Monday 19 February 2024

New Publication: "The New Witches of the West: Tradition, Liberation, and Power"

I just wanted to post a quick update to alert readers to my latest publication, The New Witches of the West: Tradition, Liberation, and Power. This short academic book is part of Cambridge University Press’ Elements in New Religious Movements series, edited by scholar Rebecca Moore, who kindly invited me to contribute. The book discusses why practitioners of various different new religions active in modern Western societies have embraced the witch as a self-identity, drawing on examples including Wicca, ‘traditional witchcraft’, LaVeyan Satanism, and African diasporic traditions like Hoodoo. To my knowledge, this is the first monograph-length academic study to really deal with these varied forms of modern religious witchcraft in tandem.

The book is available as a free download from the publisher’s website until 23rd February 2024 (here). Print copies, both in paperback and hardback, should also be available soon.



Tuesday 9 January 2024

Pagans, Dressed Trees, and the Green Man: My 2022 and 2023 Roundup

Following on from my round-ups of 2019 and 2020–21, it’s probably time to share a brief overview of what I’ve been up to in 2022 and 2023. My publication output has been a little reduced compared with previous years, largely because I’ve been focusing primarily on several larger, book-length studies that will hopefully see the light of day in a few years time, but I have still tried to keep up with publications for both academic and general audiences.

Probably my most prominent publication of 2023 has been Pagans: The Visual Culture of Pagan Myths, Legends and Rituals, a richly-illustrated work published as part of Thames and Hudson’s ongoing series on different religious traditions. As well as the original English language edition, there are also translations available in French, Spanish, and Korean, with a Japanese translation in the works. This was the first time that I had written a book for a general audience, and while doing so has its challenges (it is a more collaborative process than academic writing, for instance), I really hope that Pagans finds a welcome readership. Certainly, reviewers have tended to like it.

I’ve also had a few academic publications out. My abiding interest in the Green Man resulted in an article in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture – “A New God for a New Paganism: The Green Man in the Modern Pagan Milieu.” There has been a growing interest in the Green Man figure in recent years, but I think few people realise the extent to which the character’s promotion has been interwoven with modern Pagan subcultures. My interest in human interactions with plant life can also be seen in a recent book chapter, “Bedecked in Ribbons and Bows: Dressed Trees as Markers of Heritage, Hope, and Faith in the Landscapes of Southern England.” This has been published as part of Rachael Ironside and Jack Hunter’s edited volume Folklore, People and Place: International Perspectives on Tourism and Tradition in Storied Places. While Routledge hardcovers certainly aren’t cheap, we can hope for a paperback edition at some point in future.

Again writing for a more general audience, I was invited to produce a series of articles for Encyclopædia Britannica, helping them to update their coverage of culturally alternative religions. To that end, my contributions have included new articles on Paganism, Modern Paganism, Wicca, Heathenry, and Satanism, with several additional entries also being due in the coming months. In addition, I have continued working with the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP), not only as their Lead Director for interviews, but also in providing an in-depth entry on the prolific New Age author (and subsequent Evangelical convert) Doreen Virtue, a figure who has been surprisingly overlooked by previous academic writing.

Of course, I have also continued my book reviewing, doing so for journals including FolkloreNova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, and the American Academy of Religion’s Reading Religion website. Topics covered in these reviews include the esoteric artist Pamela Colman Smith, the boggart lore of northern England, and the place of psychic science in American history.

Tuesday 21 November 2023

An Interview with Associate Professor Per Faxneld

Last year, one of the scholars of religion that I interviewed was Joseph P. Laycock, whose work has included a study of the Temple of Satan, a group founded in the United States in 2012. Although the Temple have gained considerable attention for their socio-political stunts over the past decade, Satanism itself has a far older and more complex history. To learn a little more about it, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the world’s foremost specialists on the topic, Dr Per Faxneld, currently an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at Södertörn University in Stockholm. We talk about his book Satanic Feminism, his interest in Japanese religion, and the relationship between esotericism, the arts, and cinema.


[EDW] Your academic research has predominantly dealt with esotericism and new and culturally alternative religions, with a particular focus on Satanism. Were these subjects that interested you prior to entering academia, or rather something that you developed an interest in while in the university system?

[PF] The initial plan for my BA thesis in History of Religions back in 1999 was actually to write about Shintō. I took Japanese – but gave up after half a term as I didn’t have the tenacity needed to tackle the kanji. At a loss for ideas, I then reverted to the topic I had written an earlier undergraduate thesis about, namely esotericism. However, at this time, in the late 1990s, I was not yet aware of “esotericism studies” as a field in its own right and figured what I was doing belonged to new religious movement (NRM) studies. When NRM studies later on sort of fizzled out and esotericism became the next big thing as I began my MA, my topic proved quite timely (I still think NRMs is a fascinating and important field, though). Esotericism is something I have always been captivated by. As a kid growing up in the 80s and early 90s, esotericism was present in all the things I liked best: metal, goth, and industrial music, Warhammer, role-playing games like Call of Cthulhu, comic books by Alan Moore, horror films. I also happened to have a paternal grandmother who was a co-mason and Rosicrucian (AMORC), and for my tenth birthday she gave me a tarot deck. That certainly also helped steer me in this direction.


[EDW] The work for which you are best known is Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture, a monograph first published in Sweden in 2014 as your doctoral thesis. It has since been republished by Oxford University Press as part of their ‘Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism’ series. Could you tell us more about what this “Satanic feminism” is and what led you to undertake this significant project?

[PF] It was quite simple, really: reading up on the pre-history of modern Satanism, as well as contemporary manifestations of it, I caught sight of a prominent feminist strand in both – that had not really been discussed by scholars before. I took the idea to the head of the History of Religions department at Stockholm University, the Buddhologist Per-Arne Berglie, and he said “Sure, go ahead, write a doctoral thesis about it” (an easy thing for him to say, as the department did not have to offer salaried PhD positions back in those days!). And the rest is history. Well, actually it was not intended to be primarily about history: as originally proposed, the monograph would be one third historical background and two thirds ethnography on contemporary Satanic groups. I did two rounds of fieldwork among Satanists on the US East Coast, but after a while it became clear to me that the historical material was so rich, and so huge, that it demanded being the sole focus of the study. Indeed, the first published version of the thesis ran to 724 pages, and then I had cut out 300 pages of discussion of additional source texts. I dare not think what a monster of a book it would have become if the contemporary stuff had also been included. Some of the fieldwork and analysis of present-day texts made it into my 2013 International Journal for the Study of New Religions article “Intuitive, Receptive, Dark: Negotiations of Femininity in the Contemporary Satanic and Left-hand Path milieu”.

