`invented religions' and the study of `religion'

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Introduction: Making it (all?) up – ‘invented religions’ and the study of ‘religion’ a

Steven J. Sutcliffe & Carole M. Cusack

b

a

School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, New College, Mound Place, Edinburgh, EH1 2LX, UK b

Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Published online: 17 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Steven J. Sutcliffe & Carole M. Cusack , Culture and Religion (2013): Introduction: Making it (all?) up – ‘invented religions’ and the study of ‘religion’, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2013.839952 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2013.839952

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Culture and Religion, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2013.839952

Introduction: Making it (all?) up – ‘invented religions’ and the study of ‘religion’ Steven J. Sutcliffea* and Carole M. Cusackb a


School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, New College, Mound Place, Edinburgh EH1 2LX, UK; bDepartment of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia The editors of the special issue ‘Invented Religions: Creating New Religions through Fiction, Parody and Play’ outline the aims of the collection and place it in the context of debates on ‘invented religions’ and the ‘invention of tradition’. We introduce key concepts employed by contributors, place the category of ‘invented religion’ in a wider constructionist context, contrast it with the seminal notion of ‘invention of tradition’ and note some of its specific features which reward analysis as a separate category. We argue that the category of ‘invented religions’ is descriptively interesting and theoretically useful, and we suggest that developing the latter aspect in particular can encourage this new area of enquiry away from an exotic niche and into the mainstream of explanatory theorising in the academic study of religion/s. Keywords: invented religions; study of religions; ‘religion’; invention of tradition; social constructionism

Introduction The aim of this special issue was to explore the concept of ‘invented religion’: those formations which, in terms of standard conceptions of religion, ‘look like a duck and quack like a duck’ – as Beyer says of ‘new age spirituality’ (2006, 8) – but whose defining characteristic, as proposed by Cusack in her monograph Invented Religions (2010, 1), is deliberately to ‘announce their invented status’ and thereby to ‘refuse’ traditional legitimation strategies. In other words, these formations are ‘explicitly invented, fictional religions’ (Cusack 2010, 141), and can be distinguished by their ‘defiant rejection of the legitimating strategies employed by other new religions’ (Cusack 2010, 146). The eight papers written specially for this collection deal in one way or another with this concept through a mixture of empirical case studies and theoretical analysis. Some papers explore additional examples or variations, extending Cusack’s original project of identifying and documenting a new species of religious formation. However, not all the contributing authors accept ‘invented religion’ without question, and some take issue with the category altogether in preference for alternative theorisations

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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S.J. Sutcliffe and C.M. Cusack

of the same data. That said, this collection treats Cusack’s Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith (2010) as the starting point for the debate, in particular her characterisation of this new species as


openly defying the web of conventions that surround the establishment of new religions, which include linking the new teaching to an existing religious tradition, arguing that the teaching is not really ‘new’ but rather a contemporary statement of a strand of ancient wisdom, and establishing new scriptures as authoritative through elaborate claims of external origin . . . Invented religions refuse such strategies of legitimation. (Cusack 2010, 1)

Cusack goes on to describe the teachings of invented religions as ‘admitted to be the product of the human imagination’, and she summarises their stance as ‘fictional’ and ‘confrontational’ (2010, 1, 141, 146). These key characteristics, ‘fictional’ and ‘confrontational’, are unpacked and further explored in this special issue with the help of two rough groups of related descriptors. Fiction, parody and play are dealt with primarily in the papers by Cusack, Davidsen, Kirby, and Ma¨kela¨ and Petsche, and aspects of confrontation and contestation are probed in relation to questions of inauthenticity, qualified invention, discursivity and the legal ‘making’ of religion in the papers by Tremlett, Sutcliffe, Taira, and Stausberg and Tessmann. ‘Fictional’ is the more straightforward of the two general characteristics, in that the use of fictions (whether a pre-existing text, a purpose-written text or a developing narrative) is broadly acknowledged as an important element of the cultural formations in question. Cusack’s use of ‘confrontational’ derives from the counterculturalism of the 1960s with which many of these religions are deeply imbricated. The result is ‘religions with attitude’ that are connected either to the (North American) counterculture, such as Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds and the Church of the SubGenius or to specific oppositional projects targeting mainstream or conservative political – cultural developments, such as the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster’s opposition to Creationism in the form of Intelligent Design, and the general suspicion displayed by Matrixism and Jediism towards ‘western’ notions of ‘reality’, and their corresponding embrace of ‘eastern’ religious concepts of the illusoriness of the sensory world. This countercultural or dissident ‘attitude’ is not confined to the North American context, but can be discerned in Taira’s case study of Jediism and youth culture in the UK, in Kirby’s analysis of globalised ‘occultural’ groups and in the ‘appropriation’ of Zoroastrianism within the Russian cultic milieu described by Stausberg and Tessman. Thus unpacked, the category of ‘invented religion’ is capable of picking out some interesting empirical phenomena, and there is substantive interest in isolating and comparing further instances of this new type in different cultural contexts. The danger – as has happened in so many previous chapters in the academic study of religion – is that an under-theorised fascination for new categories drifts into a form of ‘butterfly collecting’ of colourful and exotic ‘specimens’, which is either pursued as an end in itself or tacked on to the existing hierarchical taxonomy of ‘world’, ‘new’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘esoteric’ forms


