Thank you NetGalley, the publisher as well as Tara Isabella Burton. My only review for this book is that people are searching for hope and refuse to go to where it is found.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this.

A fascinating look at the religious landscape in the 21st century. I like how it addresses certain trends (CrossFit, SJW, alt-right) as religions. Very thought-provoking.

This book is a must-read in today's religious landscape. Tara Isabella Burton paints a clear picture of the way religion is changing in today's culture, and how new forms of 'religion' are taking place - wellness culture, the far right, and more. Burton is an articulate author who writes with little bias, many details and a variety of sources. This book has an academic feel, but is easy to read and accessible for everyone. Anyone who has an interest in religion should read this book!

A fascinating academic look at the rites and practices that are replacing traditional Christianity, particularly among the younger generations. I appreciated the author's ability to balance both an academic examination of the topics with a tone that was engaging and kept the reader interested.

Strange Rites
New Religions for A Godless World
By Tara Isabella Burton
An incredible, adventuresome and encyclopedic overview of seven types of post-religions in America
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
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Religious scholars and cultural analysts have been trying to map the complicated phenomenon of the changing landscape of religion in the United States. The numbers of people who call themselves Christians are steadily declining, while the "Nones," those who claim no religious affiliation on polls and surveys, is now the fasting growing group in the population overall. A third of millennials identify themselves as religiously unaffiliated, and about a quarter of American adults overall. We call this group "spiritual independents" because although some do say they are atheists and agnostics, most consider themselves to be "spiritual."

These people are on a quest, like religious people in the past, but they are seeking new forms of community and their own practices and devotions. They advocate intuition rather than institutions. Tara Isabella Burton finds them fascinating, and her book Strange Rites makes for an equally fascinating read.

Burton has the experience, the credentials and the bold imagination to guide us through this unprecedented terrain. She is a columnist on millennial religion for Religion News Service, a contributing editor at The American Interest, and the author of Social Creature, a novel published in 2018. She received a doctorate in theology from Trinity College, Oxford, where she was a Clarendon Scholar, 2017. She also works as a touring expert for National Geographic, lecturing on expeditions in the Caucasus and the Alpe-Adrina.

With energy and panache, Burton dazzles us with her wide-ranging commentaries on the immense transformations taking place in what she calls a post-religion age where culture wars are raging, spiritual anarchy is popping up in strange places, and many of those who have left Christian churches are still yearning to create their own special tribes with a strong and a keen sense of belonging.

Burton takes a detailed look at seven different faith systems which have come alive during the decline of Christianity. She covers the beliefs and practices of fandoms and fan fiction sites with the Harry Potter franchise leading the way; the growing popularity of Wicca and its many neopagan rituals; the wellness culture and its emphasis on self-care, characterized by products promoted by Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop like jade eggs and juice cleanses.

The diversity of "new religions" take adherents on a jaunty quest for meaning, purpose, and ritual. Internet and consumer capitalism have gotten into this post-Christian religious search which excludes an institutional base, creeds, and clergy. Three more options for seekers are what Burton calls the California Idealogy of Silicon Valley; the Progressive Social Justice Movement, and the Atavism of alt.Right culture.

These spiritual orientations offer lively opportunities to think about your view of what it means to be human, to be free, to reside in a hackable future, to think about utopianism, to probe the religious dimensions of extremist groups, and to contemplate the importance of modern justice movements.

It will be edifying to see what kinds of rituals, values, mystical excursions, and philosophies these devotees of "remixed" religions come up with, especially in the face of future environmental disasters, economic woes, more global pandemics, and the ongoing crises facing millions of homeless refugees.

After reading Burton's encyclopedic overview of seven new faiths in America, it comes as no surprise that she is critical of the self-oriented character of these paths and their swerve away from transcendence. What does she call for as an alternative? It is not something you would expect. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, she writes:

"Many of us call ourselves 'Weird Christians,' albeit partly in jest. What we have in common is that we see a return to old-school forms of worship as a way of escaping from the crisis of modernity and the liberalist-capitalist faith in individualism."

By a return to "old-school forms of worship," she means Eastern Orthodox piety and an affirmation of the Latin Mass.

