Invented Religions

Imagination, Fiction and Faith

Carole M. Cusack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317113256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Utilizing contemporary scholarship on secularization, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, and Jediism. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining wider audience through the 1980s and 1990s, is chiefly as a result of underground publishing and the internet. This book deals with immensely popular subject matter: Jediism developed from George Lucas' Star Wars films; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by 26-year-old student Bobby Henderson in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius which retain strong followings and participation rates among college students. The Church of All Worlds' focus on Gaia theology and environmental issues makes it a popular focus of attention. The continued success of these groups of Invented Religions provide a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late/post-modern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity-formation, and personal orientation.

Chapter 1
The Contemporary Context of Invented Religions

Introduction

This chapter has three purposes. First, it considers the effects of secularization, individualism and consumer culture in Western society from the late nineteenth century to the present, and explains how these changes directly affected the varieties of religion that exist today. Second, it examines the development of new religions from the 1950s to the present in terms of the provision of niche religious products in the so-called ‘spiritual supermarket’. Third, it situates the category of invented religions in the context of definitions of religion, and theories of the meaning and function of religion, with an emphasis on those scholars who propose cognitive and evolutionary explanations of religion. It is argued that invented religions are exercises of the imagination that have developed in a creative (though sometimes oppositional) partnership with the influential popular cultural narratives of the contemporary West, particularly film and science fiction.

Secularization, Individualism and Consumer Culture

In 1770 religious choice scarcely existed. It was impossible for a woman living in provincial France to become a Buddhist, because not only were there no Buddhists living in France, but at that time no Buddhist texts were translated into any European language, making it impossible for a potential convert to gain knowledge of Buddhism save through travel to a Buddhist country. Christianity was the dominant, almost the sole, religion in Europe and European-derived societies, because little was known of the ‘world religions’ and the indigenous traditions of colonized nations were not recognized as religions by the colonial powers.1 Christian missionary endeavours and colonial expansion brought increased knowledge of other cultures, and as Europeans gradually learned languages such as Sanskrit and Chinese, translations were made of religious and historical texts from countries including India, China and Iran; for example, the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita, by Charles Wilkins, an employee of the East India Company, which appeared in 1785.2 The academic study of religions other than Christianity began in European universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, but at that time it was assumed that the study of the Gita, the Upanishads or the Analects was a purely intellectual exercise. As Christianity was believed to be the ‘highest’ religion, the notion that Christians might wish to convert to Buddhism or Hinduism was not entertained. Towards the end of the nineteenth century this situation had changed; the founding of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott marked an important transition; it was possible for modern individuals to turn away from the Judeo-Christian tradition and seek religious and spiritual satisfaction in Eastern religions.3 The publication of the Sacred Books of the East series, edited by Max Müller, by Oxford University Press from 1879 to 1900 greatly increased knowledge of the world’s religions, as did popular books like Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879), a biography of the Buddha that enjoyed high sales. Further, Arnold neutralized the unfamiliarity of the Buddha’s life for Western readers by casting him as Luther to Hindu ‘Catholicism’, a reformer who liberated humanity from priestly intermediaries and instigated an individualistic and scriptural faith. The 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago introduced the West to Swami Vivekananda, the charismatic Hindu teacher, and Anagarika Dharmapala, a Sri Lanka Buddhist monk who had worked with Colonel Olcott, and who preached Buddhism in Asia, North America and Europe.4 Theosophy itself provided the inspiration and model for multiple new religious movements.

The historical trajectory of modernity has been inextricably tied to the concept of secularization, which was defined by Peter Berger as ‘the process whereby sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’.5 Early formulations of the secularization thesis argued that religion would decline and eventually disappear. The past, particularly the Catholic Middle Ages, was portrayed as an ‘age of faith’ in which high, almost universal, levels of religious commitment manifested, and the era since the Reformation in the sixteenth century was characterized as one of steady, inevitable loss of faith. It was speculated that Enlightenment rationalism, the dominance of science and the confidence generated by affluence would render the comforts of religion redundant.6 However, by the late twentieth century it was clear that religion was not dying in Western culture, and indeed that the posited past ‘age of faith’ was a fiction; the secularization thesis, as a result, had to be reformulated.7 Two important factors emerged as a result of this process. The first was that Berger’s definition was partially correct; throughout the twentieth century religious institutions had lost much of their influence and the majority of people now live their lives unaffected by any authoritative religious body. Birth, marriage and death, the crucial rites of passage, can all be marked in entirely secular ways. It is still the case that high numbers record religious affiliation in official contexts, such as census questions about religion, but this affiliation does not translate into attendance or active forms of participation. It has been argued that such people are ‘believing without belonging’; however, there is evidence that those who belong to, and even regularly attend, church may not believe.8 In either case, it seems undeniable that religious institutions have lost power in the West.