Satanic feminism arose as a response to bigoted, male chauvinist use of Christian myth. According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat the forbidden fruit and thus responsible for all of humanity's subsequent miseries. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout Christian history and has been used to legitimize the subordination of wives and daughters. In the nineteenth century, rebellious females therefore performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a tyrannical patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. Such “Satanic feminism” was expressed in a wide variety of nineteenth-century literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artifacts of consumer culture like jewellery. I investigated how colourful figures like the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gender-bending Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky, author Aino Kallas, actress Sarah Bernhardt, anti-clerical witch enthusiast Matilda Joslyn Gage, decadent marchioness Luisa Casati, and the Luciferian lesbian poetess Renée Vivien all embraced Satan as an empowering symbol, and had the most wonderful time immersing myself in turn-of-the-century culture (an era I have been obsessed with since I read Sherlock Holmes and Bram Stoker’s Dracula at age eight).

By exploring the connections between esotericism, literature, art, and the political realm, I attempted to shed new light on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking. What I did not expect was the impact the book would have on contemporary Satanic groups (for example, it ended up on official Satanic Temple reading lists) and, even more surprising, how conservative Christians across the world (for example in Italy, Australia, and the US) would employ it as “proof” that feminism is the Devil’s creation. In fact, the first to order the book from the Swedish publisher was the Vatican Library (they even wanted two copies!). The fact that Satanists, feminists, and conservatives have all found the book so useful quite neatly illustrates the theoretical points I make in it about the malleability of texts. Happily, academic colleagues have also appreciated it, and it received rave reviews in journals like History of Religions, Nova Religio, Aries, Reading Religion, Comparative Literature Studies, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Feministiskt perspektiv, and Tidsskrift før kjønnsforskning (as well as being awarded The Donner Institute Research Prize).



[EDW] Satanic Feminism deals heavily in literature, looking at works like Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. In the book you make an important point about how literature has value for those studying the history of religion. Could you tell us more about this argument? How does the approach to literature that you take differ from the perspective adopted by literature scholars?

[PF] The basic argument is that literature powerfully shapes life worlds, creates shifts in public discourse (or reproduces it), and that the representation (and, in this case, subversion) of religion in literature is therefore of key importance to the historical study of religions.

I’m not sure my approach is necessarily that different from what scholars of literature do – it’s a vast academic field, with a multitude of methodological schools of thought. One thing, perhaps, is that I am quite interested in biographical details regarding authors, but not, I should emphasize, as some sort of corrective or sole determinant when it comes to interpreting texts. Rather, this dimension is interesting to help understand why certain themes and sources became popular to use (often linked to social class and gender) and as a para-textual determinant of the reception of texts – the public persona of the author often being of significance to how readers understood their works. This, I suppose, differs from the “death of the author” notion embraced by some literature scholars, where the text itself is the sole focus, but there are also many whose methods are much like mine.


[EDW] Your work in Satanic Feminism focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I wondered if you had thoughts on these discourses of Satanic feminism as they have developed since that time? Do popular culture portrayals, such as the recent Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (with its clear feminist messaging in its portrayal of Satanic witches), indicate a growing mainstreaming of these discourses?

[PF] I have to admit I haven’t watched Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (the trailer did not appeal to me much), though I must do so sooner or later for professional reasons. Certainly, such pop culture portrayals indicate a growing mainstreaming of what we can call Satanic feminism. Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The VVitch is another example. Well, at least many viewers have understood it as an empowering depiction of devil-worshipping witches, though it could arguably also be read as an example of demonized feminism or at least a very traditional riff on witchcraft tropes – which is fine, as it’s meant to be entertainment or a work of art, not a political pamphlet that you need to agree with (many of the best horror films have horrible politics).


[EDW] You have also played an important role in raising academic awareness of some of the earliest self-described Satanists, namely Stanisław Przybyszewski and Ben Kadosh. How did you come across these figures and what do you see as their significance in the broader history of Satanism?

[PF] I found both of them when I wrote my BA thesis back in 2001–2002. The topic of the thesis was Satanism prior to the establishing of the Church of Satan in 1966, and I dug pretty deep and hard to find examples of actual, self-designated earlier Satanists. Przybyszewski, Kadosh, Herbert Sloane, Maria de Naglowska, and Fraternitas Saturni (the latter two, however, with come caveats) were what I came up with. Them, and the pro-Satanic tendencies present in certain texts by Eliphas Lévi and H.P. Blavatsky. Plus, of course, numerous literary and socialist figures employing Satan as a positive symbol of rebellion. The BA thesis was then expanded into my first published monograph, Mörkrets apostlar (“Apostles of Darkness”) in 2006, subsequently accepted as my MA thesis. Once I started my PhD in 2007, I looked further into these figures, and wrote academic articles and book chapters about some of them.

Their significance lies in that figures like Anton LaVey or Michael Aquino should be understood as part of a longer tradition of lauding Satan, that is not merely literary in nature. Pre-LaVeyan Satanism is interesting as a sort of dark, sinister underbelly of more mainstream forms of esoteric thought, and the fact that it had this subaltern position speaks volumes about the broader historical esoteric milieu. It is also thought-provoking with the complex and ambiguous pro-Satanic ideas nested in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888). Though of marginal importance to Theosophy at large, they arguably laid the ground for much of the esoteric Satanism to follow.


[EDW] With Jesper Aa. Petersen, you are the co-editor of the 2013 edited volume The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity. How did that project come to fruition? Did it emerge from an existing network of scholars engaged in researching Satanism?

[PF] That book resulted directly from the first SatCon, an academic conference on Satanism organized by me and Jesper and Asbjørn Dyrendal in Trondheim, Norway in 2010 (I think it was). One of the more memorable things about that conference, aside from the many interesting papers and discussions, was the soft ice machine the Norwegians had leased – meaning all these experts in diabolical matters stood slurping away on ice cream cones during the coffee breaks. Suitably gluttonous, I suppose. You could say an international network of scholars working on the topic was properly established at that very conference. We did a second SatCon a few years later in Stockholm, co-organized by me and Kennet Granholm (who has since sadly left academia), and there is occasional talk of a third one any year now…


[EDW] Has your work attracted much interest from contemporary Satanic groups, and/or practitioners of other esoteric currents? If so, what has that response been?

[PF] It has, and with very few exceptions the reactions have been positive. As mentioned, some groups have even added my work to their official reading lists. I think it is important for scholars of religion to have a cordial and respectful relationship with groups they study, though this should of course not keep us from deconstructing insider historiographies (Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon being a perfect example of how this should be done) or dissecting power dynamics within the religious field.


[EDW] You are also interested in the relationship between art and esotericism, having for instance published an article on that topic in Nova Religio. This intersection is something that a growing number of scholars, such as Amy Hale, have delved into over the past decade or so. What do you see as the importance of this avenue of research?

