ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the ways in which fandoms have become interwoven with religion and spirituality. It provides a discussion of what constitutes “fandom” and highlights the “waves” or topics of research on fandoms more generally. The chapter examines the interconnections between fan pilgrimage, religion, and spirituality, focusing first on “religion as fandom” or some of the similarities between fandom and religion, and then on “fandom as religion”, or how some fandoms have become in part fiction-based religions, before concluding. Academic research on specific types of fandoms has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Travel to sacred places has long been an important part of religion and integral in the creation and maintenance of both individual and group religious identities and sacred geographies. Religious pilgrimage has also long influenced politics, economic development, and societal cohesiveness at local, regional, national, and transnational scales.
