Mark Rathbun, a high- profile Scientologist, has previously accused the Church of Scientology of being “fundamentalist.” The author explores the idea of a “Scientological fundamentalism,” and how Free Zone Scientology might fit the description. Giving an overview of both the Church of Scientology and the Free Zone, the author argues that many Free Zone Scientologists at least resemble the ways in which other fundamentalists— primarily Christian and Muslim ones— in that they are fixated on a return to L. Ron Hubbard’s original “Standard Tech” in response to a change in religious authority in the form of David Miscavige becoming the leader of the Church of Scientology. Although the author does not necessarily argue that the Free Zone constitutes Scientological fundamentalism, they do argue that what has been regularly described as fundamentalist is a persistent quality of religion in modernity.

Conspiracy theories and religion intersect within the profane world of politics, society, and social communities. The role of religion in the instigation and perpetuation of moral panics is well known, but what occurs when conspiracy, moral panics, religion, and the securitization of perceived national threat interact? In this paper, social media posts, podcasts, and online interviews with the leaders of an organized protest, Take Back Our Border, are analyzed for content of each of these topics. The Take Back Our Border convoy named themselves God’s Army and are fighting to save the United States from unauthorized immigrants. These immigrants are perceived to be crossing into the nation to destroy its culture and Christian faith, and to stop the elites behind the Great Replacement conspiracy: the enslavement of white Christians.

This paper attempts to reconsider a previously studied bulk of archival material and contemporary cultural debates, around— what is considered by a multitude of Indians as— a symbolic “monument,” in the light of some of Bruno Latour’s influential writings and concepts. Latour’s spirit looms large in inspiring us (even in his physical absence) to redefine the secular in terms of the freedom to historicize the geological as a key to disrupting the spiritual- secular dichotomy. However, this logic works against “freeze- framing” fetishisms of bureaucratized regimes of science and religion. On the one hand, Latour’s voice seems to acknowledge the need to preserve ancient lores as alternate methodologies or loose organizations of knowledge rather than as superstitious premodern confabulations. His eminent caution against blind empiricism and realism returns with a spectral force, reminding us of the dangers of deifying “matters of fact.” On the other hand, Latour’s reinforcement of “matters of concern” does not leave out the perils of the kind of “freeze- framing” that manifests in the case of the aforesaid Indian “monument” whenever it is hailed as a scientific reality as if to overcompensate for empiricist denials of its antiquarian values. Latour’s sanity offers a desperate window across the chasm of polarized times.

This article analyzes the irreducibility of spiritual branding, theologies of self-divinity and the business practices of a global esoteric company. Based on fieldwork with the Modern Mystery School (MMS) in Tokyo, I show how initiates, by purchasing an ascending syllabus of esoteric courses, recognize their own divinity and parlay this recognition into a spiritual brand that helps them market to their own clientele niche. The spiritual transformation of recognizing one’s transcendent individual royalty is necessarily monetized as Adepts transition from paying clients to income-generating spiritual therapists. Parallel to this, top leadership have consciously fused MMS as an ancient hermetic lineage with a modern-day entertainment company, fashion company and lifestyle magazine. This has given MMS in Japan a recognizable public aesthetic which, combined with teachings about opposite but complementary Divine Masculinity and Femininity, advances gender normative ideologies often experienced by followers as spiritual alternativity. This article theorizes the intertwined relationship of other-worldly self-branding and this-worldly business acumen without reifying the binary between religion and economy or reducing meaningful spiritual transformation to corporate profit.

What are the co-making processes that blur the boundaries between religion and economy? How can we move past misleading metaphors and analogies that reify the false distinction between sacred and secular or that frame religion as pure essences corrupted by financialization? Inspired by McLaughlin et al.’s (2020) call for increased attention to the “corporate form of religion,” we outline how common social structural and aspirational elements undergird shared processes of both religion-making and corporation-making. Drawing on ethnographic and historical data from contributing authors to this Special Issue, we hypothesize that the reification of religion and business is context dependent, benefits regimes of power, and is open to contestation; and that some intentional communities, purposeful or not, have from their inception been understood as neither religious nor corporate. We marshal global data from diverse case studies to explore the modes of relatedness between religions and corporations, on the one hand, and the context-specific boundary-making practices that reify a false binary, on the other.