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without rocking the categorical boat. We do not wish to discourage further formal analysis of ‘invented religions’, nor to stymie attempts to reform the existing taxonomy, but we also think that the study of ‘invented’ groups offers more ambitious theoretical opportunities for investigating the production and authorisation of ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ formations in line with central disciplinary concerns in the study of religion. This collection was thus conceived in the light of extending, but also complicating and in some instances problematising, the concept of ‘invented religion’, especially as Cusack is happy to admit that Invented Religions (2010) was not intended as a methodological salvo, but rather as an experiment in documenting previously nebulous phenomena. In terms of extending the theoretical purchase of the concept, these groups typically raise questions about the reliability of structural elements taken for granted in conventional history of religions, from the dramatis personae (those who began these formations, or significantly expanded them through proselytisation), the historiography of key events, the status and authority of the texts invoked by the communities involved and the boundaries and legitimacy of ‘membership’ amongst practitioners (Chidester 2005, 209). The theoretical salience of ‘invented religions’ within the study of religion can be usefully approached in terms of Lambert’s argument that the interactions of modernity and religion have created four possible future scenarios: ‘decline, adaptation or reinterpretation, conservation, and innovation’ (1999, 311). Those scenarios most relevant to the growth of new religions, reinterpretation and innovation, tend to exhibit the characteristics of this-worldliness, self-spirituality, immanent divinity, de-hierarchisation, para-scientific or science fiction-based beliefs, loose organisational structure and ‘pluralism, relativism, probabilism, and pragmatism’ (Lambert 1999, 323) – features that are richly illustrated in this special collection. This suggests that people who participate in invented religions tend to do so in a different fashion than those who are members of traditionally legitimated religions. The issue of ‘truth’, whether derived from revelation or by tradition and whether articulated situationally or strategically, is eclipsed in invented religions, as members are more likely to ask ‘Does it work?’ than ‘Is it true?’ The viability and purchase of ‘invented’ as an adjective for religions or other meaning-making or identity-constructing phenomena are paralleled, and in some cases have been preceded, by a plethora of titles positing the ‘construction’ or ‘imagining’ of this, that and the next thing: from social class to sexuality, amongst other cultural items. Recent examples from a huge range include Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s The Social Construction of Deviance (2009) and Seidman’s The Social Construction of Sexuality (2003). The notion of an institution or formation being the outcome of a process of social and collective construction, rather than issuing self-evidently and apparently seamlessly from the authority of tradition or ‘by nature’, usefully points to the subjective interests and ideologies, rather than objective scientific description, mobilised in and through apparently ordinary and innocent categories. But there is a problem with routinised or ‘knee-


