Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Competitive Sensegiving Frames: Loyalist, Rebel, Rationalist and Processor

Abstract

ABSTRACT Generally, writings about clergy sexual misconduct of adults tend to focus on a victim-abuser model, theorizing the causes and/or consequences or solutions to such abuse. With the exception of some analysis about the growth of Voice of the Faithful inside the Catholic Church (see), few researchers have focused theoretically on how members of religious groups make sense of and respond to accusations of clergy sexual misconduct against adults. In this paper, we apply the sensegiving paradigm to understand how, during crisis when leaders are absent, members compete to assert cognitive frames that attribute meaning to accusations of clergy sexual misconduct of adults. Our study analyzes a Facebook conversation with over 600 posts from over 100 participants that took place after the foremost leader of an international, Buddhist organization wrote an ambiguous letter of apology regarding clergy sexual misconduct against women members. Treating the conversation as a social discourse, we find that participants generated four conflicting frames. We refer to these frames as Loyalist, Rebel, Rationalist and Processor and distinguish among them by their respective claims regarding how the organization should respond to allegations of sexual misconduct. We find that these frames are conditioned upon the view of the validity of the allegations and the perception of the preexisting power inequalities in the organization. Further, we find that expressions of the different frames in the discourse relate to the gender identity of the participant and vary in their emotional tones.