Kids of Knutby: Living in and Leaving the Swedish Filadelfia Congregation: Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities

movement in 1921. In the 1990s, it developed into a new religion, when the congregation’s female pastor embraced the role of the Bride of Christ. The congregation became widely known in 2004 when one of its members was murdered by another member, the latter claiming to have been acting on orders from God. In 2018, the congregation dissolved after a few years of internal crisis.

Sanja Nilsson provides rich empirical analysis of archival material and interviews with the congregation’s children and youth. The young informants’ personal perspectives on their own childhoods encompass narratives from their time inside the congregation, when they identified as members of a stigmatized

minority religion, aswell as from the time after the dissolution of the group, when they identified as

defectors from what they came to view as a sectarian milieu.

This work offers a comprehensive insight into the Knutby Filadelfia congregation, a group, that although notoriously charted by the media, has been hitherto unexplored by academics. It adds to the growing field of studies concerned with childhoods within new religions and expounds the dynamics of the defection process from the rarely applied perspective of children and youth themselves.