[PF] In one way, art can function like literature, shaping life worlds and creating shifts in public discourse (or reproducing it) on religion and esotericism, and so on. Discussions about esoteric art, for example in the art criticism of a period, also often have much to tell us about contemporary society. So, there is that sociological dimension to why the topic is interesting. Careful analysis of the esoteric context for works of art will also facilitate a deeper understanding of art history, for example the by now well-known role of Theosophy in the development of abstract art. Large chunks of modern art history are really impossible to comprehend correctly without a basic grasp of esotericism. It is furthermore a vital key to unlocking deeper layers of meaning and resonances in the work of individual artists. I have just finalized an article on the surrealist Leonora Carrington, who I think is a good example of how we can engage more fully with an artistic production via esotericism. She is also paradigmatic for how it is nonetheless seldom possible to lock down a single meaning using esotericism as some sort of matrix for interpretation.


[EDW] Many of your early writings, largely in Swedish, focus on cinema. Is the intersection between esotericism and cinema an ongoing interest of yours?

[PF] It is indeed. I took three terms of cinema studies, plus a summer course on Japanese cinema, and film remains one of my great passions – I spend a lot of time at the Cinematheque in Stockholm! My mother also had a background in cinema studies, so I had something of a cinephile upbringing. Even though I enjoy many different genres, horror is close to my heart and also the genre where my academic expertise in esotericism is most useful for doing analysis.

The early publications you refer to deal with topics like the cultural history of zombie films, mummy films and Egyptomania, Japanese horror films, and German silent horror films. I have recently written pieces on occult dimensions of Nosferatu (1922, my all-time favourite film and a work I constantly find myself returning to in my writing), the bizarre “documentary” Häxan (1922), and personifications of death in cinema. Coming up is also an overview chapter on esotericism and cinema that I’m co-writing with my good friend Francisco Santos Silva. This spring, a cinema in Stockholm invited me to select a series of classic early horror films and I then gave talks on their religious dimensions before the screenings – great fun, with very enthusiastic audiences.


[EDW] From 2015 to 2017 you also worked on a post-doctoral project focusing on the character of Lilith, and her transition from Jewish lore into Christian and post-Christian contexts. Could you tell us more about this particular project?

[PF] The Lilith monograph, a short one compared to for example Satanic Feminism, has been 60% finished since back in 2017. The reason I did not wrap it up at that time as planned was that in the middle of my post-doc my mother suddenly became ill and died. This hit me very hard, and I temporarily re-focused my publishing strategy on clearly delimited articles (so I still gave my post-doc financers more than their money’s worth in terms of publications!). A sprawling monograph, focusing on the period from around 1800 until the present day, was simply a bit much to handle under the circumstances. Immediately when my post-doc ended, I was tenured at a different university. This meant I was thrown into a world of heavy teaching and administration duties, and Lilith ended up in the desk drawer. I still hope to return to this project at some point, as it’s a quite agreeable little book and I did an awful lot of fieldwork and digging for obscure primary sources that would be a shame to waste. However, there’s a very promising PhD thesis being written by Brennan Kettelle in Amsterdam right now on queer dimensions of Lilith, so I will at least wait until that is published so as not to unnecessarily duplicate anything, and to be able to enter into dialogue with the present cutting edge of Lilith studies.


[EDW] Your current focus is on martial arts and the sacralisation of physical exercise. Could you tell us more about this?

[PF] I have a three-year project funded by The Swedish Research Council where I’m looking at notions of spirituality in Japanese martial arts in Sweden. Primarily, I’m analysing how ideas about subtle energy (ki), martial practice as a form of meditation, the development of a “sixth sense”, attaining unity with the cosmos, a sacralisation of the self, and so on, have been negotiated in relation to Swedish secularity over time, ever since the arrival of Japanese martial arts in the early twentieth century. There are also interesting tensions and polemics within the martial arts milieu itself over whether there is, or should be, a spiritual dimension at all to such activities.

A view among westerners of East Asian martial arts training as spiritual has been around for a long time and is found across Europe. For example, a 1983 survey among West German Kyūdō (Japanese archery) practitioners determined 84% claimed they were drawn to it as a spiritual training. The theme of martial arts spirituality has occasionally caused controversy, as evidenced by discussions in the International Olympic Committee. When Japan applied to have Judō included in the programme for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, concerned voices claimed Judō was insufficiently “secular”. This rhetoric reared its head anew in 2008, when China (unsuccessfully) attempted to incorporate Wushu for the Beijing Olympics. In terms of a broader impact outside martial arts practice as such, this milieu has also functioned as a contact point with Buddhism for many. Moreover, it has, alongside yoga, arguably been pivotal in a broader sacralization of bodily exercises in the West. Such dimensions make martial arts relevant to all scholars working on the transnational circulation of East Asian religiosity and/or Western alternative spirituality.

I’m also looking at how masculinity is constructed in this milieu. Insider discourses often hold up Western masculinity as limiting for the individual, tied to unnecessary violence and to a (supposedly) destructive hard-line secularism. Eastern masculinity, by contrast, is constructed as spiritual, semi-pacifist, and encompassing a broader spectrum of situation-specific softness and hardness. Enlightened Zen samurai and (paradoxically pacifist) warrior monks are ideal figures, connecting spirituality and forms of “alternative”, “non-Western” masculinity. There are always multiple constructions of masculinity in any given culture, which stand in a hierarchical relation to each other as well as to the varieties of femininity. Awareness of this provides a scaffolding for analysing the martial arts milieu and what hegemonic masculinities its counter-ideal of “spiritual, peaceful warriors” has historically been positioned in relation to. Conceivably, however, martial arts masculinities often need to be conceptualised as “hybrid masculinities”, a recent term designating when men in a position of privilege nominally distance themselves from dominant ways of “doing gender”, yet to some degree reproduce hegemonic masculinity.


[EDW] Are there any future research projects or publications of yours that we should be looking out for?

[PF] Last month, Satanism: A Reader, co-edited by me and Johan Nilsson, came out from Oxford University Press. And just a couple of weeks ago, the huge volume Det esoteriska Sverige (“Esoteric Sweden”), where I have contributed three lengthy chapters, was published. It will appear in English translation next year.


Together with the historian and folklorist Fredrik Skott, I’m applying for funding for a project on Swedish folk grimoires that I have high hopes for. I’m also looking for funding to write a monograph on the Spiritualist group The Edelweiss Society (that I contributed a chapter on in Det esoteriska Sverige).

On a completely different note, I have a new book coming out in the spring of 2024 called Secret Stockholm – a guidebook to peculiar places in my native city. Much of the content is, unsurprisingly, related to esotericism. The book is part of the brilliant series from French publisher Jonglez, that has already covered many other cities across the world.

Finally, my book of “folk gothic” short stories, The Tree of Sacrifice (2020), is being published in English next year (originally written in Swedish, it has since been translated into Finnish and Danish, with a Ukrainian edition also on its way). Moreover, I have a new fiction book in the works, with a similar setting (rural northern Sweden a hundred years ago or so).


