Strange Rites

In Strange Rites Tara Burton sets out to tell “the story of the religious sensibility of a whole generation. It’s the story not just of the religious “Nones,” but of an even broader category: those who aren’t rejecting religion, but rather remixing it. 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.” 

Burton does a fabulous job, but I’m irritated at once by this way of putting it. We’re not remixers because we want to be. At least I’m not. We’re remixers because we have to be, because we’ve been made painfully aware that we’re already remixing, “negotiating” with our traditions, and we’re aware (unless we’re real dullards) of dozens of vibrant competing traditions: and we can’t legitimately disavow responsibility for our religious selections. We’ve been backed into remixing. We have no choice.

I am by temperament loyalist and traditionalist. I want to sink into a tradition, and be trained and corrected by it. It’s just not a course that’s available to me. We’re in an age like the age of St Augustine, a maelstrom of competing faiths, and an upwelling of heresies. Whether we like it or not, we're pitched into creating the patristics of the future. What can we do but lean into it?