Ask people in 2020 about their religious beliefs, and the respondents will group themselves into four basic categories. We might picture these as a “galaxy brain” meme, in ascending order of self-congratulation. At the bottom, we find the traditional believer, who likely belongs to the confession of his or her parents and grandparents. Next are the atheists, irritable and evangelical in their unbelief. Next come those who are “spiritual but not religious,” which encompasses everyone from the sincerely agnostic seeker to the devotee of astrology and Tarot. And at the top of the hierarchy — drum roll, trumpet fanfare, fog machine-sized incense cloud — are the “religious but not spiritual,” those who understand humans as “hard-wired” for ritual and meaning-making but regard God or spirituality as optional, even superfluous.
The spiritually slippery and the secularized meaning-seeker are the subject of religious scholar Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. The book is a tour of what one might call “replacement rituals,” from fandoms, wellness culture, and witchcraft to sexual liberationism and politically charged doctrines such as social justice, techno-utopianism, and far-right racism. Burton examines these efflorescences of quasi-religious sentiment with a sobering mixture of sympathy — she claims her book is about “our quest for knowing, for belonging, and for meaning” — and skepticism. (“This book is, in large part, about charlatans.”) She holds not that all searches for meaning are equal but that all are equally worthy of our attention.
It should be noted that although Burton’s subtitle refers to a “godless world,” Strange Rites is about the United States. “A quarter of American adults say they have no religion,” Burton writes. The “Nones,” as she calls them, make up a less dramatic 16% of the global population, but it is their rapid rise as an American phenomenon that interests Burton. American Nones are decidedly not atheists. Nearly three-quarters of them believe in “something” — a little over half “believe in a higher power or spiritual force,” just not the Judeo-Christian one. (If this savors of Alcoholics Anonymous or Star Wars, try to keep an open mind.)
The Nones, Burton maintains, are in fact a subset of what she called the “Remixed.” The Remixed are the real story here. They are to the broad spectrum of American religiosity what “cafeteria Catholics” (those who adopt congenial aspects of Catholicism and ignore the rest) are to the Church of Rome. Some of them identify with a specific faith tradition but add to or subtract from it at will. This kind of intuitional practice has always been evident in syncretic religions and can be hard to distinguish from sloppy thinking. (Indeed, sometimes even the religiously affiliated are only superficially conversant in the creeds they claim to profess.)
Burton furnishes her readers with two valuable resources. The first is an attempt, informed by such anthropological scholars as Emile Durkheim, Peter Berger, and Clifford Geertz, at a suitably expansive definition of religion: It is a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual for its participants. The second is a capsule history of religion in America, the way it “has been like a pendulum: swinging constantly from the institutional to the intuitional.” This history sets the tone for much of what follows: the “intuitional” seems always to have been shot through with delusion, wishful thinking, inconsistency, and incoherence.
The latest wave of intuitional religion, Burton argues, is “more likely to stick around” in part because it is entwined with consumer capitalism and the internet. Her first example, tellingly, is Harry Potter fandom. If the printing press and the vernacular Bible allowed our ancestors to interpret scripture for themselves, capitalism and the internet have allowed us to disseminate, popularize, and sacralize any cultural product as scripture. People are interested in good and evil, ethics, and the challenges of the human condition, but they also expect the pills in which their spiritual medicine is delivered to taste good.
There is an insistent sense throughout the book that our strange new rites differ from the old ones primarily by virtue of being fun and facilitating consumption. Wellness culture, with its focus on feeling good, looking great, and purchasing tastefully minimalist products, fits this bill, though taking a CrossFit or SoulCycle class is arguably closer to self-flagellation than anything else discussed in Strange Rites. Witchcraft and other occult-inflected practices seem like religions in which everyone gets the thrill of being the “priest” — that is, the figure with all the power.
Of course, given that spells and rituals do nothing apart from affirming values and fostering community, one suspects that much of their appeal is aesthetic. People flocked to the Guggenheim’s Hilma af Klint retrospective because her supposedly supernaturally inspired artworks are beautiful and cool, not because their bright colors and suggestive geometric figures amount to divine instruction. The occult tends toward slight content in stylish packaging: Capitalism strikes again.
Sexual and technological utopianism, similarly, are about fostering the good life — and while the former may entail tempering jealousy or “small-mindedness,” it is not marked by anything like a recognizable demand for self-sacrifice. Much of what puts people off traditional religion is its insistence that life is hard and that human beings are wicked enough to need redemption. Abandoning these tenets is easier than it sounds, and it doesn’t even sound hard.
The least epicurean or hedonistic new religions in Burton’s account are also the most politicized: social justice and its perceived enemy, the tradition-oriented and decadence-obsessed beliefs associated with men’s rights, the alt-right, and (though this subset already feels hopelessly dated) Jordan Peterson fans. These movements are more concerned with virtue than pleasure-seeking, but they clearly offer their adherents the joys of tribalism, competition, persecution of heretics, and mastery of arcana. For their true believers, they are fun.
Strange Rites leaves one with the inescapable feeling that the new religions are like the old ones in degree but not at all in kind. They can inspire obsessive devotion and even violence, but their content is not about soul-making or salvation so much as identity, branding, group-formation, and mundane pleasure — the pleasure of anesthetizing or distracting oneself, not the ecstasy of divine communion.
Beliefs and communities are only as good as their content and their members. “The Earth is flat” is a belief system. A shooting gallery, a cult compound, and a white power militia all fit beneath the gauzy umbrella of “community.” Grasping what makes something a religion doesn’t, in the end, assist us in forming value judgments about it. There are better questions to ask. A good one to start with: Is it offering me something, or is it demanding something of me? These “strange rites” are pie in the sky for a nation, if not a world, badly in need of baking lessons.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