[EDW] Are there topics to do with Satanism, or with esotericism and alternative religion more broadly, that you feel are really in need of further investigation?

[PF] Numerous. “Folk magic” (and its intersections with so-called “learned magic”, in itself a problematic category in many ways) is a topic that needs to be more fully integrated into esotericism studies (something I hope to do with the folk grimoire project just mentioned), which as currently constructed has a very classist bias in many ways. In general, social class is a topic I plan to do more work on. Often mentioned in passing in discussions of for example Theosophy, its full ramifications need to be explored in-depth.

Regarding Satanism, I think there has been an unfortunate emphasis on US, UK and Scandinavian Satanism. This field is in dire need of a more global approach. Right now, I’m a visiting scholar at Tōhoku University in Japan, and I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some local Satanists. It’s fascinating to see the differences between Anglo-European Satanism and the varieties present in a country where only around 1% identify as Christians. I would love to do a conference and collected volume on global Satanism!


Thursday 11 May 2023

Out Now - Pagans: The Visual Culture of Pagan Myths, Legends and Rituals

On 27th April, my latest book – Pagans: The Visual Culture of Pagan Myths, Legends and Rituals – was officially released. As I wrote here in March, the book was commissioned by well-established publisher Thames and Hudson to serve as a general introduction to the concept of paganism and has been lavishly illustrated with over four hundred colour images. I’ve had some nice reviews (such as this one at A Bad Witch’s Blog), for which I am grateful. Sales have been good, so the English-language version has already gone into a second printing, allowing me to correct a few small errors (mostly in the image captions) that slipped into the final-stage proof for the first printing. As well as being available in French, Spanish, and Korean translations, a Japanese language translation is also in the works.



Thursday 9 March 2023

New Thames and Hudson Book - Pagans: The Visual Culture of Pagan Myths, Legends and Rituals

Early last year, the well-known publishing company Thames and Hudson asked me if I could write them a book about paganism as part of their ongoing series on the visual culture of various religious traditions. A little over twelve months on, the book is now set for release in April 2023 as Pagans: The Visual Culture of Pagan Myths, Legends and Rituals. You can check it out at the publisher’s website here, although you’ll probably also find it for sale at your bookseller of choice. As well as the English language version, translations are also being released in French, Spanish, and Korean.

Working on this lavishly illustrated coffee-table book was a collaborative effort, with my main text being supplemented by over 400 images obtained by the publisher themselves. Thames and Hudson have a great record at publishing wonderfully illustrated works accessible to a broad readership, and I still have fond memories of devouring some of their volumes on witchcraft and esotericism in my teenage years.


Of course, writing about paganism is a bit more complicated than writing about, say, Catholicism, as Suzanna Ivanič did in the previous volume in this Thames and Hudson series, Catholica: The Visual Culture of Catholicism (which has also been beautifully put together). That is because paganism is not just one thing, but (at least) two. On the one hand, ‘paganism’ is a Christian theological concept with which Christians since the fourth century have characterised every religious tradition not worshipping the God of Abraham. In this Christian sense, ‘paganism’ describes everything from the polytheistic religions of the ancient Romans and the early medieval Vikings to thriving living traditions like Hinduism and Shinto today. On the other, ‘Paganism,’ usually with a capital P, is the term typically embraced to describe a family of related new religions that arose largely in Europe and North America during the twentieth century. These modern Pagans, who include among their ranks Wiccans, Heathens, and modern Druids, are heavily inspired by the extinct pre-Christian religions once found across Europe and in adjacent parts of North Africa and West Asia. For today’s Pagans, the distant past is a resource with which to craft meaningful spiritual traditions for the present.

Pagans seeks to give a good overview of both of these phenomena. I try to make it clear how the term ‘pagan’ has been used in different ways, and why some people embrace it while others dislike it. ‘Paganism’ can be a controversial term, especially when used in the Christian sense, and we should not shy away from that fact. Alongside considering these terminological issues, I seek to offer a thematic overview of many of the recurring traits that we find in religions that do not venerate the God of Abraham, such as their acceptance of many different deities, their use of divination, and their view that divinity can manifest through material culture and the natural world. In this way I highlight some of the rich diversity that can be found within the world’s non-Abrahamic religious traditions.

Unlike my previous publications, such as my 2016 book Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft, this is not a volume aimed primarily at an academic audience. Rather, Pagans is intended for a broader, popular readership, people who may have a general interest in paganism but not know a great deal about it, or who may be put off reading strictly academic books. Hopefully there are many readers out there who will find it to be exactly what they are looking for.

Wednesday 11 January 2023

An Interview with Professor Marie W. Dallam

In the latest interview in my ongoing series, produced for the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP) but also reproduced here, I’m pleased to have Professor Marie W. Dallam of the University of Oklahoma with me. Dallam’s research has looked into some of the less well known facets of American Christianity, resulting in her two books Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (2007) and Cowboy Christians (2018), the former looking at an early Pentecostal figure and the latter at the growing number of Protestants who are strongly inspired by the cowboy culture of the American West. We discuss these projects as well as her interest in the relationship between religion, food, and attire.


[EDW] You have been interested in religion for a long time, having first received a BA in religious studies in 1996 and then stayed on that track throughout your career. What is it about this subject that fascinates you?

[MWD] Religious belief can be such a strong motivator in human lives, yet often in ways that are more like undercurrents rather than being readily observable, identifiable, and nameable. I find it endlessly fascinating to peek under the blanket and try to understand how the whole picture fits together.


[EDW] Your first book was Daddy Grace: A Celebrity Preacher and His House of Prayer (New York University Press, 2007). Could you tell us something about who this figure was and what led you to devote your attention to him while in graduate school?

[MWD] Daddy Grace (Marcelino Manuel da Graça, 1881 or 1884–1960) was an immigrant from Cape Verde who founded a church in the Pentecostal tradition, called the United House of Prayer for All People. I first came across his name in a seminar during my master’s degree work and wound up writing my term paper about his church. My research led me to see that the academic treatment of Grace and his church was not only scant but polemical, with many people boldly dismissing him. Even though he built an organization that served tens of thousands of people over the years, almost no one had investigated his work in a serious and balanced way. Was that because he presented as a bit of a caricature? Was it because he did things that made people uncomfortable? Was it because poor, black people have often been overlooked as a matter of course? It’s probably all of these things, and others. In any case, it struck me as deeply sad. I thought his work and his legacy were worthy of recovering and I set out to do that for my doctoral dissertation, eventually published as the book with New York University Press.

[EDW] You were previously a steering committee member on the American Academy of Religion’s (AAR) “Religion, Food, and Eating in North America” seminar and subsequently brought out a co-edited volume on Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia University Press, 2014). What interests you about the relationship between religion and food, and how did this particular project get off the ground?

