Strange Rites Quotes

“Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences. They demand to rewrite their own scripts about how the universe, and human beings, operate. Shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative Internet and consumer capitalism, today’s Remixed don’t want to receive doctrine, to assent automatically to a creed. They want to choose—and, more often than not, purchase—the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“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 about God or the universe or the Way Things Are, but that still seeks—in various and varying ways—to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has: meaning, purpose, community, ritual.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“This book is, in large part, about charlatans. It’s about capitalism and corporations and the new, cutthroat Silicon Valley of spirituality. It’s about people who want to sell us meaning, brand our purpose, custom-produce community, tailor-make rituals, and commodify our very humanity. It’s about how the Internet and consumer capitalism alike have produced experientially satiating substitutes—many, though not all of them, poor—for well-developed ethical, moral, and metaphysical systems. It’s about the denatured selfishness of self-care, and the way in which “call-out culture,” at its worst,”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences. They demand to rewrite their own scripts about how the universe, and human beings, operate. Shaped by the twin forces of a creative-communicative Internet and consumer capitalism, today’s Remixed don’t want to receive doctrine, to assent automatically to a creed. They want to choose—and, more often than not, purchase—the spiritual path that feels more authentic, more meaningful, to them. 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.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“If something bad happens to you, it’s your fault. Positivity, within this paradigm, becomes both a blessing and a curse.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“When we are all our own high priests, who is willing to kneel?”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“Self-care has become a marketing slogan, one designed to lend legitimacy to behavior that might, in other moral systems, be considered merely selfish.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“When it comes to Remixed religion, at least, we all come out from under Severus Snape's robes.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“Unlike wellness or witchcraft, social justice culture has it all. It’s capable of taking American intuitionalism and giving it a clear shape, a clear theology. It provides a compelling nontheistic vision of why the world is the way it is, locating original sin in the structures of society itself and liberation in self-examination and solidarity. It provides a clear-cut enemy: Donald Trump, and the scores of straight white men like him who have benefited from a corrupted status quo. It provides a sense of purpose: the call to self-love (for the marginalized) and to self-denial (for the unduly privileged). It provides a framework for legitimizing emotion, rather than oppressive rationality, as the source of moral knowledge; the discourse of lived experience and embodied identity reaffirm the importance of subjectivity. In the absence of transcendent notions of the soul, or of a universal, knowable truth, or of an objective foundation of being, social justice provides a coherent framework about why and how our personal experiences are authoritative. And it has succeeded in galvanizing a moral community—a church—through its ideology and its rituals of purgation and renewal. If social justice is indeed America’s new civil religion—or, at least, one of them—it comes by that claim fairly. In”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“At first glance, the story both Falwell and Harris tell seems like a plausible one. America is getting less religious. America’s youth—its future—are more irreligious still. The gays and the abortionists and the ACLU have won. The secularists have emerged, victorious, from the culture wars and salted the earth behind them. We’re all Nones now. Or, at least, eighty-one million of us are.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“Falwell and Harris agreed on almost nothing when it came to religion or politics. But on this point, at least, they were in accord. The country we’re living in now—as opposed to the America of sixty or a hundred or three hundred years ago—is secular, and only getting more so.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“Speaking on the Christian talk show The 700 Club, Falwell told interviewer Pat Robertson that America was a godless nation. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this,” Falwell said, speaking of the attacks, “because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortions, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘You helped this happen.’”1 Five years later, in a 2006 interview with Wired magazine, author Sam Harris—widely known as one of the Four Horsemen of the New”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“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.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

“It’s the story of how more and more Americans—and particularly how more and more millennials—envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions. The Remixed hunger for the same things human beings have always longed for: a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life. But they’re doing it differently.”
― Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World