That Old-Time Religion
Patrick T. Brown

[National Review, August 2020]

Without Johannes Gutenberg, Protestantism may never have gotten off the ground. And without Tim Berners-Lee and other Internet pioneers, the rising tide of religiously unaffiliated young adults would doubtless look very different.
Strange Rites, by Religion News Service columnist Tara Isabella Burton, offers a series of Instagram-filtered snapshots of what the search for meaning looks like in the age of curated consumption. It also provides an irresistible frame for understanding the quest for community in the age of YouTube influencers and fan-fiction forums.
Burton, who holds a doctorate from Oxford University and is a contributing editor of The American Interest, suggests that the religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” are better understood as the “Remixed,” because they mix and match elements of different practices to fit their individual preference or identity. All told, she estimates, “at least half of America” falls into the category of the “Remixed.” We can quibble with the estimate, as many in this camp self-describe as belonging to a conventional denomination, but American life is clearly moving in a more individualist, less institutional direction. Look at popular media, political leaders, brands, and institutions, she says. “We may not all be Remixed, but we all live in a Remixed nation.”
Strange Rites reads like an unauthorized sequel to Ross Douthat’s 2012 Bad Religion, which made the claim that America was becoming not a post-Christian nation but a heretical one. Almost a decade later, Burton proposes that our most national heresy is syncretism, a blend of ancient, faux-ancient, or contemporary practices to suit our needs—especially ones sold to us by corporations that recognize “spirituality sells.”
Borrowing from Émile Durkheim, the godfather of modern sociology, Burton understands “religion” as a set of rituals and beliefs that affirm participants’ identity as part of a group. Here she places fans at a football game or gamers simulcasting World of Warcraft matches, taking part in a collective ritual that binds them together. But, she notes, religion is more than a set of shared actions. It is also, in the words of the sociologist and theologian Peter Berger, “the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established.” Religion is not just worship but the anthropology or philosophy that makes sense of the world around you—to paraphrase that other great sociologist, Frank Sinatra, it’s “anything that gets you through the night.”
Millennials adrift at the “end of history,” Burton argues, use the infinite-swipe mentality of the Web to custom-build a sense of belonging and meaning while straddling different, often online, communities. Everything from a resurgence of interest in the occult to contemporary “wellness” practices routines to online communities built around certain sexual practices are tributes to the new gods of our secular age—or, as Douthat might put it, ways of gratifying the “God within” of ego or libido.
How seriously we should take rituals such as sage-burning, or hexing Brett Kavanaugh, remains an open question. Strange Rites is more essential in describing the way a particular kind of political praxis has become its own religious order.
A certain type of urbanite Millennial might start the day with a morning reflection over a social-media feed, commune with brethren over the all-you-can-eat-brunch table, perform acts of self-mortification in a SoulCycle studio, and avoid ritually impure foods (no GMOs!). Those practices might substitute for yesteryear’s Divine Office or daily scripture passage but cannot form the “sacred canopy” Berger pictures. For that, the “Remixed” need a sense of the transcendent, and the biggest and most powerful denomination today is the high church of progressivism.
Since Voegelin, conservatives have accused progressives of trying to immanentize the eschaton, but the quasi-theological fervor has never been felt so keenly on the left as in the modern social-justice movement. John McWhorter, the Columbia University linguist, may have been the first prominent commentator to identify the modern anti-racism movement’s religious characteristics, followed by Vox’s Matt Yglesias, New York magazine’s Andrew Sullivan, and others who have noted a nascent “Great Awokening.” Much contemporary rhetoric around global warming takes on a religious tone as well, replete with the original sin of the industrial revolution and carbon offsets as indulgences.
Burton’s contribution is to explore, with rigor and empathy, the roots of how the political became spiritual. She grounds the appeal of “social justice” in its narrative power, revealing to the “woke” the gnostic truths of how power and oppression order the world. This eschatological framework situates the adherent in a chain of being and orients him or her towards a particular goal. Our “Remixing” Millennial loft-dweller can now find communion at SoulCycle and redemption on the right side of history.
