1. Answer the following questions: How and why do unconventional religions lose members? What reasons do people give for leaving, and how do they arrive at these decisions? What is the process of voluntary disengagement? What kinds of problems are involved in such a transition? Moreover, how do ex-members, in retrospect, see their experiences? What kinds of attitudes or reactions do they have after they leave?
2. What role does contact with alternative belief systems have in the decisions of defectors to leave the world-transforming movement?
3. What role does the age of the defector have in his or her decisions to leave the world-transforming movement?
4. What role does parental attitudes toward the world-transforming movement, the type of adolescent experience of the member, and prior feeling of family closeness have in the decisions of defectors to leave the world-transforming movement?
5. Why does Wright classify the variables of contact with alternative belief systems, age of the member, and contact with parents or other kin members as only supplementary reasons for leaving world-transforming movements?
6. What are the different tactical modes of exit from world-transforming movements? When are each likely to be employed by defectors? What are the reasons for the widespread use of covert methods for exiting? How do these methods parallel modes of exit from dissatisfying marriages?
7. Where do most ex-cult members relocate? Why are there differences between the different groups (COG, Moonies, and Hari Krishna)? How would you account for the importance of conservative religious groups, schools, work, and families as being essential in the process of relocation?
8. Why would 67% of all defectors (ex-members) look back on their experience in the world-transforming movement as something that made them wiser for the experience?
9. What is the meaning of the following quotation?

Where religions fail, cults appear. When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

1. What is the meaning of the following quotation?

Given the centrality of charismatic movements in history, one must question the conventional wisdom of those who would suppress unpopular or nontraditional religion for the "good of society."

Go back to Stuart A. Wright's Leaving Cults: The Dynamics of Defection, Chapters 1 - 4

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