Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

Quick - what do the following have in common: CrossFit, polyamory, Soul Cycle, kink, the Social Justice movement, Burning Man, the alt-right, 4chan, polyamory, Rationalism, Harry Potter, and Wicca? Answer: they're some of the "Remixed" religious movements that religion scholar (and seasoned travel writer) Tara Isabella Burton visits in "Strange Rites." Each is like its own foreign country, and like an able travel guide, Burton describes the internal language, culture, and customs of each. Except that these countries aren't so foreign after all - or shouldn't be. Not only have they been under our noses all along, but many of us have been citizens of them without even knowing it.The cultish overtones of some of these movements are obvious, but are they full-fledged religions? Instead of philosophical hair-splitting about what makes for a real religion, Burton focuses "primarily on what a religion does: the way in which it functions both individually and societally to give us a sense of our world, our place in it, and our relationships to the people around us." Fair enough.One of the key distinctions Burton makes between old-timey and contemporary religions is that the latter are "Remixed". People can pick and choose what they want from a menu, instead of accepting a creed wholesale, so long as it offers them four things: "meaning, purpose, community, and ritual."Most of the Remixed cults are what she calls “intuitional religions": "their sense of meaning is based in narratives that simultaneously reject clear-cut creedal metaphysical doctrines and institutional hierarchies and place the locus of authority on people’s experiential emotions, what you might call gut instinct. Society, institutions, credited authorities, experts, expectations, rules of conduct—all these are generally treated not just as irrelevant, but as sources of active evil." That quote should give you a sense of the writing style of the book: more academic, less pop.I appreciate her treatment of these diverse entities with the seriousness of a scholar and a reporter, even when the movements sound frivolous (e.g. Jediism) or odious (e.g. neo-Nazism). She has done the hard work of wading into waters I would never venture into, and we get to be the richer for it. Who knew that Jediism has more members than Wicca or Scientology? Or that Christian Science and the New Age movement share common origins? Lots of fun tidbits here.Where do all these Remixed religions come from? Burton proposes "post-materialism" as the cause of this kaleidoscopic fragmentation of large-scale religions into a zillion different creeds: "In a society where we no longer fear securing the basic necessities of life, we gradually adopt a different value system, one dedicated to seeking out self-expression and fulfilling personal experiences."But beyond ego-gratification and affiliation, do these Remixed religions also offer some path to solace? And some meaningful reconciliation with death? I feel like those are two of the fundamental functions of religion that the Remixed creeds, in spite of their extensive personalization, fail to provide an increasingly neurotic American populace. Meaning, purpose, community, and ritual aren't enough. People are desperate for some peace, especially in crisis times.Like a pair of night-vision goggles, this book made visible heretofore ignored landscapes that were right before my eyes. It's serious fun, with a lot of stuff I'd never heard before and choice insights into both luminous and dark parts of human nature. May you also find it enjoyably mind-expanding.-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of  The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible , the most-highlighted ebook on Amazon, and  Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine

This was a very good book. Tara Burton takes us on a whirlwind tour of contemporary spirituality. Her journalistic writing style is light and lively and, she has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, social media and all the new ways people are frantically looking for God in all the wrong places.The book would have been even better though if she had:Put some cross tabs in an appendix. She sprinkles the text with a lot of numbers but I came away wanting them in one place so I could assess really how "fringe" are these people and who are they anyway.Every reader will have his favorite group she left out. Mine would Extinction Rebellion and even more moderate folks in the climate activists world.Somehow Wicca and self care people seemed strange bedfellows with the Social Justice Warriors. The former are totally self absorbed, the latter are at least other oriented.She gives a history of American Intuitional Religion. Would have liked to have seen a longer historical description. To me the current "strange rites" are just another arising of Gnostic sentiment now 2500 years old-but I realize this would have doubled the books length.But, I learned a lot about the new Gnosticism. Good read!