Fascinatingly, Burton finds the same desire for direction and transcendence on both the “self-care post-religious left” and the “atavist post-religious right.” (She also explores, with probably more seriousness than they merit, the transhumanist rationalists found in Silicon Valley—the all-in-one nutrition package Soylent will not be manna for many.) Adrift, but with newfound access to speakers and ideas once considered taboo, those on the post-Christian right are also formed by a type of identity politics, often rooted in misogyny or white supremacy. The parallels Burton draws between the alt-right and the social- justice Lleft are indelible [wrong word? I’m not sure I get it; do you mean they’re apt/striking?]— – evidence [also, what is the evidence? The parallels themselves?], she says, that tThese “most successful of our modern new religions provide a clear, if nontheistic, account of the meaningfulness of the world,” Burton says, and the parallels she draws between the alt-right and the social-justice Left are unforgettable. d.”
The success of these “religions” in forming new allegiances has shifted the fault lines of our debates as a nation. Battles in the culture wars used to be fought over religion and the family but have taken on an increasingly different character in the Internet age. Lapsing into the argot of the online, Burton reports, “Our culture wars now better resemble Gamergate—with its clash of SJWs [social-justice warriors] and proto-atavist nerd culture—than they do the debates of the 1980s and ’90s.”
At times, Burton sympathizes with the perspective of the “Remixed,” but shethat empathy does not prevent her from seeing also sees through their self-delusion. The creams, classes, and self-care of “wellness culture” are gently skewered as “equal parts Ayn Rand and John Calvin.” The commerce of virtue signaling, from LGBTQ-themed soda cans to #MeToo-branded razors, demonstrates how “today’s new religions interface with the brands that so powerfully promote, reify, and profit off them.” The book’s avatar for the book’s message may well be one of her interviewees, a willing participant what is described as in what is described as a “24-7 master-slave relationship,” who tells Burton, “If we had a god, that god would be consent.”
Burton’s blend of an academic’s care and a journalist’s eye for suggestive detail makes Strange Rites an easy book to recommend. One relatively weak point is its limited scope. The narrative’s prime movers tend to be “creative class” types who came of age with Harry Potter and balance their time between an upwardly-mobile aspirational career and a Tinder account. There is not much about the spiritual practices of young adults outside urban cores. Religion, derided since Marx as the “opiate of the masses,” seems less likely to be replaced in the lives of the deinstitutionalized working class by ersatz religions such as dominant-submissive relationships than by actual opiates.
In a recent report, American Enterprise Institute scholar Lyman Stone highlighted that “religious affiliation has never before fallen as it is falling today.” But this shift, he and other scholars have notedfound, is not being primarily driven by a mass falling-away from faith, but by generational replacement, especially as children raised in weakly religious households come of age. The “Remixed” grew up with religion as something “‘nice to have’ teaching ‘good values’ or solidifying family bonds—[not] necessarily a core part of their meaning or purpose,” Burton saysnotes. For traditional religious denominations, a boldA restatement of what makes traditional religious denominations their’ conception of human anthropology different from that of the secular mainstream is long-overdue. Churches will need to recognize that their former advantage in fulfilling individuals’ need for meaning and meeting is being competed away not just by the Internet, but by the individualistic, hyper-customizable orientation towards the world that it enables. And they will need to adjust.
Mass-produced texts democratized access to first the words of God, then to those of man, enabling theological and political upheaval. Automobiles, arguably, did as much for the sexual revolution as any tract by Margaret Sanger. And chat rooms, message boards, and blogs doubtless contributed to our 21st-century great awakening. “The proliferation of Internet creative culture and consumer capitalism have rendered us all simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity,” Burton writes.
Strange Rites will find a ready audience among those who have recently revised down their cheers for capitalism from two to one. A certain type of reader will come away from Burton’s work blaming the Internet for accelerating the breakdown in traditional institutional religion. Still others will credit it for the rise of Black Lives Matter or the alt-right. But a more subversive interpretation might see the Internet as accelerating, but not causing, the working out of homogenized consumerism in the way we interact with the divine and with each other. The “strange rites” she refers to may well be our suspicion of unchosen obligation and the fetishization of autonomy that had taken root before the first message board went online. The fault may be not in our social-media platforms, but in ourselves.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from “Strange Rites.” Author Tara Isabella Burton presents the spiritual and religious traditions alive in America today, represented through the words and actions of the followers and supporters. Other groups are included, ranging from the political to the cultish. Many of these I was aware of, some I had only a fleeting knowledge, and I gained a ton of knowledge on all the different opportunities for people to follow. I found it very interesting that the history of each way of thinking was explained and examined, providing a basis for the beginning of each movement.

