Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
There are two aspects of Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites that commend it to the reading list of anyone interested in modern religious studies or cultural movements in general.
First is the author directly addresses a very real and often poorly approached trend. Across the globe, we are in the midst of one of the largest-scale realignments of belief in human history. For everything we hear about the rapid growth of traditional monotheistic religions in various isolated corners of the world, the fact is that non-believers and the vaguely spiritual are an increasingly large portion of many nations’ citizenries. That shift in personal beliefs can change how communities are formed, what morality is activated in the voting booth, and how the average person defines a ‘good life’.
Too often, that trend is discussed from the point of view of the declining religions and what it will mean for those systems to survive as people move away. Instead, Burton flips that sensibility on its head and looks from the ground up. If people are believing in new ways, how are these individuals and their communities creating meaning out of new rites, rituals, and spiritual practices? Understanding these social shifts from the street level gives us a much better chance to understand the potential downstream impacts on people’s lives and the society that will result.
Secondly, and this might ruffle some feathers, I appreciate that Burton discusses these trends from the inside. Commonly, historians or culture writers who attempt to discuss their own communities are criticized for exhibiting bias, so examinations of deeply human emotions and communities are reduced to sterile and dispassionate recitations of statistics and quotes. To be sure, there’s data to present, but as the author Mitch Horowitz argues in his new book, there also has to be room for a believing historian to share their own personal experience with the practices and beliefs.
Burton doesn’t deliver a dissertation written by a researcher who only studied her topic from the library and secondhand sources. Instead, she provides a lived experience of the community, ecstasy, and epiphany that these new strange rites are providing for millions of people. We’re not, in fact, losing our religion. We’re simply discovering the same core aspects of human faith and transcendence in new places. The gods may wear different faces and dance to cooler music, but they still fill our lives with meaning and help us cope with the constant onslaught of an unpredictable universe.
As we seek to understand the waves of disruption washing over our politics, our technology, our economic systems, and our culture, we should turn the same eye to our systems of faith and belief. Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites is an excellent entry to that project, and a vital early step to navigating the shifting landscape beneath our feet.