The second factor to emerge from attempts to refashion the secularization thesis was the significance of the growth in new religious movements in the post-war period. When scholars began studying these movements in earnest in the 1960s they were generally regarded as deviant, ‘cults’, phenomena that were anachronistic, both in the light of modern secularism and in terms of their opposition to the normative religion, Christianity. However, the success of many of these new religions, and the constant replenishing of the alternative religious sector, so that those movements that failed were replaced by newer forms, demanded attention. Yves Lambert has argued that the interactions of modernity and religion created four possible future scenarios: ‘decline, adaptation or reinterpretation, conservation, and innovation’,9 and he noted that those relevant to the growth of new religions, reinterpretation and innovation, tended to exhibit certain characteristics. These are this-worldliness, self-spirituality, immanent divinity, dehierarchization, parascientific or science fiction-based beliefs, loose organizational structure, and ‘pluralism, relativism, probabilism, and pragmatism’.10 Logically, this meant that those who participated in new and alternative religions would do so in a rather different spirit than those who were in mainstream Christian denominations, or even reinterpretations of Christianity such as Pentecostalism. The criterion of truth is eclipsed in such religions; members are more likely to ask ‘does it work?’ than ‘is it true?’ Moreover, their definition of what works is flexible and pragmatic. As they are ‘seekers’, they will move on to another practice or teaching should their current group cease to ‘work’ for them.

It remains to note that secularization is now broadly understood to refer less to a process of religious decline and more to a process of religious change, which in the twentieth century resulted in the uncoupling of the sacred from institutional religion, so that ‘religion becomes only one possible – albeit one very important – source of … the sacred’.11 This helps render intelligible the range of practices, experiences, and texts that modern Westerners draw upon in new religious and spiritual forms, including science fiction, comic book superheroes, and rock stars like Elvis Presley.12 It also draws attention to the fact that Berger’s definition was wrong as much as it was right. This is because he understood secularization to involve the sloughing off of religious symbols, and not only religious institutions. Yet what has actually happened is that a multitude of symbols from a variety of religions are being constantly added to as previously secular symbols become sacralized. These symbols have been detached from their historical, institutional context and are now ‘floating signs that seem to mix and merge without any overarching meaning’.13 Thus, a group of friends in Dallas, Texas can begin an art project influenced by the Russian Theosophist and composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), who planned that his final multi-media work Mysterium, to be performed in the foothills of the Himalayas, would usher in a universal transcendent state and bring about the end of the world. The Hot Tubbists created ‘installations [that] combined music, visual art, food, and sometimes mind-altering chemicals, along with symbols from Sufism, the Cabala, and other sources’, and one member, Yehoodi Aydt, states that ‘about 1991 or ’92, several of us got together as sort of an affinity group, and we started doing events and parties and installations and putting out zines and whatnot. And it kind of evolved into a mystery religion’.14

In the early twenty-first century, scholars are generally in agreement that the contemporary religious landscape is very different to that of one or two centuries ago. There are disputes as to how these changes came about, but it appears that the shift from understanding the self as part of a community to valuing the self as an individual is a major part of the process. Recent explanations of the secularization process have tended to concentrate on the relationship between the public and the private realms; while it is no longer possible to valorize the Middles Ages as an ‘age of faith’, it is still true to say that it was an historical era in which Christian authority filled the public or social sphere, whereas in the modern West it no longer does. Charles Taylor notes that this is still compatible with a majority of people believing or practising their faith in the private sphere. He proposes three interpretations of secularity: first, where it is understood that contemporary public spaces are secular; second, where it is understood that religion, if adhered to, must occupy only the private realm; and finally where it is understood that it is the conditions of belief that have changed: ‘the shift to secularity consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’.15

This third sense is formulated on the understanding that belief is a personal choice, something that an individual may or may not choose to engage in. Taylor charts the change from a society where belief was dominant to one where it is optional through three narratives of alienation. He argues that in 1500 the natural world ‘testified to divine purpose and action’, that this same divine presence and purpose was ‘implicated in the very existence of society … as polis, kingdom, church’, and that the world was ‘enchanted’, which meant that individual agency was not sharply distinguished from impersonal forces.16 For Taylor, the modern world has become disenchanted, public spaces have been emptied of God, and humans have become increasingly distant from nature in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The modern self is ‘buffered’ where the self of earlier times was ‘porous’, interpenetrated with other people, the divine and nature. He argues that ‘for the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of taking a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind. My ultimate purposes are those which arise within me, the crucial meanings of things are those defined in my responses to them’.17 This insight is vital to understanding the interrelationship of individ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Imagination, Fiction and Faith
• 1 The Contemporary Context of Invented Religions
• 2 Discordianism: Chaos is a Goddess
• 3 The Church of All Worlds: Science Fiction, Environmentalism and a Holistic Pagan Vision
• 4 The Church of the SubGenius: Science Fiction Mythos, Culture Jamming and the Sacredness of Slack
• 5 Third-Millennium Invented Religions: Jediism, Matrixism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
• Conclusion: Imagination, Fiction and Faith Revisited
• Bibliography
• Index