While I had experienced examples of the “spiritual but not religious” feelings people exhibit, I had never named it as Ms. Burton has – Remixed. In the quest for spiritual satisfaction and enlightenment, folks mix and match from different religions, theologies, and interests (including politics) to come up with what works for them. The result makes for an intriguing subject, one that never allowed my interest to flag throughout the entire book.

This is also due to the author’s talented use of words, coupled with extensive research (note the large bibliography in the back of the book). Ms. Burton’s chapters discuss subjects like religion, magic and witchcraft, the wellness culture, social justice, and the drive for perfectionism (which also encompasses such topics as sexual appetite). Most of her examples are culled from the words of followers, who are as diverse as one might expect. Although one can ascertain a reasonable guess on the author’s thoughts, allowing each group to present their philosophy through the spoken and written words of those who are part of each movement helps the book maintain an objective feel. Highly recommended. Five stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Perseus Books for a complimentary electronic copy of this title.

First of all, I loved Burton's novel SOCIAL CREATURE, and had forgotten that this was the same author. Major props for such skillful work in multiple genres. As far as this book goes, it's a really interesting dive into the way we have recreated religious "rites" and traditions in this new, less religious world. There's a lot of great research here, and some intriguing stories, and although it wasn't necessarily propulsive, it's a great read for those, like me, who are interested in modern "rites."

I initially was interested in this book because I was a huge fan of Tara Isabella Burton's first book "Social Creature." This book is very different. First of all, it's non-fiction, and it takes on a much less propulsive writing style. I found it a very interesting overview of the "tribes" we divide ourselves into today although I can't say I learned that much that I didn't already know - except for the fact that the Speak No More crew holds awesome parties. I am giving this book 3 stars for its content and engaging writing.

I have something of an interest in post-Internet nonfiction, such as Because Internet and Trick Mirror, and Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites piqued my interest as a title befitting that theme. While at times I found the author's writing style cumbersome to parse and prone to overkill, it was overall an educational read with perceptive insight.

First and foremost, the book is excellent about giving the numbers. Pew Research and other survey results abound summarizing how the US is becoming less institutionally religiously affiliated, and a big part of the take-home message is that it's primarily not accelerating atheism. Most of the Nones, or as Burton calls them the Remixed, ultimately believe in some kind of spiritual presence or transcendence, even if it's not based on easily nameable deity or faith. As an atheist, this book helped me gain some prospective why labels like "spiritual but not religious" are appealing to the current generation, when I myself find it a bit of a puzzling concept.

I also appreciated the chapter that recapped religious history in America, pointing to example of religious remixing that have been going on since the earliest days of the country's European colonization. For many years, people have been trying to turn inward, and make religion more individual, more intuitional. It's a process that resonates with Millennials, who are accustomed to the self taking center stage: selecting what they want to see on their social feeds and curating their digital selves according to their liking.

Thorough the bulk of the book, Burton goes on to discuss how things like fandom, wellness culture, the occult, sexual non-monogamy, social justice, or even atavism are our modern forms of remixing. Though not traditionally thought of as religious, they provide individuals with meaning, purpose, and a sense of community, i.e. the contexts religion has historically satisfied. Whether or not you agree if you want to call these things religions is largely immaterial. The book is diving into what younger generations are using to fill the void that has been left in the demise of traditional religion. This gives the book very real relevance, regardless of which entries we'd consider religion and which we perhaps would not.

My less positive feelings toward the book stem from the writing author's writing style. She's very prone to using long dashes, perhaps more than any book I've ever read. Many sentences are very long and I find it difficult to parse all the way through. For example, "But, at the same time, the refractory nature of these new institutional religions -- each one, at its core, a religion of the self -- risks creating an increasingly balkanized American culture: one in which our desire for personal authenticity and experiential fulfillment takes precedent over our willingness to build coherent ideological systems and functional institutions." I also thought some of the chapters we a little too long, with enough examples to feel like overkill. In particular, the fandom and social justice chapters seemed to beat the point to death.

Overall, I thought Strange Rites was worth the read, even if I found the sentences and chapters a bit long-winded. It's an ever-relevant topic and at the end of the day, you will go home remembering a swarth of new age Remixed religion insight.