[MWD] Within religious contexts, I am interested in material objects and the range of relationships people have with them. I like to reflect on ways that both the objects themselves and the relationships function in religious meaning-making, and in turn how that effects peoples’ everyday lives and behavior. Our AAR seminar on food and the anthology that came out of it were followed by an AAR seminar on Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America, and it too has a volume that is now in press (Columbia University Press, 2023). There was some overlap in the group of scholars involved in both projects because of our common interests in the material culture of religion and the types of questions we explore. For the newest volume I both co-edited, with Dr. Benjamin Zeller, and I contributed a chapter about the Church of Body Modification. And who knows, there could even be a future third volume in this series!


[EDW] Your most recent monograph, Cowboy Christians (Oxford University Press, 2018), looked at the growing number of self-described “cowboy churches,” especially in Texas and Oklahoma. Could you give us a rough idea of what cowboy Christianity is and how you came to study it?

[MWD] Cowboy Christians are people who feel personally grounded in a subculture of the American West, which they themselves tend to call “cowboy culture,” and for whom Christianity blends with that culture on a deep level. Of course, some of this cowboy culture is real and some aspects of it are based on an entrenched mythology about cowboys and the “Old West.” Many cowboy Christians feel they have been marginalized from mainstream churches over the years, and cowboy churches have sprung up to make an intervention on that. The cowboy church itself is defined mostly by behaviors and structures, and perhaps somewhat by values and expectations, but not really by theology; theologically they are on the conservative end of evangelical Protestantism.

In its ideal form, the cowboy church eschews formality and deliberately lowers social barriers in order to welcome people who don’t typically feel comfortable in traditional churches. The attire is casual, the atmosphere is informal, the music is identifiable, the sermons are relatable, and the social activities are things that interest a cowboy culture crowd. They won’t ostracize people who demonstrate “sinful” behavior; the idea is that through involvement with the church, you will gradually shed your sinful tendencies, but no one expects it to be a quick, easy, or permanent process. In the meantime, everything might look a bit messy.

Every book begins with a question. I began studying cowboy Christianity simply because I didn’t know what it was, and I was trying to get my questions answered. And as with most things, the deeper I looked, the more I found. That’s part of why I think of it as a cowboy Christian “movement,” rather than just a type of church.


[EDW] You characterise cowboy Christianity as a new religious movement (NRM), a concept that I feel (in the popular imagination at least) often tends to be associated more with groups that are wholly distinct from mainstream religions (Wicca, Scientology, and so on) rather than new variants of established traditions. That being the case, I wondered if you had any additional thoughts about the value of the NRM framework for understanding new denominations or trends within existing religions like Protestantism?

[MWD] My interests skew toward alternative religions, rather than “new” religions, because they can actually be more controversial. What I mean by that is that people are less likely to fear something that they perceive as dramatically different from themselves (“new religions”), whereas something that is similar to them but slightly different can be more deeply disturbing—the “variants of established traditions,” as you phrased it. Daddy Grace’s church is a slightly different type of Pentecostalism, and for that reason most Pentecostals prefer to significantly distance themselves from it. The same is true of the cowboy church: it’s just a little bit different from “mainstream” Christianity, and that causes discomfort for some. I find that dynamic interesting.

But that’s not what you asked, is it? The answer to your question is that yes, much of the sociological work that has been done on new religious movements can readily be applied to more mainstream religious developments. The social dynamics themselves are largely the same across religions. They’re just points on a continuum.


[EDW] Have you had much of a response to the book from cowboy Christians (or other Christians) since it was published?

[MWD] I had some positive responses from several of my interviewees, but I suspect that the ones who didn’t like the end result are too nice to hunt me down and tell me that. Cowboy Christians are, after all, polite! I spoke on the phone for a couple hours with one gentleman I’d interviewed, and he really grilled me about some things I’d written, but it was all a good-natured effort to come to a peaceful understanding about it (which we did). I also had one man who pointed to a part of my introduction in which I acknowledged that some readers in the cowboy Christian world would not agree with my take on things; he said that was true and that he was glad I’d written the book nonetheless. I really appreciated him saying that. Honestly, though, people of faith were not my target audience. It’s a book for scholars. It’s a book for the history shelves. It’s a book that gives insight into how this movement is unfolding and self-styling, and I suspect it will be more intellectually valuable in a few decades when scholars are trying to puzzle through the past.


[EDW] In your book you refer to a comparative lack of overt politicization within the cowboy Christian churches, and I wondered if that had potentially changed in the past few years given the growing ideological polarization of U.S. society? Do you think that there are connections between the cowboy Christian movement and what is now often being called “Christian Nationalism”?

[MWD] That’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer. Certainly, many cowboy Christians would identify closely with the feeling that they have been long left out and tossed aside from the world of mainstream politics. So a safe bet would be that political issues and candidates have become discussion points in cowboy churches in recent years. However, since the conclusion of my research I have distanced myself from engagement with the cowboy Christian milieu, so I don’t really know that for certain. Hopefully another young researcher is out there as we speak, gathering the answers.


[EDW] Has there been an expansion of the cowboy Christian movement outside its U.S. heartlands? Has it extended into either Canada or Mexico, for example?

[MWD] Yes, absolutely. There are cowboy churches and cowboy Christians all over the world: Canada, Mexico, Australia, several countries in Asia. I don’t have any idea what those communities are like, nor what aspects of the cowboy church model they do and don’t choose to follow. But I know some leaders have deliberately undertaken mission efforts in those places and they intend to stick closely with the model while also incorporating local relevance.


[EDW] Are there any future research projects or publications of yours that we should be looking out for?

[MWD] In the past couple of years, I’ve been exploring intersections of religion and the arts. I published an article last year in the MAVCOR journal about Mormon art (https://mavcor.yale.edu/mavcor-journal/art-religious-memory-and-mormon-polygamy). Now I’m in the earliest stages of a project that is a consideration of religious theatre. I am interested in different genres of theatrical performance that are deliberate efforts at evangelism, particularly (but not solely) among new religious movements, and I’m looking at the phenomenon across time periods and geography.


[EDW] Professor Dallam, thank you for your time and all the best with your future research.

Tuesday 16 August 2022

An Interview with Associate Professor Joseph P. Laycock

Today in my ongoing series of interviews for the World Religions and Spirituality Project (WSP – check out the site here) I am pleased to provide an interview with Dr Joseph P. Laycock, an associate professor at Texas State University. As well as being co-editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, he has published a string of fascinating books on various culturally alternative and new religions, from The Satanic Temple to the Baysider Catholics. We discuss his varied research and the role that scholars of new religious movements can play in today’s world.

[EDW] Your first book was Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism (Praeger, 2009), and both there and elsewhere you’ve written about people identifying as vampires and the broader Otherkin movement. Could you tell us more about these movements and what led you to investigate them?

