Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

Consumer-capitalist culture offers us not merely necessities but identities. Meaning, purpose, community, and ritual can all—separately or together—be purchased on Amazon Prime.

Kek wasn’t “real” in the sense that nobody believed he was metaphysically out there, offline. But he was real in the sense that he served as a celebration of the randomness of online culture, which relished in the chaos that Trump seemed poised to bring to America. That chaos, they knew deep down, reflected the structure of the world all along.

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.

As journalist Amanda Hess writes in the New York Times, “Shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a purchase need not have any explicit social byproduct—the materials eco-friendly, or the proceeds donated to charity—to be weighted with significance.

In his 1911 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim argues that religion is basically the glue that keeps a society together: a set of rituals and beliefs that people affirm in order to strengthen their identity as a group. Religion, he writes, is a “unified system of beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community cal

A full 72 percent of the Nones say they believe in, if not the God of the Bible, at least something.

The ultimate object of worship he sees in a society’s church is society itself. “God,” he writes in Elementary Forms, “and society are one of the same.… The god of the clan can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined” as a totem, be it plant, animal, or deity. “Religious force,” he ultimately concludes, is “nothin

A religion of emotive intuition, of aestheticized and commodified experience, of self-creation and self-improvement and, yes, selfies. A religion for a new generation of Americans raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims ab

But, other scholars have argued, religion isn’t just about social glue. It’s also about making sense of the world around us: answering the question What does it all mean? Another foundational scholar in the field, Peter Berger, argues that religion is ultimately about creating a coherent and meaningful narrative.