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
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Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World Hardcover – June 16, 2020
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Print length320 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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Publication dateJune 16, 2020
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Dimensions9.6 x 1.4 x 6.7 inches
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"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
―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
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).
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Product details
- Publisher : PublicAffairs (June 16, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1541762533
- ISBN-13 : 978-1541762534
- Item Weight : 1.15 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.6 x 1.4 x 6.7 inches
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Best Sellers Rank:
#76,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #36 in Freemasonry (Books)
- #53 in Religious Cults (Books)
- #82 in Sociology & Religion
- Customer Reviews:
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4.3 out of 5
128 global ratings
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A fun, mind-expanding tour of the new landscape of contemporary "Remixed" quasi-religions
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2020Verified Purchase
23 people found this helpful
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Great whirlwind tour of people in America Looking for God in all the wrong places
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2020Verified Purchase
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!
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!
9 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2020
Verified Purchase
American religiosity is not declining, but it is changing, argues Tara Isabella Burton in this book. Institutional religion is giving way to intuitional religion. The former is “organized faith in a higher power.” In the latter, Americans — especially millennials — “envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions.” Burton traces the history and offers a taxonomy of these new religions, whose metaphysics and morals are often explicitly, even vulgarly, anti-Christian.
10 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2020
Verified Purchase
This book summarizes what I have been thinking for quite some time. Religion is all around us. As a Christian, I think and believe in one way, and think that many adherents to the major religions of the world would have their own individual response to life as it is affected and influenced by their religions beliefs.
The author very clearly shows that our 21st century world has adopted many different religions. Many of them have many adherents. It seems that the greatest underlying theme of these various religions is that they all stress the "I, Me" axis. I am the most important. Everything must revolve around me. A religion which places me on top is one which is gaining in the world.
A somewhat difficult read, not one which you can scan and fully appreciate while watching some fluff piece on the tube.
The author very clearly shows that our 21st century world has adopted many different religions. Many of them have many adherents. It seems that the greatest underlying theme of these various religions is that they all stress the "I, Me" axis. I am the most important. Everything must revolve around me. A religion which places me on top is one which is gaining in the world.
A somewhat difficult read, not one which you can scan and fully appreciate while watching some fluff piece on the tube.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries
J F G Shearmur
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but disturbing book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 25, 2020Verified Purchase
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.
One person found this helpful
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Leandro Herrero
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary book. Magnificent prose.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 11, 2020Verified Purchase
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)
happichappi
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worthwhile timely read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2020Verified Purchase
Very interesting book and great for discussion groups! Covers a lot of new material for me.
Reptilian Lord
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Timely Course Correction
Reviewed in Canada on July 20, 2020Verified Purchase
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.
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.
One person found this helpful
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