Play, narrative and the creation of religion: Extending the theoretical base of ‘invented religions’

Abstract

What may be termed ‘invented religions’, self-consciously fictive movements that emerge from alternative subcultures in the West from the 1950s to the present include Discordianism, the Church of all Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, Jediism and Matrixism. This study employs the model of origin and development of religion from Bellah [Bellah, Robert N. 2011. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press], focusing particularly on the centrality of play, to establish three crucial propositions. The first of these is that play, narrative and experiences of an order other than the quotidian are central to the emergence and maintenance of religion. The second is that different types of social organisation and political organisations will foster different types of religion. Bellah argues that these are related to the four modes of human developmental psychology, characterised as unitive, enactive, symbolic and conceptual. This claim is significant, because it links recent cognitive models of the origin and development of religion to older social constructionist theories. Third, it is argued that invented religions are important because they render transparent the process of the origin and formation of religions from play and narrative. It is concluded that invented religions are a particular cultural form of the human impulse to religion, appropriate to the twenty-first century West.

Keywords::

• play
• narrative
• social constructionism
• invented religions
• Robert N. Bellah

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to my research assistants, Zoe Alderton and Venetia Robertson, who assisted me with library searches and note-taking for this paper, and to Don Barrett, whose support has contributed in no small way to my research over the years.

Notes

^1. It is acknowledged that the position that all religions are ‘invented’, that there are reasons to accept that traditional religions such as Christianity and Buddhism grew from fictions that were promulgated either by charismatic leaders or by their followers, exists and has a certain validity (Lewis and Hammer 2007). However, this study argues that the case of ‘invented religions’ from the 1950s to the present is both particular and overt, and is quite distinct from the ways in which essentially fictional narratives became reified in ‘old’ religions. The teachings of invented religions are advertised as fictional from the start, are accepted as fictional by converts and remain identifiable as fictions, whereas the teachings of traditional religions were presented as true and received as true by converts. Members of invented religions regard the fictional nature of their religion's doctrines as a non-issue, whereas for many ‘old’ religions (particularly the monotheistic traditions) the propositional truth of doctrines remains a near-constant preoccupation.

^2. This is a contentious point, the validity of which depends upon certain factors. If converts to invented religions are contrasted with mainstream Christians in the recent past (e.g. until approximately 1980), the contention holds. However, over the three decades since 1980, the general culture of the West has moved decisively towards a flexible, pragmatic and eclectic approach to the self and identity-construction, which includes religion. Thus, many twenty-first century Christians now adopt an approach that looks very like that of adherents of invented religions, in that they pick and choose what is core and what is not from the store of doctrines and practices. Martin Stringer (2008), while studying lay urban Christians, especially women, observed many unorthodox beliefs and non-traditional practices which are evidence of such flexibility in contemporary manifestations of ‘old’ religions.