[JPL] This was a “crime of opportunity.” I was teaching high school in Atlanta when I learned of the existence of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance. I was really fascinated by this group because they were collecting data on their community, trying to understand why they weren’t like other people. There would be no need for a group to do that if they were just playing at being vampires or delusional. I had planned to give a paper on this group to the American Academy of Religion (AAR), but Praeger approached me about a book contract. (Unlike me, they knew Twilight-mania was on the horizon). So this became my first book and I had 15 minutes of fame as a “vampire expert.”

Basically, vampires feel they aren’t like other people and they use the word “vampire” as a kind of shorthand to describe that difference. Some of them drink human blood (consensually) and report health issues if they go without blood for too long. A related group are the “Otherkin,” who identify (on a metaphysical level) as non-human entities like angels, elves, or dragons. Previous scholarship on the vampire community was abysmal: It was basically part of the Satanic Panic literature, warning that vampires are a “cult” who hate Christians, commit murders, etc. Many of the vampires I met were Christians! That research was also getting published without ever having met a self-identified vampire, which seems pretty unacceptable. One reason the Atlanta Vampire Alliance was doing this research project was to raise the standard of evidence for making claims about the community.

I found that the vampire community members are neither mentally ill nor practicing a “religion” in the way that word is traditionally used. Our culture doesn’t have a box yet for this kind of identity. By studying vampires, I came to realize that the history of Western society is one of more and more options becoming available for thinking about and talking about ourselves. Foucault argued that the concept of “sexual orientation” was invented in the nineteenth century. And in only the last ten years or so I have seen an unprecedented number of students who identify as “non-binary.” Of course, I am not equating vampires with the LGBTQ community. But I argue that vampires are what Foucault called a “technology of self.” In this sense, they aren’t abnormal at all, but are part of much larger trend as our culture evolves.

[EDW] Your next monograph, The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism (Oxford University Press, 2015), explored the Baysiders, a Roman Catholic group established in 1960s New York. Can you tell us a bit more about this group and why you decided to study them?

[JPL] The Seer of Bayside began as my dissertation. Beginning in the 1960s a woman from Bayside, Queens, New York named Veronica Lueken began to experience visions of the Virgin Mary. A group called simply Baysiders, followed her and collected her messages from Mary until her death in 1995. Most Baysiders were traditionalist Catholics reeling from the changes of Vatican II (1962–1965). Through Lueken, Mary condemned Vatican II and even said Pope Paul VI (papacy, 1963-1978) had been replaced by a KGB agent altered with plastic surgery. The Baysiders had a contentious relationship with the Diocese of Brooklyn, which eventually condemned Lueken’s visions as fraudulent. They still meet regularly in Flushing Meadows Park where they believe Mary is still present on Catholic holy days.

On one level, this was simply an ideal dissertation topic. There was enough data in archival sources to do the dissertation, but not so much that it would take years to complete. More importantly, no one had done a book on Bayside before. There’s a saying, “If you want to stand out in your field, pick an empty one.”

[EDW] One thing that I found interesting in The Seer of Bayside was your point that one of the Baysider groups said that they would not respond to your phone calls and emails, something you felt was possibly because they disapproved of your previous research topics. I wonder if you had any additional thoughts about the ways in which the topics that we as scholars cover results in other religious groups not wanting to communicate with us? Are there ways of overcoming this?

[JPL] Negotiating entry with the Baysiders was extremely difficult. There are two rival groups active in Flushing Meadows Park. (They literally hold services a few meters apart and aggressively ignore each other). They notice which group you approach first. They also have a “fortress mentality” in which most institutions and media are corrupted and corrupting, so they can be mistrusting of outsiders. But the biggest issue is that the media has not been kind to them. Even academic researchers who interviewed them have been dismissive in their writing. This sort of “poisons the well” for future researchers seeking to engage with these groups. Of course, the answer can’t be to never say anything critical about the groups you study. But there are costs when academics or the media interview groups like the Baysiders just to get a quote for a derisive story about a kooky group.

I should also say here that I don’t believe in “covert research.” I could have feigned religious interest in the Baysiders, but this would be unethical. It could also contaminate the data and, when the book came out, they would feel that their paranoia was justified!

[EDW] In The Seer of Bayside, you describe a personal background in Roman Catholicism and also relate that as a scholar you are “drawn to groups that are understudied, misunderstood and maligned,” something that is very evident in the choice of movements you have studied. What is it that draws you to “alternative” religions as a topic? Was this an interest that led you towards religious studies at university?

[JPL] I think all academics should be studying things that are understudied. I think religious studies is profoundly perverse in that it discourages research on understudied groups. We love to moan about the “world religion” paradigm,* but the job market is king and if you don’t study a so-called “major world religion,” you won’t get a job. Good advisors know that, so they discourage their PhD students from studying anything that hasn’t already been written about for generations. Can you imagine if another discipline did this? Can you imagine a PhD in biology discovering a new kingdom of animals at the bottom of the ocean and being told not to study it? That you can only get a job if you focus on one of the six or seven accepted animal kingdoms?

When I wrote my first book, I was a high school teacher and I figured I would never get a job as a professor anyway. When I started my PhD I tried to market myself as an “Americanist,” but the Americanists never seemed interested in the topics I was studying. I kept being told that I studied “new religious movements” (NRMs). That annoyed me because I never made a conscious decision to be a scholar of new religious movements––others just labeled me as such. And, of course, there are no jobs for NRM scholars. So I fell on the Baysiders as a topic almost out of defiance. It was sort of like, “Go ahead, I dare you to tell me the Roman Catholic Church is an NRM.”

I have since given in and accepted the label of NRM scholar. And I now believe research on NRMs is one of the most important things religion scholars do. The groups we study are the ones most in need of “worldview translators,”* the ones whose rights are the most vulnerable, and the ones where––as with the Branch Davidians––there are preventable episodes of violence.

* = [EDW] The World Religions Paradigm is a framework for studying religion that only focuses on five or six religions, chosen for their numerical size and/or influence upon Western history (i.e. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and sometimes Sikhism).

* = [EDW] The term “worldview translator” was used in by Phillip Charles Lucas, “How Future Wacos Might Be Avoided,” in From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco, ed. James R. Lewis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 209-12, to refer to the role that religious studies scholars could have played in the negotiations between the FBI and the Branch Davidians in the conflict outside Waco in 1993.

[EDW] You have also looked at moral panics over role-playing games, primarily in your book Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (University of California Press, 2015). Could you tell us more about this project?

[JPL] I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in Texas in the 1980s. I basically lived through Stranger Things, minus the monsters and psychic powers. As a child, I kept encountering authority figures who were certain my favourite pastime was evil and involved Satanic worship. I knew empirically that these claims were absurd. Looking back, this was my first inkling that adults acted like they had all the answers but actually had no idea what they were talking about. They were ignorant and frightened—traits they attributed to children.

