By Andrew D. Thrasher

(Click Here to Read Part 1)

Carole M. Cusack and Adam Possamai are known for coining the phrases invented religion and hyperreal religion, respectively. While both terms are referring to how popular culture helps to inform and shape contemporary religions, the first refers primarily to how religions are invented based on a fascination and love for popular culture, that in turn informs the creation of religious beliefs and practices. The second also does this, but with a theoretical nuance that pays due to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality—where reality is no longer actual, but simulated and virtual. Possamai’s adoption of Baudrillard’s language of hyperreality when applied to religion gives account to how contemporary religions are not only simulated beliefs and practices based on popular culture and the media, but poses that these new religions are “more real” than actual religions.

The question of hyperreal or invented religions primarily deals with certain sources on and by which religions are created—popular culture. What popular culture mediates and recites to us are a plethora of images that rescript and resource traditional religions in ways that re-enchants a world where participation in traditional religions is in decline. But when we come to fantastic subcreations, what popular culture does is create alternative worlds where there may not only be imagined religions, but certainly metaphysical or magical systems that imply a coherence to this alternate world and how it makes sense of “enchantment” (referring to supernatural beings, gods, the sacred, and the practices and beliefs tied to this spiritual reality). But more importantly these religious or spiritual ideas within fantasy find their resourcement in traditional real-world, actual religions, while they may also be imaginatively recreated, rescripted, and synthesized to fit the coherence of these subcreated worlds. Furthermore, how these alternate world resource, rescript, and synthesize traditional real-world religions becomes a source for the creation of hyperreal or invented religions in the real-world.

That is, there is a dialogical process in the creation of hyperreal religions from fantasy: it starts first with the subcreator’s exposure to or belief in traditional religions or metaphysical ideas (actual, real-world religions). Then the subcreator creates a fantastic world informed by real-world religions, among other sources—hence the religion found in the subcreation. Finally, based on consumption of the subcreation by its consumers and its religious resourcement and rescription of traditional religions, the subcreated religion becomes a (pop cultural) source for invented or hyperreal religions in the real-world. As such the logic goes as follows: real-world religion or religious influences of the subcreatoràsubcreated religion, metaphysics, magic, and spiritualityàhyperreal or invented religions. Or again, actual real-world religionàsubcreated religionàinvented or hyperreal religion.

When it comes to the volume I co-edited, Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination, the contributors begin to explore and examine how certain subcreators (Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, Pratchett, Jordan and Eddings, Sanderson and Scott Card) resource actual real-world religions into their subcreation, often offering critical analyses of how the subcreator’s religion shapes and influences—is resourced in and rescripted by—the alternative world of their subcreations. As such, the practice of this volume is primarily how religion is in popular culture. Uniquely however, the chapter by Scott Donahue-Martens begins to explore how popular culture, specifically the fantastic table-top game Dungeons and Dragons, may become a foil to the articulation of real-world believing through role playing—implying how Dungeons and Dragons may become a space for the articulation of religious, spiritual, or ethical sensibilities. Does this lead to invented or hyperreal religion? I think it can, but it does not necessarily have to. Indeed, for it to do so—and this is not where Donahue-Martens goes—Dungeons and Dragons must become a source on and by which a religion is invented. This can happen, but I leave his forthcoming volume on Theology and Dungeons and Dragons to potentially pursue it.

So, does fantasy help shape hyperreal or invented religions? It can—and it has. There are several volumes by Carole Cusack, Adam Possamai, Michael Jindra, and Emily MvAvan that at attribute to how Tolkien, Star Trek, and other instances of fantastic imagination have become sources for hyperreal or invented religions. But underlying the phenomena of hyperreal or invented religions are also several intellectual currents that have shaped the contemporary late modern imaginary: the post-Christian turn in theology and culture, the postsecular emphasis on the role re-enchantment plays among secularization discourses, and how, underlying all of these, the postmodern aestheticization and deferral of truth is combined with the fragmentation and explosion of reactive responses and proactive forces that shape our contemporary culture and reality. It is to these three “Posts” that I will turn next time.

Part 3 Forthcoming…

Andrew D. Thrasher teaches religious studies at George Mason University and in the Virginia Community College System.