Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

by Tara Isabella Burton

Overview

A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.
 
Fifty-five years have passed since the cover of Time magazine proclaimed the death of God and while participation in mainstream religion has indeed plummeted, Americans have never been more spiritually busy.
 
While rejecting traditional worship in unprecedented numbers, today's Americans are embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures — from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right.As the Internet makes it ever-easier to find new "tribes," and consumer capitalism forever threatens to turn spirituality into a lifestyle brand, remarkably modern American religious culture is undergoing a revival comparable with the Great Awakenings of centuries past. Faith is experiencing not a decline but a Renaissance. Disillusioned with organized religion and political establishments alike, more and more Americans are seeking out spiritual paths driven by intuition, not institutions.
 
In Strange Rites, religious scholar and commentator Tara Isabella Burton visits with the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; Satanists and polyamorous communities, witches from Bushwick, wellness junkies and social justice activists and devotees of Jordan Peterson, proving Americans are not abandoning religion but remixing it. In search of the deep and the real, they are finding meaning, purpose, ritual, and communities in ever-newer, ever-stranger ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541762527
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	214,607
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at the American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the former staff religion reporter at Vox.com. She has written on religion and secularism for National Geographic, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and more, and holds a doctorate in theology from Oxford. She is also the author of the novel Social Creature (Doubleday, 2018).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Notes from a So-Called Secular Age 1

1 Who Are the Religiously Remixed (And What is a Religion, Anyway)? 15

2 A (Brief) History of Intuitional Religion in America 35

3 Today's Great Awakening (And Why It's Not Like the Others) 53

4 Harry Potter and the Birth of Remix Culture 63

5 Wellness Culture and the Rebirth of New Thought 91

6 The Magic Resistance 115

7 The New Perfectionism: Our Sexual Utopias 141

8 Two Doctrines for a Godless World 165

9 Twilight of the Chads 201

Conclusion: Clash of the Titans 239

Acknowledgments 247

Notes 249

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

04/13/2020

Religion News Service columnist Burton (Social Creatures) chronicles the increasingly common scene of “intuitional” spirituality, or what she calls “religiously Remixed” culture, in this engaging if limited study. Burton’s approach mixes reportage and personal encounters to illuminate what’s happening with those looking for “knowing, for belonging, and for meaning” in places readers might at first find unlikely. Whether it be the “religious-but-not-really-but-actually-kind-of-yes” energy of Harry Potter fandom, the “self care” and “wellness culture” embodied in communities surrounding SoulCycle, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, or hypermasculine alt-right groups, Burton argues that “new gods are everywhere.” A particularly insightful chapter, “The Magic Resistance,” explores the melding of “occultism” and “New Age, Neo-Pagan, or Wiccan” spirituality with mass progressive movements, such as the mass “hexing” of then Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh organized by occultists. Burton’s smart book, contrary to its subtitle, has a frustratingly narrow focus, centering primarily on analysis of religious hybridity in America. Nonetheless, this is a revelatory survey of the increasingly transfigured American spiritual landscape. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A revelatory survey of the increasingly transfigured American spiritual landscape."
—Publishers Weekly

"Burton's writing is challenging, educational, and electric, combining big-picture thinking with deep-dive immersion...Readers will come away with enlightened and altered thinking."
—Booklist

"A bracing tour through the myriad forms of bespoke spiritualism and makeshift quasireligions springing up across America."
—The Wall Street Journal

"An essential work for anyone interested in understanding—or addressing—our rapidly transforming cultural and religious landscape."
—Christianity Today

"Any good historian of religion knows that it's possible for a culture to become less and more religious at the same time—an insight that Tara Isabella Burton uses on an illuminating journey through the many unorthodox forms of faith emerging in post-religious America. With a novelist's knack for storytelling, Burton shows in scintillating detail how the unquenchable longing for connection and transcendence is merging with carnal desires and the capitalist marketplace to produce new sacred spaces and experiences of enchantment. Read Strange Rites. It's a revelation."—Damon Linker, Senior Correspondent at TheWeek

"A lesser writer and a colder intellect would have been content simply to mock the video-gaming, Soul-Cycling communicants of our "Remixed" Great Awakening. Yet in Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton grasps that strangeness entails ecstatic power as well as oddity, and that even folly in search of transcendent meaning merits empathy, not apathy—the difference between a merely lively read and a profound one."—Giselle Donnelley, Research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

"Rigorously researched and reported with scholarly curiosity and an eye on the zeitgeist, Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites takes a hard look at what's replacing traditional religious practice in American culture today and finds that the thirst for community and belonging has not gone away. As the discovers, today's religiously remixed subcultures could indeed be tomorrow's new religions. Her book is an adventure story through the new American religious landscapes."—Kaya Oakes, UC Berkeley, author of The Nones Are Alright

"With Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton establishes herself as her generation's foremost chronicler of American religious life. Her intelligence, her immersive reporting, and her vivid prose style illuminate with particular intensity the radical religious changes transforming post-Christian America. The religious center has not held; Burton is an essential guide to the mere spiritual anarchy now loosed upon the Western world. Strange Rites will doubtless be one of the most important books of the year."—Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option

"Tara Burton is a brilliant observer of contemporary life, and in Strange Rites she explores the way that religious impulses have been transmuted into new passions, from self-care and wellness to social justice to bronze age bodybuilding in our online age."—Frank Fukuyama, author of The End of History and The Last Man

“[A] snapshot of US culture in its latest ‘religious’ guises…Burton’s deftly written account of ‘remixed religion is persuasive and entertainingly argued. What makes it such a satisfying read is the way she places seemingly disparate fads and worldviews into a wider context of religious anthropology and the unfolding American story…anyone with a concern for the world in which we live – and would like to live – should read this book.”—Anaphora

From the Publisher

03/13/2020

Burton elaborates on her work as a regular contributor to outlets such as Vox and The Atlantic with her unique perspective on the evolving nature of religion in the United States. Burton argues that organized religions, particularly traditional Christian-based faith communities, have fallen out of favor as their social, spiritual, and/or community-building functions are replaced by nonreligious niche groups such as Harry Potter fandoms, SoulCycle devotees, kinksters, political organizations, or any numbers of interests that typically coalesce around a strong internet-based community. This well-researched work begins rather unevenly, but finds its footing and concludes with an especially riveting analysis of the religious aspects of the male-dominated alt-right nationalist movement and its dangerous consequences. VERDICT For readers with an interest and background in philosophy, theology, and popular culture who enjoy casual academic banter and a unique perspective on the evolving nature of contemporary U.S. society.—Kelly Karst, California Institute of Integral Studies

Library Journal