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jerk’ constructionism in that, the more everything is seen as ‘invented’ – nations, classes, sexes, religions – the less any particular analytical delineation is supplied by the concept, a view strongly expressed in Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (1999). Strictly speaking, the premise of materialist historiography is that all religious formations are at root ‘invented’, which would seem to render our defended sub-category formally redundant. Moreover, to describe something as ‘invented’ may seem pejoratively to connote a pop culture disposable object (Chidester 2005) or the mystified product of ideological ‘manufacture’ (McCutcheon 1997). These potential problems with the notion of ‘invention’ would seem to undercut the analytical value of a separate category of ‘invented religion’. But the case studies in Cusack (2010) demonstrate that ‘invention’ is also evidently an emic notion carrying a positive set of connotations for practitioners. The key feature of the category is therefore not that the formations it identifies can be shown to be ‘constructed’, ‘imagined’ and generally ‘made up’ – there is nothing new in this per se, as indicated – but that these formations themselves pointedly ‘announce’ and embrace this status as a mark of identity. (In contrast, few if any religious groups have self-identified as ‘imagined’ or ‘constructed’.) This points to larger theoretical questions within the study of religion which have the potential to draw invented religions out of the cul-de-sac and into the mainstream: what, if anything, is the difference between a ritual and a game, between puja and playing and between praying and acting, and how should we position and understand these ludic and sometimes parodic behaviours in cultural and political context? As is well known, the motif of invention in history and cultural studies is particularly associated with Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (2003 [1983]). Arguably, the prominence in the literature of this edited volume is due to the ‘postmodern’ effect of its titular oxymoron: ‘invention’, connoting fresh and new, is conjoined with ‘tradition’, connoting established and authentic, forming an arresting theoretical combination. In fact, a complex network of academic uses of the concept of ‘invention’ can be discerned in the humanities and social sciences from around the late 1970s, from Wagner’s The Invention of Culture (1981) through to Bowler’s The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (1989), to name just two prominent examples. Closely related to the vogue for invention are seminal studies exploring the political effects of the central cognitive mechanism involved in ‘making it up’ – the imagination – such as Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991 [1983]) and Inden’s Imagining India (1990). In his chapter ‘Inventing Religious Tradition: Yagnas and Hindu Renewal in Trinidad’, Vertovec (1991) remarks on the paucity of examples of ‘invented religious tradition’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger. He argues that Weber’s theory of the institutionalisation of charisma, as well as theories of ‘cargo cults’ and ‘revitalisation movements’, dealt with broadly similar questions of the creation and legitimation of cultural practices, but through different concepts (Vertovec



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1991, 79). Vertovec goes on to argue that ‘invention of religious tradition’ is particularly likely to occur ‘among religious minorities in contexts of rapid social change’ (1991, 80), and he offers an empirical case study in Trinidadian yagnas (week-long pujas, scripture reading and music) as an example of an ‘invented religious tradition’, although he does not further develop the concept. A few years later, York’s discussion ‘Invented Culture/Invented Religion: The Fictional Origins of Contemporary Paganism’ (1999) introduced the twin concepts of ‘invention’ and ‘fiction’ into the debate on the creation of Paganism, arguably the ur-countercultural ‘invented religion’. Meanwhile, the linked tropes of ‘imagination’, ‘construction’ and ‘invention’, increasingly employed in Religious Studies and Anthropology from the 1980s to theorise the production of religious representations amongst practitioners (Kliever 1981), began to model scholarly method itself. A neo-romantic notion of the power of creative artifice can be seen to drive the essays constituting Smith’s Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (1982). Homologous to the announcement of the invention of tradition by practitioners, Smith affirms the acceptability of the scholar ‘imagining religion’, on grounds that ‘religion’ is a theoretical object only with no ontological referent, strictly speaking. In Smith’s presentation, the ‘scientific’ study of religion becomes a form of creative, playful modelling: the study of religion sub specie ludi (Gill 1998). Arguably, however, Smith’s method comes at the price of a belletristic approach in which the literary essay replaces empirical methods of survey, fieldwork and experiment. Some of the cultural and political fall-out of this neo-romantic and even idealist methodology of ‘imagining’ and ‘inventing’ is traced in the examination of ‘real-world’ outcomes of scholarly arguments in, for example, Whitelam’s The Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian History (1996) and in Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (2005), whose subtitles point to the economic and political consequences of merry scholastic ‘invention’. Returning to Lambert’s discussion of the multipolar fate of religion in modernity, the merit of the contributions to this special issue lies in their finegrained descriptions of a latent human capacity to ‘invent’ religion/s in circumstances where, for some, existing traditions disappoint and secularity palls. The precise mechanisms of this human capacity require to be carefully calibrated, but its basic presentation fits with current explanatory trends in the cognitive and biological sciences as well as with narrative theory and critical historiography. In other words, the concept of ‘invented religion’ need not trigger a return to butterfly collecting but can be mobilised in the service of more ambitious theorising. The meta-authority claimed for ‘religion’ makes it a particularly interesting cultural institution against which to test the impact of discourses of ‘invention’. The twist is that invented religions by definition happily appropriate a term or label which might previously have been used to render them ‘other’ and hence inferior, and use it for their own self-definition. Thus, the term ‘invented religion’ is effectively shorthand for ‘self-invented

