Strange Rites

New Religions for a Godless World

By: Tara Isabella Burton

A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.
Fifty-five years have passed since the cover of Time magazine proclaimed the death of God and while participation in mainstream religion has indeed plummeted, Americans have never been more spiritually busy.
While rejecting traditional worship in unprecedented numbers, today's Americans are embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures -- from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right.As the Internet makes it ever-easier to find new "tribes," and consumer capitalism forever threatens to turn spirituality into a lifestyle brand, remarkably modern American religious culture is undergoing a revival comparable with the Great Awakenings of centuries past. Faith is experiencing not a decline but a Renaissance. Disillusioned with organized religion and political establishments alike, more and more Americans are seeking out spiritual paths driven by intuition, not institutions.
In Strange Rites, religious scholar and commentator Tara Isabella Burton visits with the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; Satanists and polyamorous communities, witches from Bushwick, wellness junkies and social justice activists and devotees of Jordan Peterson, proving Americans are not abandoning religion but remixing it. In search of the deep and the real, they are finding meaning, purpose, ritual, and communities in ever-newer, ever-stranger ways.

Critic reviews

"A revelatory survey of the increasingly transfigured American spiritual landscape."
—Publishers Weekly

"Burton's writing is challenging, educational, and electric, combining big-picture thinking with deep-dive immersion...Readers will come away with enlightened and altered thinking."
—Booklist

"A bracing tour through the myriad forms of bespoke spiritualism and makeshift quasireligions springing up across America."
—The Wall Street Journal

"An essential work for anyone interested in understanding--or addressing--our rapidly transforming cultural and religious landscape."
—Christianity Today

"Any good historian of religion knows that it's possible for a culture to become less and more religious at the same time--an insight that Tara Isabella Burton uses on an illuminating journey through the many unorthodox forms of faith emerging in post-religious America. With a novelist's knack for storytelling, Burton shows in scintillating detail how the unquenchable longing for connection and transcendence is merging with carnal desires and the capitalist marketplace to produce new sacred spaces and experiences of enchantment. Read Strange Rites. It's a revelation."—Damon Linker, Senior Correspondent at TheWeek

"A lesser writer and a colder intellect would have been content simply to mock the video-gaming, Soul-Cycling communicants of our "Remixed" Great Awakening. Yet in Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton grasps that strangeness entails ecstatic power as well as oddity, and that even folly in search of transcendent meaning merits empathy, not apathy--the difference between a merely lively read and a profound one."—Giselle Donnelley, Research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

"Rigorously researched and reported with scholarly curiosity and an eye on the zeitgeist, Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites takes a hard look at what's replacing traditional religious practice in American culture today and finds that the thirst for community and belonging has not gone away. As the discovers, today's religiously remixed subcultures could indeed be tomorrow's new religions. Her book is an adventure story through the new American religious landscapes."—Kaya Oakes, UC Berkeley, author of The Nones Are Alright

"With Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton establishes herself as her generation's foremost chronicler of American religious life. Her intelligence, her immersive reporting, and her vivid prose style illuminate with particular intensity the radical religious changes transforming post-Christian America. The religious center has not held; Burton is an essential guide to the mere spiritual anarchy now loosed upon the Western world. Strange Rites will doubtless be one of the most important books of the year."—Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option

Insightful

Tara Burton identifies and describes in some depth the various divergent trends of the post-modern American religious landscape, synthesizing values and historical progression of thought and ideology to provide a deeper understanding of who we are and what we believe as Americans—and why we may be so sincerely divided as a civilization, owing to our radical individualist ideologies. If you’re interested in cultural study or want a more nuanced understanding of the societal reality in which we live, this book will prove a valuable resource for our contemporary context.

Biased and somewhat dated but important

Now that social justice culture is in decline, the author’s biases shine through loud and clear, and large swaths of this book are quite cringe in 2025. She takes for granted that the tenets of social justice (as well as intuitional and individualistic secular religions more generally) are not only self-evidently correct, but bound to keep ascending. Both assertions are now clearly in question. Nevertheless, there are important insights in here as to how the current godless age came to be, and how new gods sprang up to replace the old ones in organized religion.
The book would benefit greatly from a new edition that examines the post-2024 backlash and “vibe shift”, and takes a more balanced and critical look at the movements that Burton examines. And for the love of god, PLEASE scrub all the instances of outdated, offensive terms like “Latinx” for the next one.

Interesting Insights

Excellent expose of new or remixed spiritual traditions in an evolving internet age. Very well researched.

not what I expected but there's good effort

i enjoyed the documentational effort and cataloguing of contemporary quasi religious movements or the one's that fills its place and the ability to draw analogies and parallels with those more traditional and established traditions with sometimes great insights. Yet there's an unavoidable judgmental overtone and descriptive clues that could've been easily avoided to deliver a more wholesome take.

Performance felt monotonic at times.

A fascinating view into the gods of today

I found this to be a very in-depth and interesting review of a lot of things that I had only minor exposure to. I felt the author stayed very even handed in describing multiple religious points of view without passing judgment as much as possible.