion of former Damanhurians interviewed in 2010. The process of deconversion is analysed, distinguishing four ideal-typical steps that repropose the main results of the research in this field. They are the coming out of a vague and unfocused discomfort; the attempt to deconstruct the discomfort; the opening of a reflexive instance; and the departure from the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research consistently finds that many Americans will completely abandon their religious belief, a process that scholars have often called deconversion. However, scholars have yet to study deconversion from a specifically rhetorical perspective. This article proposes that the rhetorical dimension of deconversion is a crucial aspect of the renunciation of Christian beliefs, especially as it bears on how ex-believers enter into communities of like-minded people who have made the same choice. Relying on symbolic convergence theory as a guide, the study focuses on how the fantasy themes and rhetorical visions ex-believers craft lead to a shared reality as they encounter each other in an online community. In the accounts of religious deconversion posted to websites catering to ex-Christians, four identifiable fantasy themes were identified: "I was a victim," "I became enlightened," "Christians are hypocrites," and "God is cruel." The effect of these fantasy themes was to cast a rhetorical vision depicting ex-Christians in as favorable a light as possible while conversely portraying Christianity and its adherents in an unfavorable manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]