Invented Religions

The era around the beginning of the third millennium has been marked by a significant decrease in adherence to institutionalized religions, and a growth in New Religious Movements (NRMs) and individualized forms of spirituality, often defined by both practitioners and scholars in contrast to organized religion. Among the more interesting and least studied NRMs are what Carole M. Cusack calls “invented religions.” These are, by her definition, religions that openly present themselves as products of human creativity and imagination, embracing their status as inventions or even jokes and refusing any strategies of authentication or legitimation such as narratives of divine revelation. In this book Cusack examines six invented religions, all of which arose in the second half of the twentieth century or in the first decade of the twenty-first. They include Discordianism, loosely dedicated to the worship of the goddess of chaos, Eris; the Church of All Worlds (CAW), based on the fictitious religion described by science fiction author Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); the Church of the SubGenius (COSG), seemingly a parody of the Church of Scientology and numerous other religions; Jediism and Matrixism, each a recreation of religions portrayed in popular films; and the lighthearted Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also known as Pastafarianism. In all six cases, literature, particularly the genre of science fiction, played a key role in the development of the religion's foundation narratives and key tenets. Cusack is specifically interested in the narratives told by these movements; she contends that fictional stories are no less effective at inspiring religious sentiment than those presented as objectively true.

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