Inside Out, Alone Together: Studying Grief in the Midst of Social Change

• In Event: Narratives of Emotion: Situational, Temporal, Flexible

Abstract

In 2023, more than seven thousand congregations disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church (UMC), marking one of the largest denominational fractures in recent U.S. religious history. The departures followed decades of conflict over the denomination’s restrictive policies regarding LGBTQ+ ordination and marriage, codified in the Book of Discipline, including the statement that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” For many members, this institutional rupture has generated profound emotional turmoil, including grief tied not only to denominational division but also to the loss of religious identity, strained relationships, and the compounded disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examines grief as a social, narrative, and meaning-making process unfolding in real time and over time. Moving beyond efforts to measure grief as an isolated psychological state, I conceptualize it as both internally felt and externally objectified, individually experienced yet collectively shaped. Drawing on Robert Neimeyer’s theory of narrative meaning-making, Arlie Hochschild’s concept of the “deep story,” Maurice Halbwachs’ work on collective memory, and Sara Ahmed’s theory of the sociality of emotion, I explore how grief is constructed, expressed, and contested within communal contexts.

Guided by the question of how current and former UMC members make meaning of their grief related to denominational decisions and disaffiliation, this qualitative study employs grounded, ethnographic, and autoethnographic methods. Informed by Jakoby’s integrative model of grief, the research foregrounds participants’ voices while acknowledging my positionality as a UMC clergyperson. Findings illuminate how grief operates as a dynamic social process that shapes boundaries, values, and identities amid institutional change, contributing to broader sociological understandings of emotion in contexts of collective transformation.

Author

• Lynette Moran, University of Pittsburgh