I knew for awhile I wanted to write something about religion and D&D, but I wasn’t ready to write this book until I got my PhD. This book tries to explain why conservative Christians focused on this game (as opposed to thousands of other social issues). D&D was created by two devout Christians and I also found it odd that when Christian critics found Christian elements in the game (cleric spells with names like “atonement,” for example) they interpreted this as evidence of Satanism. I conclude that on some level this was what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences.” In convincing themselves they were fighting demons and Satanic cults, these conservative Christians were playing a game very much like D&D. They were the ones lost in their game of heroic fantasy! But I also think D&D resembles a religion in that it involves human beings joined together in a state of play creating an alternate reality. I think that’s as good a definition of religion as any: An alternate reality brought about through the collective effort of human beings engaged in a unique mode of communication and activity. I also think on some level, the conservative Christians were right to fear D&D. Antonio Gramsci argued that the ability to imagine things as being different than they are creates a radical form of autonomy that makes people harder to control. So D&D is a problem if you’re trying to raise a generation of children that will remake society in your image.

[EDW] Your most recent monograph, Speak of the Devil: How The Satanic Temple is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2020), is devoted to The Satanic Temple, a U.S.-based organisation that has attracted quite a bit of attention over the past few years. Could you give us a brief introduction to what The Satanic Temple is? What led to your decision to study it?

[JPL] The Satanic Temple (TST) is a political and religious group of Satanists. They are essentially atheistic but regard the Satan of Milton and the Romantics as a powerful symbol for their values of resistance to arbitrary authority, reason, autonomy, etc. They are known for “stunts” (they might say “experiments” or “provocations”) designed to change the conversation about topics like abortion or the separation of church and state. I think a lot of people first noticed them when they offered to donate a statue of Baphomet (a goat-headed deity) to be displayed at the Oklahoma state Capitol in 2014. Their argument was that The Ten Commandments monument placed at the state Capitol was illegal (the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed with them on this), but that if they had a Satanic monument as well, the monuments would no longer constitute an illegal government endorsement of religion.

I first interviewed TST leader Lucien Greaves about the proposed monument for Religion Dispatches and basically asked him, “Are you serious about this?” It turned out, TST was pretty serious! The media loves TST and I kept covering their various campaigns and projects. As I did so, I watched the group evolve from basically a handful of political gadflies into a community with sincerely held beliefs, rituals, etc. I started to get annoyed when people who didn’t know anything about this group told me they were “obviously trolls.” I was also very interested in whether the things they were doing were having any effect. Were they changing laws? Were they getting people to think about the First Amendment differently? In many cases, they succeeded in getting their opponents to publicly admit that they did not believe in religious freedom and separation of church and state––they believed in Christian hegemony, but not rights for groups like The Satanic Temple. So my book was intended as a definitive history of this group and how it formed, but also an analysis of the way TST has shaped public discourse about ideas like “religion” and “religious freedom.” That’s why the title is “Speak of the Devil” and not “The Satanic Temple.”

[EDW] Since Speak of the Devil was published, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, with significant ramifications for abortion access in many states. Given that abortion access was already an issue that The Satanic Temple was very involved with, have you observed the group changing or being significantly impacted by the court decision? Do you think this decision (and others that may follow on topics like same-sex marriage) will have a long-term impact on The Satanic Temple?

[JPL] This is a big can of worms! This really begins with the 2014 decision Burwell v. Hobby Lobby where the Supreme Court ruled that the retail company Hobby Lobby was exempt from certain requirements of the Affordable Care Act because of their religious beliefs. The Satanic Temple said, “If Hobby Lobby can be exempt from some laws ensuring access to contraception, we should be exempt from laws restricting abortion access.” They filed a series of lawsuits in Missouri (and then Texas) arguing that state restrictions on abortion violated their sincerely held belief that one’s body is inviolable. Missouri and Texas both had 1) laws that made obtaining an abortion extremely difficult, and 2) Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) laws that essentially require the state to accommodate religions if they possibly can.

So far, no court has actually answered the basic question raised by TST: Does religious freedom mean Satanists can get abortion on demand, just as Hobby Lobby can be exempt from parts of the Affordable Care Act? Instead, their cases have been thrown out on procedural grounds. In one case, a judge sat on the case for nine months and then told the plaintiff (a pregnant Satanist) she no longer had standing to sue because she was no longer pregnant. TST created an “abortion ritual” that has to be completed in a certain amount of time, in an effort to prevent this sort of loophole.

TST has no plans to back down now that Roe was fallen, but it will change the situation in several ways. First, TST is nervous to approach this Supreme Court, which seems amenable to a Christian nationalist agenda. Taking a case to this Supreme Court could result in a really radical ruling, setting a disastrous precedent.

Second, RFRA laws require the government to provide a “compelling interest” to restrict religious freedom. When abortion was recognized as a right, Missouri had to claim its restrictions on abortion were necessary so that women could make an “informed decision about a medical procedure.” Now they no longer need to make such a pretence: They can simply state that abortion is murder and the state has a compelling interest in preventing it. This could mean TST members have no more right to get an abortion then to perform a human sacrifice. (In theory, TST could argue that claiming abortion is murder is itself a religious belief and therefore a violation of the establishment clause.)

Third, people are reasonably scared of what a post-Roe America will look like and some have turned to TST. This has resulted in both more interest in TST and more criticism. On social media, some people have wrongly claimed that by becoming a Satanist, you can legally get abortion on demand. Some of TST’s long-time critics are furious about this and claim TST is putting pregnant women in danger.

[EDW] Another of the topics that has attracted your interest has been spirit possession and exorcism, resulting in two volumes that you have edited, Spirit Possession around the World: Possession, Communion, and Demon Expulsion across Cultures (ABC-CLIO, 2015) and The Penguin Book of Exorcisms (Penguin Classics, 2020). What do you find particularly interesting about this and are you pursuing the topic further?

[JPL] As a PhD student I wrote a paper on The Exorcist that became one of my first publications. Then ABC-CLIO tapped me to edit an encyclopaedia on possession and exorcism across cultures. That’s a pretty good introduction to the topic! I created a course on exorcism to attract students to our new Major in religious studies. This led to some media interest and eventually an invitation from Penguin to do another book.

I find it fascinating that spirit possession occurs in nearly all cultures. Of course, cultures disagree profoundly on what exactly happens when people enter a state of possession and whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. In the end I am interested in possession because it shows that we as human beings really don’t understand ourselves. As inheritors of the Enlightenment, Westerners are led to believe we are autonomous individuals with distinct personalities that are solid and consistent. But this isn’t really true. We can effectively be different people depending on our mood, and especially the social situation we find ourselves in. We adopt social roles and conform with others without even realizing we’re doing it. Spirit possession can be one way of talking about these changes, as can various diagnoses of so-called “dissociative disorders.” But both these explanations assume there is some stable personality that is “really you” to begin with. In the end, I think we don’t understand the spirits because we don’t understand ourselves!

