In September 2001 Jerry Falwell Sr., the onetime provocateur of the religious right, infamously blamed the 9/11 attacks on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians” who tried to “secularize America.” The atheist intellectual Sam Harris, similarly, predicted in 2006 that “at some point . . . it’s just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.” Falwell and Mr. Harris would agree on little, Tara Isabella Burton observes in “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World,” but about one thing they were in accord: “The country we’re living in now—as opposed to the America of sixty or a hundred or three hundred years ago—is secular, and only getting more so.”
Is America secularizing, as has routinely been supposed for 30 or 40 years? It depends on how you define religion, but probably not. There are fewer self-identifying Christians today than in 1960, to be sure, but the much-talked-about rise of the “nones”—people listing no religious affiliation in surveys—doesn’t necessarily signify the growth of plain unbelief and atheism. Many of the nones, Ms. Burton points out, say they pray regularly and think “spiritual energy” resides in physical objects. They also believe that God, however they may define the word, protects, rewards and punishes them. Nor are the formally religious too principled to embrace the smorgasbord approach to faith: Nearly a third of self-identifying Christians say they believe in reincarnation.
At least half of all Americans, Ms. Burton explains, belong to no religious tradition but borrow freely from several. The Religiously Remixed, as she calls them, “want to choose—and, more often than not, purchase—the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them. They prioritize intuitional spirituality over institutional religion. And they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems.”
“Strange Rites” is a bracing tour through the myriad forms of bespoke spiritualism and makeshift quasireligions springing up across America: the ersatz piety and self-veneration of “wellness culture”; the startlingly earnest and deeply strange world of Harry Potter fan fiction; the newer, woker forms of sexual utopia, witchcraft and satanism that are now prevalent among the affluent young.
The book, despite its occasionally lurid material, is easy to enjoy. Ms. Burton writes fluently, doesn’t take herself too seriously as an authority, and keeps her own political and metaphysical views mostly to herself. She is right to observe that the current craze for customized spirituality is part of a dramatic shift in American religion from the “institutional” to the “intuitional.” I would only add that midcentury mainline Protestantism, which she takes to represent consolidated, institutionalized Christianity, was quite as syncretistic as today’s Prosperity Gospel Megachurch or neopagan cult, only instead of borrowing from Zen Buddhism and 12-step philosophy and cognitive-behavior therapy, yesterday’s mainline Protestants mixed in bits of Emerson, Hegel, Marx and Jung.
Strange Rites
By Tara Isabella Burton
PublicAffairs, 301 pages, $28
Tara Isabella Burton.
Photo: Rose CallahanOne complaint, which perhaps you would expect a reviewer in this newspaper to raise, has to do with the author’s use of the word “capitalism.” Ms. Burton is one of a number of young, hyperintelligent Catholic, Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic writers who take traditionalist religious practices seriously but also espouse left-wing views in the economic sphere. Accordingly she finds ample evidence of companies and corporations trying to make a buck by promoting the bizarro cults and ersatz copies of authentic religious traditions—SoulCycle, for example, an exercise regimen that has all the trappings of an ascetic religion but for an exclusively upper-class clientele; or Ritual Design Lab, which advises clients on designing their own “custom, nontheistic ritual.” “Consumer-capitalist culture,” Ms. Burton writes, “offers us not merely necessities but identities. Meaning, purpose, community, and ritual can all—separately or together—be purchased on Amazon Prime.”
The charge that “capitalism” encourages the kind of soullessness and hedonism that its supposedly conservative defenders abhor is an old and not unreasonable one. It is made cogently by Daniel Bell in “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1976) and in the essays of the Southern Agrarians. The charge is increasingly popular among young progressives—of whom I think it’s safe to say Ms. Burton is one—who despite their leftist inclinations long for the stability and ancient beauty of a religious tradition. I don’t purport to end the debate here, but it cannot be stated too often that markets mainly respond to demands that are already there. It’s not the market response but the thing responded to that ought to incite the ire of these high-minded Christian progressives. The religious traditionalist who laments the fact that Urban Outfitters sells Wiccan paraphernalia, to use an example Ms. Burton mentions in this context, would be better advised to contemplate the failure of traditional religious outlooks to hold the interest of the younger generation than to bemoan “consumer capitalism” for advancing godlessness.
Ms. Burton brings “Strange Rites” to a disappointing end. She posits an apocalyptic struggle among three godless religions: the eschatological ideology of social-justice activism, the transhumanist vision of techno-utopianism and the atavistic nihilism of the alt-right. I credit Ms. Burton for categorizing social-justice leftism, with whose economic objectives she is presumably most in sympathy, as a well-intentioned but basically anti-Christian ideology. (All the same, I wonder why she says nothing about either radical environmentalism, an atavistic religion if ever there was one, and almost nothing about radical Islam, whose adherents actually do aim for domination.)
“Only time will tell which one will win,” Ms. Burton concludes. Really? The alt-right is a movement of mentally pubescent boys playing anonymous games on social media. Techno-utopianism is the vanity project of Bay Area dreamers with too much time and money and too little sense. The soft-totalitarian outlook of social-justice activism, by contrast, is the default ideology of our university, media, corporate, transnational, entertainment and political elite. I’m pretty sure I know which one will win.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
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