The Strange Rites of Our Unsecular Age
Rather than a secular age, Burton presents us with a picture of our current cultural moment as embracing a wide variety of niche spiritualities designed to meet our individual needs for purpose, meaning, and hope.
Review by Cort Gatliff
In her book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, journalist Tara Isabella Burton challenges and complicates the conventional narrative explaining the steady decline of traditional religious beliefs and practices in America. America, so the story goes, was once a blessed, pious, and unified nation under God, but now encroaching secularism has rendered it a disconnected, godless land. This current religious recession is a well-documented and much-debated phenomenon, one showing no sign of slowing down. Church attendance is cratering. The Nones, people who described themselves as religiously unaffiliated, are on the rise. Houses of worship are being purchased by developers and converted into luxury condominiums. Secularism seems to have won the day. Burton, however, disagrees. Traditional religious commitments may be on the decline, she argues, but religiosity is alive and well.
Burton, influenced by the work of scholars like Émile Durkheim, Peter Berger, and Clifford Geertz, offers an expanded definition of religion—one not limited to faith in a divine being. A religion is anything that satisfies the universal human desire for “meaning, purpose, community and ritual.” With this working definition, a majority of the Nones we hear so much about aren’t actually Nones at all. Burton argues they are part of a larger and more diverse group that we cannot discount if we are to understand the modern American religious landscape: the religiously Remixed. The Remixed are those who identify as spiritual, not religious. They “self-report as Nones but also say they believe in psychics or practice prayer.” The Remixed pick and choose elements of various faith traditions, curating “bespoke religious identities” to fit their needs and desires. The Remixed aren’t necessarily more secular than their traditionally religious peers; they’re just more intuitional. Religion isn’t dead, but the source of authority has moved from the institution to the individual. “We do not live in a godless world,” writes Burton. “Rather, we live in a profoundly anti-institutional one, where the proliferation of Internet creative culture and consumer capitalism have rendered us all simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity.”
A secular age, this is not.
A secular age, this is not.
Burton offers a brief history explaining the shift from fixed institutional dogmas to fluid intuitional beliefs, and then introduces readers to a handful of these new and, at times, strange religions of the twenty-first century. On this New Age journey, we meet Snapewives, women who claim to have a romantic relationship with the brooding professor from J. K. Rowling’s fictional Harry Potter universe; self-identified Jedis; wellness industry charlatans hawking “Psychic Vampire Repellent” ($27 USD for a 3.4 oz bottle); SoulCycle enthusiasts peddling their way to spiritual transcendence; progressive witches who fight the patriarchy by casting hexes on Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump; free-love proponents who view polyamory, BDSM, and other previously-taboo sexual practices as a path to freedom, authenticity, and enlightenment; and misogynistic “incels” (involuntarily celibate men) who glorify mass murderers like Elliot Roger. Like the Internet itself, which gave rise to many of these intuitive religions, Strange Rites is a wild—and at times very, very dark—ride, to say the least.
In the hands of a lesser writer and reporter, this project could easily have devolved into a sideshow carnival making a spectacle of the fringe elements of these various movements. But Burton, who is also a novelist and holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford, combines empathy and careful research and reporting to help us “normies” understand how these Remix cultures fulfill, in their own strange and unexpected ways, the human impulse to be part of something bigger than ourselves. This is seen most clearly when Burton focuses her gaze on what she considers the two intuitional religions with a strong enough sense of meaning, purpose, community and ritual to potentially supplant “the benign optimism of midcentury Protestantism”: social justice culture and Californian Ideology.
Strange Rites [is] an insightful and necessary read for anyone interested in the current state of American spirituality.
“The gospel of social justice,” as Burton calls it, typified by movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, proclaims racism and sexism to be the most formative forces shaping American society. In this view, white supremacy and patriarchy are the ultimate evils that must be defeated in order to bring about a world of perfect harmony and equality. As the recent nationwide unrest in response to police brutality and the deaths of unarmed black men and women show, this is a powerful narrative—one that Burton argues, convincingly, may be “capable of taking American intuitionalism and giving it a clear shape, a clear theology.”
Californian Ideology—the second intuitional religion vying for dominance in a post-Christian world—is a libertarian movement influenced, and often funded by, the who’s who of the Silicon Valley. Californian Ideologues hope to create a tech-utopia, where rational thought reigns supreme and humans are finally freed from our “mortal meat sacks and shifty synapses that keep us from achieving our full . . . potential.” Government bureaucracies merely get in the way of real progress. Those with the necessary skills and abilities “should be given absolute liberty to shape our world, with little regulation or impediment to their various decisions, innovations, and disruptions.” Techno-utopians imagine a world where computers and humans become one, allowing individuals to live forever. Who needs the resurrection of the body when you can have your consciousness uploaded to the cloud and circumvent death altogether?
The idea that social movements, capitalistic enterprises, and political commitments are filling the spiritual vacuums left behind by the continuing decline of organized religion is not particularly novel. But Burton’s personal experience as a devout follower of a bespoke, intuitional religion (an immersive theatre production called Sleep No More, which she describes in the book’s introduction) and her encyclopedic understanding of Internet culture makes Strange Rites an insightful and necessary read for anyone interested in the current state of American spirituality.
Cort Gatliff is the Assistant Minister for Discipleship at South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World was published by PublicAffairs on June 16, 2020. Fare Forward thanks the publisher for providing us with a review copy. You can purchase a copy of your own on their website here.