In early twenty-first century Tibet, many Geluk monasteries established capital funds that they invested in small businesses—the Geluk being one of the main Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Drawing on fieldwork in northeast Tibet, this article examines debates surrounding this monastic engagement in business, asking why it proved contentious despite historical and canonical precedent. I approach this question by thinking about monastic business engagement in relation to Geluk monasticism as a distinctive corporate form. Foregrounding how monks made sense of what they were doing as corporate actors, I examine common rationales, concerns, and questions of legitimacy at the heart of arguments both for and against monastic business development, and how these related to the monastic corporation’s core concern with preservation and continuity. The article concludes with some broader reflections on what these debates can tell us about the ongoing process of corporation-making, suggesting some possible avenues for future research.

While strictly conceptual matters have dominated much of the discussion concerning religion as an object of scientific research, different understandings of the scientific character of the study of religion have also always had a significant role in the scholarly self-understanding. Here two significant conceptualizations of this scientific character—that of the so-called new scientificity (as advocated mostly by scholars from the cognitive science of religion) as well as that of the comparative history of religion—are described in detail and then thoroughly analyzed and criticized. It will be shown how both conceptualizations face problems, but those of the new scientificity are significantly more serious. Lastly, some more general reflections will be offered concerning the significance of these matters for the study of religion overall.

The article discusses supernatural experiences within the wider culture of the supernatural as a discourse in communication and performance in the liminal area between the credible and the incredible. The interviews analysed in the article were recorded within the context of research into the paranormal that includes several themes, for example apparitions of ghosts, humanoids, dowsing. The concept of belief pervades vernacular discussion and takes the form of the performance of truth in various forms. The teller’s position to the truth of the story can be seen from their narrative strategies, which present the teller as an expert in the supernatural, or on the contrary as an individual struggling in the face of the unknown. Paranormal enthusiasts give social legitimation to single experiences and to networks of thinking, along within the wider culture of the supernatural. Moreover, the places of these encounters can become experiential evidence for meeting the supernatural through dowsing practices that shape the spiritual worldview of those engaged. Thus, single experiences and stories will be woven into a wider story about the intervention of the supernatural in everyday life.

In this article, I take up the “Muslim Question” in relation to neoliberalism and the Dutch government through a community approach focusing on the responsibilization of citizens. Based on fieldwork that I have conducted over the last 15 years, I will argue that, in order to understand the Muslim Question, we have to explore how Muslims respond to the “neo-liberal Muslim Question.” I will explore how the paradoxes and tensions that co-constitute the neoliberal Muslim Question, create opportunities for some Muslims to be able to find, then enlarge and navigate a space for themselves as responsible subjects within a particular framework which also, simultaneously, targets them as potentially unruly subjects. In doing so I show how Muslims engage with the neoliberal governance of themselves and demonstrate how their approach is informed, shaped, enabled and challenged by the racial neo-liberal discourse of the Muslim Question.

This article examines a secular liberal state’s demand for religious representation of minorities, exploring how one heterodox Muslim community has responded to this demand in a context of intense public scrutiny. In order to gain recognition and rights as a legitimate religious community in modern Lebanon, Druze leaders created a new figurehead to look something like the head of a Christian church. Their project offers a striking case of how a secular democracy can end up generating the “religion” it expects to find; how the politics of religious representation can transform Muslim communities that lack a church-like structure; how ambiguous the notion of “religious representation” turns out to be when these Muslims try to do it from scratch; and how much harder heterodox Muslims often have to work to gain recognition within a world religions paradigm.