America, land of unbelieving believers

Burton cites Harry Potter as a paradigmatic example of this “collective effervescence.” Children born to Potter fans are being christened Albus and Hermione in honor of Rowling’s characters; their Hogwarts-tattoo-sleeved parents derive moral teachings, ethical notions, and a larger message from the books, which amount to a “foundational text” for their lives—just as scripture may have been to their own parents. This quasi-religious devotion to the imaginative universe of Harry Potter helps explain the otherwise unaccountable ferocity of the backlash to J.K. Rowling: Her controversial public statements about trans women have elicited something akin to a crisis of faith among devotees who may have first learned about the importance of inclusion and acceptance in the Potter novels. Fans of the fantasy series are not unique in the degree to which they give themselves over to their enthusiasm. Yale religion scholar Kathryn Lofton has long argued that the obsessive fervor generated by celebrities like Oprah, Britney Spears, and BTS has elements of organization and function that appear far more similar to those of religious communities than of more pedestrian fandoms.

But these tendencies offer a brief glimpse of a much larger emerging religious landscape. Thanks to TikTok, Instagram, and the pandemic that kept everyone inside and on their phones, astrology has made a significant apparent comeback with Millennials and Zoomers. Promising a more authentic and spiritually attuned feminism, Wicca and Neopaganism have grown “from 134,000 [adherents] in 2001 to nearly 2 million [in 2021].” Young men, some of them nervous about any kind of feminism, have elevated Canadian psychologist and self-help writer Jordan Peterson to the status of a mystical guru. There is the “cult of Peloton,” known for its collective affirmations and liturgical calls to fitness. Followers of QAnon could be described as “initiates” because of the relationship they develop to an esoteric body of beliefs. The Disney community treats a visit to Disney World as a secular pilgrimage. And the dominant contemporary form of progressive social consciousness—“wokeness,” as critics call it—has features that resemble Burton’s notion of “remixed religion.” From calls to atone for unearned privilege (original sin, if you squint), to chants and kneeling as forms of protest, to the targeting of dissenting opinions for conveying heretical forms of thought, the parallels with elements of Christian history, theology, and practice are suggestive. Columbia University linguist John McWhorter is a well-known proponent of this view, arguing that an “anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”