Scriptures, Schisms, and (Digital) Spiritualities

This paper will explore the dynamics of Free Zone Scientology, an umbrella term for all Scientologists practising outside the institutional Church of Scientology (CoS), in the digital age. The relationship between the Free Zone and CoS is marked by tensions surrounding the legitimacy of each group's application of L. Ron Hubbard's 'spiritual technology'. Indeed, the CoS positions the use of Scientology outside its remit to constitute the heretical act of 'squirrelling'. Drawing from my ethnographic research of Freezoners who primarily practise Scientology online, I will demonstrate that digital applications of Scientology have significantly transformed how Scientology is practised and understood by contemporary Scientologists. These innovations point to key issues for scholars - including the ways in which established new religious movements transition and transform in online spaces, breakdowns in routinized charisma, and how the intentions of the CoS have been subverted by those practising in fluid and non-heirarchical digital envrionments. 

This paper analyzes capitalist spirituality and digital orientalism on Gaia.com's subscription-based streaming video service. Gaia's content creators primarily map East and West onto three dualities: intuition versus rationality, present in their fraught portrayal of science; spiritual versus material, present in their discussions of financial self-help; and collective versus individual, present in their descriptions of social crisis and imminent upheaval. To resolve the contradictions created by their circular logic of capitalist spirituality, Gaia’s writers draw from orientalist tropes to show that capitalist individualism can be redeemed by Eastern spirituality, and need not be challenged. On Gaia.com East redeems West, transforming it into something more sacred, more moral, more aligned, and allows spiritually receptive viewers to transcend the fears associated with capitalism while participating in it. Gaia.com is a rich archive for observing online religion, Carrette and King's concept of capitalist spirituality, and the aspirational, affective orientalism described by Jane Iwamura.

This paper presents a new theory on secular religiosity called Kidcore Spirituality. This new form of religiosity is linked to the Kidcore fetish and lifestyle that has become popular among a demographic who were raised in the 1980s and 1990s. Replacing and mimicking explicit religious upbringing and education, I shall highlight and argue how cartoons facilitate what religion has typically been expected to represent - moral teaching, community, ritual, salvation, and icon veneration. From Care Bears and He-Man to Spongebob and the Powerpuff Girls, multiple examples are shown to implicitly facilitate religiosity among children, and for adults, who grew up in the late twentieth century watching these cartoons and now aesthetically and nostalgically venerate and commemorate them. In my analysis I will present ethnographic examples of how such Kidcore Spirituality is demonstrated through tattoos, clothing, conventions, altars, and even through specific new religious movements.

The colorful Urantia movement grew up around The Urantia Book, a lengthy and mysterious tome that was first published in 1955 in Chicago and has since sold over one millions copies worldwide. The Urantia Foundation is the receiver of the original manuscript that it claims is authored by higher angels, and three rival “fellowship” organizations have arisen around this phenomenon since the 1990s, many of whom are educated professionals. Most adherents believe that the new revelation, said to be authorized by Christ himself, will bring about the radical reform of the Christian church. The three competing groups are now engaged in an intriguing power struggle—the key focus of my paper because it reflects sincere but conflicting responses to a rare claim of epoch-making revelation. I show how each response clusters around *one* of the classic three levels of interpretation of scripture first identified by Origen of Alexandria, who distinguished the literal, moral, and spiritual dimensions of scriptural texts. This influential NRM has distinctive, idiosyncratic, and often baffling social and literary characteristics requiring much more scrutiny by scholars.

Contemporary religion in the Philippines reveals the sticky residues of a long history of cultural mixing, multiple colonialisms, international commerce, and a global citizenry.  A nexus between empires and geographies, the 7,000+ island chain hosts the spectrum of religious and spiritual forms -- from international Roman Catholicism and Fo Guang Shan Buddhism to local village shamanism and local NRMs.  More recently, traditional beliefs and practices around magical objects (*anting-anting*) have coalesced into an NRM focused around the mythology of the Infinito Dios, a primordial deity whose identity is presumed to be a concession between the power and insistence of indigenous traditions and the imposition of Iberian Roman Catholicism.  This paper examines key aspects of the myth of the Infinito Dios and speculates on the origins of a narrative that, on the surface, appears as syncretized Indigenous beliefs in the creator god Bathala with the Roman Catholic *Dios*, but may in fact have origins in gnosticism and/or Manichaeism.