I just bought your book and only made it through the introduction and I must tell you that I am SCARED. If this is what people are into now we're in trouble. Feelings, intuition and experiences, rather than reason and observable evidence? That's the focus of today's spiritual seekers? All you need is some dark room and a costume and nice, feel good fiction that lasts as long as you remain in your fantasy world? I understand it feels good to be enacting a story because it provides lots of meaning and a "spiritual experience". But don't you know we're already living a story? It's not really April Fool's Day, you know. Someone made that up. Just like all the names of the months, and the year 2021 Anno Domini. It's all a fiction we're living. I'll admit the dominant narrative we're enacting sucks! But that's no reason to find meaning in your little play lands of experience to make you feel so special. You might as well just find a way to create your own little story in a fantasy land virtual reality program. Or like your Technotopian fools... in a chip. "Chips are destiny," according to people like Ray Kurzweil and Bart Kosko. To me, it's all childish nonsense. These people need to grow up. Here's a dose of reality for you: Walk out of your darkened play rooms, take off your make-up and costumes, put down your smartphones, quit taking selfies and go outside. That's where WE need to be finding meaning "reading the story of nature". It's not all about selfish little fool's anymore. Stop being so self-absorbed. From my quick scan of the other chapters, you don't even cover RELIGIOUS NATURALISM. There are much wiser people than the ones stuck in the fantasy rooms, and they're outside finding the awe and wonder of nature. They're doing their best to save it, too. Not escape from it like the fools in their tiny temporary fantasy worlds that are probably emitting tons of carbon on our already overheated world. Good luck finding your deep meaning. I wonder what costume the fools are going to put on for their dress up and make believe tonight. I'll be out watching the Song sparrows hiding in the bladderpod bush down on the bluff by the ocean. There's a wonderful ecosystem called Coastal Sage Scrub here where the field mice hide from the red tailed hawks that hover overhead. There's a marvelous world of stories out there. Too bad you're all missing it. It could use your help. For the story is becoming tragic. Maybe you'd find some meaning helping me pick up some plastic that came off the packaging of a costume somebody bought on Amazon for one of your special experiences tonight. What fools we've become!

Mrs.Burton has written a book that is very timely and necessary and which has caught the momentum of the current Zeitgeist. She rightly identifies the fizzling out of the New Atheist fervor of the 2000s and the re-enchantment of the post-Christian West with New Age faiths. She correctly expands the definition of religion to encompass non-traditional faiths that fulfill the human needs for meaning, purpose, community, and ritual (pg.29-34). The author presents a wide range of new faiths that emerged to meet these needs ranging from fandoms and social justice movements to BDSM and witches. I was also impressed with tracing of contemporary New Age movements to 19th century Spiritualism which reminds us that the new faiths of today did not merge ex nihilo.The book is written in a very accessible style but that comes at the expense of being brief and lack of detail. This is also reflected in the works cited which are mostly online sources and articles from popular media. It would have been very useful if she provided a further reading section and suggested very detailed books on New Age faiths from authors like Emilio Gentile, Hugh urban, Catherine Albanese, Wouter Hanegraaff, and John Newport. Nonetheless, Mrs. Burton has provided a fantastic introductory book with valuable insights that undermine Enlightenment prejudices and the 'Secular Age' of the last 200 years.

This is an extraordinary book that has managed to jump up the reading list and stayed there. Tara is a fantastic writer. I confess there are a myriad of doors open in this book That I did not know existed. Not living in the US it always surprises me the complexity of the fabric of society -there and anywhere- and the existence of so many parallel worlds so trivialized by what from the distance is often seen as a ‘simple’ political bipolarity. Thanks Tara for this ‘travel book’ (from a few miles down from your old Oxford)

This seemed to me both interesting and informative. A good bit of the book's content moved away from anything that was connected to religion in any strict sense. But the overall argument - of people adopting a kind of pick-and-mix approach, with little thought about the coherence of what they ended up with - seemed to me close to that suggested by Steve Bruce's recent work on the sociology of religion.