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religion’, which differentiates this species from the many other kinds of ‘religion’ invented, imagined or constructed by scholastic ‘others’. The implications of the announcement of this position for the durability and transmission of the formations in question remain to be systematically explored. Our aim in commissioning this special issue is to further this task. Summary of papers The collection begins with two papers (Cusack, Davidsen) that set out key terms and concepts for the analysis of invented religions. Four separate extended case studies follow which draw on a range of textual, ethnographical and archival sources from Australia, Finland, England and Russia (Kirby, Ma¨kela¨ and Petsche, Sutcliffe, Stausberg and Tessmann). The collection finishes with two critiques (Tremlett, Taira) of the value of the core concept, which probe its implicit theoretical limitations. Carole M. Cusack’s contribution, ‘Play, Narrative and the Creation of Religion: Extending the Theoretical Base of “Invented Religions”’, engages with Bellah’s (2011) model of the origin and development of religion in human evolution, focusing on the centrality of play. Cusack presents three theses to establish ‘invented religions’ as culturally appropriate forms of religion in contemporary Western societies. She posits that play, narrative and experiences of other than quotidian consciousness are central to the emergence and maintenance of religion. Second, different types of social and political organisations will foster varying types of religion. Finally, she argues that the theoretical importance of ‘invented’ religions lies in the fact that they render transparent the processes of play and narrative involved in the origin and formation of religion/s. Markus A. Davidsen’s paper ‘Fiction-Based Religion: Conceptualising a New Category against History-Based Religion and Fandom’ begins with Possamai’s (2005, 2012) term ‘hyper-real religions’, but argues that ‘fictionbased’ is a better description for these phenomena, as they are based on narratives, like George Lucas’ Star Wars film trilogy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels, that create a fictional world rather than referring to the actual world. Thus, they contrast with conventional ‘history’based religions in which the central texts claim to refer to the actual world (though this claim is contested from a historian’s perspective). Davidsen also contrasts fiction-based religions with fandom, a form of play that again does not make claims about the actual world. He concludes that fiction-based religion emerges when fictional (non-referential) narratives are used as the basis for actual, referential religious practices. Danielle L. Kirby’s contribution, ‘Between Synchromysticism and Paganism: Tracing Some Metaphysical Uses of Popular Fictions’, shifts attention to the popular narratives that scholars, including Cusack and Davidsen, have identified as being likely to engender invented or fiction-based religions. Kirby, however,



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is interested in the very different relationships that members of invented religions, new religions and more nebulous spiritualities and occultural groups may have with texts. She examines a range of short case studies, including the Church of All Worlds, Jediism, Sithism, the Otherkin, contemporary Chaos Magic, the Church of the SubGenius and Synchromysticism, arguing that across these groups, fictional texts can be seen to function in five principle ways: as catalyst, ideal type, reality, practice and proof. Essi Ma¨kela¨ and Johanna Petsche, in ‘Serious Parody: Discordianism as Liquid Religion’, consider Discordianism, which Cusack (2010) regards as the first ‘invented religion’ proper, in the context of Taira’s model of ‘liquid religion’ (2006), which is itself a re-working of Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ (2000). The authors explore the practices of contemporary Finnish Discordians in a rare empirical study of those who identify with this contested formation. Unsurprisingly, some interviewees denied that Discordianism was religious while others celebrated and embraced the label. This paper is important because it chronicles the spontaneous development of ritual (including the veneration of a cabbage and the shamanistic divination of garden gnomes and pink elephants as ‘power animals’) and the innate ‘slipperiness’ of invented religions, in terms of the frequent unwillingness of adherents to be considered ‘religious’ at all. In ‘“Rosicrucians at Large”: Radical versus Qualified Invention in the Cultic Milieu’, Steven Sutcliffe examines the legacy of Rosicrucianism, itself an excellent candidate for investigation as a ‘fiction-based’ religion in that the manifestoes of 1614– 1616 were the stimulus for the formation of initiatory brotherhoods imitating those described in the texts (Eco 1998, 10 – 11). Sutcliffe describes the formation of the Rosicrucian Order, Crotona Fellowship (ROCF) in the cultic milieu and its exploration in the later 1930s by the future founders of Wicca and Findhorn, tracing the resulting genealogies of ‘hidden transmission’ into the present day. His paper is valuable both for its close engagement with neglected archival sources of a modern ‘Rosicrucian’ group (ROCF) and for its methodological claim that qualified, rather than radical, ‘invention of tradition’ was the more successful adaptive strategy, explaining the vitality of Wicca and Findhorn long after the demise of the ROCF. Michael Stausberg and Anna Tessmann consider a significant case study of Zoroastrianism in contemporary Russia to separate out the different processes involved in the creation, the emergence and the ‘making’ of (a) religion. ‘The Appropriation of a Religion’ is the only paper in this collection to treat the contemporary re-making of an established tradition. Eschewing ‘invention’ in favour of ‘appropriation’, its significance lies in its analysis of the complex process whereby the ‘new age’ Zoroastrianism promulgated in Russia by Pavel Globa (b. 1953), initially a teacher of astrology but who later came to be viewed as a prophet of this ancient Persian religion, after time attracted expressions of interest and fraternity from established Zoroastrian communities around the world. This paper reinforces the argument that once a group begins to perform a