[EDW] What has the feedback been like following publication of your various books? Have you had much of a response, for instance, from The Satanic Temple, the Baysiders, or the modern Vampires? Moreover, what has the response been like from other academics? Do you feel that those scholars of religion who focus on “mainstream” movements have been receptive?

[JPL] Overall, I would say the feedback has been very positive. I wrote these books with other scholars in mind, and they have generally spoken well of them. Several PhD students had Speak of the Devil on their exam lists, which is about the biggest honor I can imagine. I also still have a lot of friends among these communities. The Baysiders are a contentious group and the first two comments on Amazon both trashed the book––one for implying Veronica Lueken might not be a mentally ill con artist, and the other for implying she might not be a genuine Marian seer sent to save the world from divine chastisement. So I guess I did my job right!

Some right-wing troll heard my interview about Speak of the Devil on the New Books Network and wrote to tell me I’m “a progressive liberal satanist chucklehead douchebag.” More recently I have received some attacks from former members of The Satanic Temple. They claim the group they joined is actually a greedy cult and that despite being publicly progressive it secretly supports anti-Semitism and the alt-right. Even though I discussed many of these accusations in my book, these critics feel that if I’m not with them, I’m against them. Therefore, I must be a shill for the group I study. I actually find these accusations perversely flattering. Nobody is anybody in NRM studies until they have been accused of being a “cult apologist” by ex-members of the group they study. So I guess I’ve made it!

[EDW] You’ve been writing for Religion Dispatches since 2009. What do you see as its role in disseminating information about religious topics to a wider readership? Do you think scholars of religion as a whole are doing enough to engage wider audiences outside the academy?

[JPL] Two of my mentors were Diane Moore at Harvard and Stephen Prothero at Boston University, both of which have called attention to the dire need for religious literacy. The media is largely part of the problem here. For example, when Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire in 2019, a priest told the media he had rescued “the body of Christ” from the burning building. The New York Times reported that the priest had rescued a statue of Jesus, because what else could “the body of Christ” refer to? So I think it’s really important that scholars have an outlet to discuss contemporary issues involving religion. I’ve also written for a lot of outlets and I find the editors at Religion Dispatches the easiest to work with.

I think religion scholars are more open to the public than ever before with podcasts, YouTube channels, etc. But I also think there is still an attitude that these efforts are working against your career instead of with it. A media article that informs the public about an important issue doesn’t carry the same weight as a dense academic monograph that costs $200 and will only sell a dozen copies.

[EDW] Since 2016 you have been co-editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, and in 2019 you also became co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s New Religious Movements Unit. What do you see as the importance of having the study of new religions as a distinct sub-field and where do you think it currently stands in relation to the study of religion as a whole?

[JPL] As I’ve already said, I feel like NRM studies chose me more than I chose it. NRM studies emerged out of “the cult wars” when there was a moral panic that “cults” possessed secret techniques of brainwashing and were taking over America in the form of an “information disease.” Expert witnesses were making a fortune testifying about the dangers of brainwashing and religious freedom as we know it seemed to hang in the balance. NRM studies began as a group of religion scholars and sociologists who sought to combat this nonsense.

Since the cult wars, NRM studies has tried to find a new purpose. One of the important functions of the AAR group and Nova Religio is to platform research on emerging religious movements in the Global South: Africa, Asia, and South America are teeming with movements that no one else is paying attention to. We also provide a space for research on all manner of magical traditions, parody religions, entheogenic practices, and other sundry religious phenomenon that have fallen through the cracks of the world religion paradigm.

But I also think history is repeating itself and that the cult wars are beginning anew. QAnon and the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. were so bizarre and so scary that the public was once again turned to the facile narrative of “brainwashing” to explain this behaviour. Figures like Steve Hassan, who was a deprogrammer in the 1970s, have resurfaced as “cult experts” who can explain “the cult of Trump.” (To be clear, I think Trump-ism is both toxic and dangerous, but this is all the more reason to take a nuanced, rational approach to its causes.) Adding to this problem is a glut of sensationalist media about “cults.” It feels like everyone with access to Wikipedia and a microphone is starting a podcast about cults these days. It’s a stark example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in which incompetence leads to a feeling of confidence. These podcasts often amount to little more than pornography describing the abuses of cult leaders, but there is never thought given to what makes a group a “cult” or even whether this is a valid category. Furthermore, the deprogrammers and anti-cultists are much more adept than NRM scholars at getting their message out in the popular media. So I think we will need the wisdom of old school NRM scholars once again.

[EDW] Are there topics to do with new and “alternative” religions more broadly, or with the groups that you have studied specifically, that you feel are in crying need of more research?

[JPL] One thing NRM studies has inherited from the world religions paradigm is a focus on organizations. We still ask questions like “Who is the founder of this religion? How many members does it have?,” etc. But with the internet, we are dealing less with organizations and more with networks, ideas, and (dare I say it) memes. These are cultural flows that are methodologically much harder to study. How do you do an ethnography of Tik-Tok where everyone has a unique algorithm feeding them videos catered to their viewing history? How do you study subversive groups that meet primarily on the dark web? But I think such work is important so that scholars can study things like QAnon that have serious consequences for democracy.

More broadly, I think what is being called “Conspirituality” needs to be taken more seriously. Kooky conspiracy theories are fun to talk about, but these ideas have now entered the mainstream. I think a lot of the ideas associated with QAnon begin as “play,” then somehow metastasize into belief, and finally conviction. How exactly does one go from talking to their friends on Facebook to attacking a pizza parlor with an assault rifle looking for Hillary Clinton’s satanic torture dungeon? In some ways I think religious studies is uniquely suited to answer this question and in other ways I think it is unprepared. Religious studies scholars understand the power of belief, but not enough about where new beliefs come from––especially in an age where “prophets” flourish on sites like 8chan.

[EDW] Do you have any projects on the horizon that we should be looking out for?

[JPL] I have been kicking around an idea for a book on hoaxes. Charles Fort once said it is possible that all religions began as hoaxes. I am not interested in making claims that certain religions were founded by con artists or false prophets or anything of that sort. Rather I am interested in the collective nature of a hoax in which multiple people construct an alternate version of reality. Many of the exorcism cases I studied clearly began with adolescents engaged in play––but once religious leaders labeled that play as demonic possession, that interpretation became a social fact. It was thereafter impossible for the adolescent to be anything other than demonically possessed. So the people labeling the play are in a way more the authors of the hoax than the players themselves. I think there is something important going on in these cases that can help us understand how human beings go about performing the social construction of reality.