Abstract
Abby Day transformed research into nonreligion by demonstrating how to talk about belief without asking religious questions. This article aims to go a step further by demonstrating a way of exploring (non)religious imaginaries without asking belief-centred questions. It does so by suggesting that researchers 1) ask what people are willing to commit their precious time to doing and subsequently 2) pay attention to the myths they tell in sustaining these actions and the way that the imagination brings these to life. I suggest that asking people what they believe may force them into a response that forecloses the complexity of their imagination. Focusing on the belief-based distinctions between purportedly ‘religious’ and ‘nonreligious’ people as has proved particularly popular in the psychology of religion reproduces a (post)Protestant understanding of religion as deeply held belief. Recent developments in sociology and anthropology suggest that this is an inaccurate understanding of many religious people. I suggest that it also places conceptual constraints on explorations of nonreligious imaginaries. Perhaps it does not matter whether people believe that a literary figure really existed or whether or not people believe in life after death. Instead what matters is the agentive force the characters they are imagining have over their lives.
Highlights
It’s a hot summer’s night in Vancouver – warm enough to be sat on the beach with friends – and I’m stood in the corner of a packed office training room listening to Beth, a slight but compelling woman in her sixties, once again telling the crowd of new community organising recruits of the time Metro Vancouver Alliance pressured a care home to pay a living wage to their carers
The Performative Power of Myth Whether the illocutionary force is to bring fictional characters to life, to revive people from the dead or to illicit moral transformation, the point is not that the myth represents an alternative notion of causation propositionally understood
Metro Vancouver Alliance is an organisation permeated by a culture of story gathering, sharing and plotting
Summary
Abby Day transformed research into nonreligion by demonstrating how to talk about belief without asking religious questions. This article aims to go a step further by demonstrating a way of exploring (non)religious imaginaries without asking belief-centred questions. It does so by suggesting that researchers 1) ask what people are willing to commit their precious time to doing and subsequently 2) pay attention to the myths they tell in sustaining these actions and the way that the imagination brings these to life. I suggest that it places conceptual constraints on explorations of nonreligious imaginaries. Perhaps it does not matter whether people believe that a literary figure really existed or whether or not people believe in life after death. Instead what matters is the agentive force the characters they are imagining have over their lives
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