Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture

by David Chidester

Authentic Fakes explores the religious dimensions of American popular culture in unexpected places: baseball, the Human Genome Project, Coca-Cola, rock 'n' roll, the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, the charisma of Jim Jones, Tupperware, and the free market, to name a few. Chidester travels through the cultural landscape and discovers the role that fakery—in the guise of frauds, charlatans, inventions, and simulations—plays in creating religious experience. His book is at once an incisive analysis of the relationship between religion and popular culture and a celebration of the myriad ways in which invention can stimulate the religious imagination.

Moving beyond American borders, Chidester considers the religion of McDonald’s and Disney, the discourse of W.E.B. Du Bois and the American movement in Southern Africa, the messianic promise of Nelson Mandela’s 1990 tour to America, and more. He also looks at the creative possibilities of the Internet in such phenomena as Discordianism, the Holy Order of the Cheeseburger, and a range of similar inventions. Arguing throughout that religious fakes can do authentic religious work, and that American popular culture is the space of that creative labor, Chidester looks toward a future “pregnant with the possibilities of new kinds of authenticity.”

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy

306 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2005

About the author

David Chidester is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town.

Reviews

[Iris Olwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was actually one of the more mid books I’ve ever read for school. The point was that there was no point and it was so gimmicky and blerghh.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chidester is a fun thinker and writer who really looks for ways that popular culture, American culture, and religion intersect, and then just gives lots of details about those intersections, ultimately providing a really unique look at the face of contemporary religion and where it can be unexpectedly found. This book is a great study in the varieties and vagaries of American religious experience in culture, and some really surprising ways that that culture has worked itself out into globalized commodities and symbols. The writing was always lucid, the anecdotes and examples vivid, and the theorizing clear and concise. I didn't always love the way that chapters did/didn't connect together and I wasn't always clear on the main idea carrying across the collection of chapters, but still felt like I learned a lot about how people are conceiving of and arguing about religion in culture today.

[Karis · Rating 5 out of 5]

that was a doozy and it was fucking brilliant i don't care what the reviewers say, y'all didn't grow up confused about the inexplicability of the eclectic crosshairs of transglobal exchange and it shows - also y'all aren't kept up at night by a fascination with meta fan culture like i am and that's whatever, my brain is a wild place to be and this was fun

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my area, so I didn't get much from it. Pop culture and religion and how they over lap.