Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

Back in 2007, 15 percent of Americans called themselves religiously unaffiliated, meaning that they didn’t consider themselves to be members of any traditional organized religion. By 2012, that number had risen to 20 percent, and to 30 percent when it came to adults under thirty.3 Now, those numbers are higher still. About a quarter of American adu

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

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

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.

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.

One fan created his own special coin to “tip” the bellhop who escorts guests from the bar into the show proper. Another developed his own costumed character—a lumberjack named Clyde—and took to haunting the McKittrick’s (non-ticketed) rooftop garden bar while studying for his university exams, delighting in the fact that most people never quite fig

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.

Much of the responsibility for that shift belongs to institutions themselves. Traditional religions, traditional political hierarchies, and traditional understandings of society have been unwilling or unable to offer compellingly meaningful accounts of the world, provide their members with purpose, foster sustainable communities, or put forth evoca