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particular religious identity, both members and outsiders react to that performance by affirming the ‘authenticity’ of the tradition embraced. In ‘The Problem with the Jargon of Inauthenticity: Towards a Materialist Re-Positioning of the Analysis of Postmodern Religion’, Paul-Franc ois Tremlett argues that fashionable concepts of ‘fake’, ‘hyper-real’ and ‘invented’ religions are idealist distractions for a cogent analysis of religion under the political and economic transformations of late capitalist societies. He critiques the category of ‘invented religions’, positing that such dubious latecomers are merely being added to a ‘table’ of existing religions, rather than destabilising or re-drawing the category of ‘religion’ in a theoretically and politically salient way. Referring to contrastive ethnographic studies of urban practices in the Philippines and Taiwan, Tremlett argues that the material meaning of new sites of religion lies not in allusions to simulations, hyper-realities or pop-cultural consumption, but in their capacity to serve as agentive nodes to generate new forms of public association and assembly. Teemu Taira’s concluding paper ‘The Category of “Invented Religion”: A New Opportunity for Studying Discourses on “Religion”’ rejects questions of the categorical value and/or ‘authenticity’ of invented religions outright, rather viewing such phenomena as further grist to the mill of discursive study of ‘religion’ simpliciter. Taira mounts a three-pronged argument: first, evaluating the analytical category of ‘invented religions’, which he relates to problematic questions of typology, and a perceived desire to continue to separate out ‘real’ religions from imposters; second, proposing a discursive approach to invented religions that focus on laying bare the vested interests and practical outcomes of certain phenomena being classified as ‘religions’; and finally, testing these positions through an empirical case study of Jediism amongst young men in the UK. References Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Beyer, Peter. 2006. Religions in Global Society. London: Routledge. Bowler, Peter J. 1989. The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cusack, Carole M. 2010. Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Farnham: Ashgate. Eco, Umberto. 1998. Serendipities. New York: Columbia University Press. Gill, Sam. 1998. “No Place to Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith as Homo Ludens, The Academic Study of Religion Sub Specie Ludi.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66 (2): 283– 312. Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben Yehuda. 2009. The Social Construction of Deviance. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.



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Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 2003 [1983]. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Canto. Inden, Ronald B. 1990. Imagining India. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Kliever, Lonnie D. 1981. “Fictive Religion: Rhetoric and Play.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49 (4): 657– 669. Lambert, Yves. 1999. “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?” Sociology of Religion 60 (3): 303– 333. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. McCutcheon, R. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. Possamai, Adam. 2005. Religion and Popular Culture: A Hyper-Real Testament. Brussels: Peter Lang. Possamai, Adam, ed. 2012. Handbook of Hyper-Real Religions. Leiden: Brill. Seidman, Steven. 2003. The Social Construction of Sexuality. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taira, Teemu. 2006. Notkea Uskonto [Liquid Religion]. Tampere: Eetos. Vertovec, Stephen. 1991. “Inventing Religious Tradition: Yagnas and Hindu Renewal in Trinidad.” In Religion, Tradition and Renewal, edited by Armin W. Geertz, and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, 79 – 97. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Whitelam, Keith W. 1996. The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. London: Routledge. York, Michael. 1999. “Invented Culture/Invented Religion: The Fictional Origins of Contemporary Paganism.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 3 (1): 135– 146.