ABSTRACT
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
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 politicalcultural 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.
