(Un)Holy Hauntings: The Experiences of LGBTQ+ People Who Have Disaffiliated From Non-Affirming Protestant Churches in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores how Canadian LGBTQ+ people make sense of their experiences after leaving the non-affirming Protestant church. Drawing on 23 semi-structured interviews with participants from across Canada, I trace the multiple impacts of the non-affirming church on LGBTQ+ disaffiliates as they reimagine their lives outside of and in resistance to the cisheteronormative structure of the church. Shaped by a queer theoretical lens and bringing together the insights of trauma theory and affect theory, I reveal how participants continue to feel the teachings of the church in deeply embodied and emotional ways. I demonstrate how church discourses around gender and sexuality invisibilise possibilities for LGBTQ+ disaffiliates concerning who they can be and how they can envision their lives, producing and reinforcing distrust and shame in their bodies, feelings, and intuition. I further explore how the morals, values, and beliefs of LGBTQ+ disaffiliates come into conflict with the teachings of the church in a way that compels them to leave, reassess their faith, and evaluate the redeemability and benefit of the church in broader society, especially as they have become more aware of the church’s colonial legacies. Following and expanding upon Espen Gilsvik’s (2023a) concept of phantoms of faith, I argue that LGBTQ+ people carry with them the (un)holy hauntings of the church in their post-disaffiliation everyday lives. These hauntings are most pronounced in the moments of fracture where they diverge from the church’s teachings that have been ingrained within them.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".