Chidester, David. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 294+xii pp. $50.00 US (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-24279-1;  $21.95 US (paperback), ISBN 0-520-24280-7.

[1] In Authentic Fakes, David Chidester explains how “the traces of transcendence, the sacred, and the ultimate” saturate American popular culture (10).  Far from flighty or irrelevant, the author posits that popular culture “has a lot to do with how Americans in the United States think about America” (29). “America” casts a large shadow in this book, extending beyond territorial boundaries and into the global theatre.  An American-born professor of comparative religion at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Chidester is in a unique position to witness America’s widespread influence.  As a result, he delivers a captivating series of dispatches from popular culture, each revealing how religion is at work in some unlikely places throughout the world.  Both scholars of religion and popular culture and theorists of religion should read this book.  At its core, this volume is a penetrating study of religion, its meanings, locations, practices, and importance. 

[2] From the outset, Chidester makes provocative claims about where “religious activity is at work in forming community, focusing desire, and facilitating exchange” (5).  The author cites the “church of baseball,” which he claims creates a “community of allegiance” for followers of the sport (33).  The “religion of Coca-Cola,” Chidester continues, revolves around a sparkling beverage “that no one needs but everyone desires” (34).  Rock music also bears the traces of religion, with its ritualized exchange of enthusiasm and intensity between “ritual specialists” (music artists) and the “congregation” (music fans) (34).  Chidester applies similar religious language to McDonalds, Disney, Tupperware, and the Human Genome Project.  Recognizing that some will dismiss his findings on the grounds that he stretches the definition of religion too far, the author recalls the European explorers who initially labeled New World inhabitants “atheists.”  Europeans revised this assumption by “[extending] familiar metaphors—those that were already associated with religion, such as the belief in God, rites of worship, and the maintenance of moral order—to the strange beliefs and practices of other human populations” (50).  For Chidester, relating the “familiar metaphors” of community, desire, and exchange to the “strange” world of popular culture, undoubtedly shows religion at work. 

[3] The book’s attention-grabbing tone continues when Chidester compares the civil religious rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and Jim Jones, both of whom emphasized the redemptive quality of individual and collective sacrifice.  American democracy and capitalism were essential components of Reagan’s creed.  In contrast, they were demonic plagues for Jones, a self-proclaimed communist revolutionary who led the mass-suicide of over nine hundred people in 1978.  Despite their differences, the author proposes, “Reagan looked a lot like Jim Jones, inverted mirror images, perhaps, one at the center, the other at the periphery of American society, but both reflecting an ideology that negotiates redemption through the supreme expenditure” (110).  Instead of dismissing Jones’s as “fake,” the author brings the religious leader into indirect conversation with Reagan, noting along the way their ironic similarities and profound differences. 

[4] Chidester’s study takes a transatlantic turn with his examination of shamanism and the complex career of South African, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa.  Beginning in the 1950s, Mutwa claimed to be a genuine receiver of Zulu tradition.  During the following decades, he oversaw a series of South African cultural villages, all the while flaunting his credentials as a witchdoctor and healer.  While popular with tourists, fellow South Africans labeled Mutwa a spiritual fraud.  His final cultural village closed in 1994.  But in the following years, TheAfrican.com and Credomutwa.com gave Mutwa a new building space and a new audience.  In the United States, the supposed shaman has earned the approval of New Age enthusiasts, environmentalists, animal-rights activists, and extra-terrestrial conspiracy theorists (Mutwa claims to have had alien encounters).  With a hint of irony, Chidester concludes that Mutwa has “achieved a greater aura of authenticity in cyberspace than in Africa” (188). 

[5] The discussion of religion, authenticity, and the Internet continues with the volume’s investigation of “real fakes,” or religions that flaunt their fakeness.  The Discordians, for example, supposedly began in 1957 in a California bowling alley when two friends had a vision of Eris, “Goddess of Discord and Confusion and Really Scwewy [sic] Stuff” (199).  From this encounter, a mythology developed, a community formed, and offshoots sprang (such as the Illuminated Knights of Otis and the Intergalactic House of Fruitcakes).  These “religions” are all patently fake; however, Chidester proposes, “Let us call them religions, since they are real fakes, acting just as religions even if they are completely fake, because they are doing real religious work in a medium of communication in which anything, even religion, seems possible” (212).  Again, the author makes an ostensibly counterintuitive claim: Even the Discordians can do “real religious work” by imitating, parodying, and/or criticizing “real” religions.

[6] In his preface, Chidester expresses his hope that readers will, “see all of the religious fakery in this volume as an occasion for thinking about authenticity” (xii).  The author most certainly succeeds in meeting this objective.  When talking about “real fakes,” Chidester cites the Landover Baptist Church (202).  Interested, I visited their site and happened upon a sermon  concerning the brutal 1998 murder of Wyoming’s Matthew Sheppard, an openly gay man.  “True Christians,” the fictitious address reads, “believe that every word of the Bible was dictated by God, Himself.  They consequently must believe that God, the Father, ordered that people who ate the wrong food or messed around before marriage should be punished in a way even more brutal than Sheppard was killed.”  Some may find this mock sermon outlandish, absurd, irreverent, and decidedly unfunny.  But compare it with similar statements on Godhatesfags.com, the website of Pastor Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church—a “real” church.  Here, I located an image of a memorial stone to Sheppard, which announces that he “entered Hell on October 12, 1998, at age 21, in defiance of God’s Warning: ‘Thou Shalt Not Lie With Mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.’”  With Chidester in mind, we may conclude that Landover—a “real fake”—is doing “real religious work” by mimicking, mocking, and criticizing the sexual theology of Phelps and others.  Indeed, Authentic Fakes both provokes interest in religion and popular culture, and provides a vocabulary for talking about it.  In doing so, Chidester has made a significant contribution to this fascinating field.

Arthur Remillard
St. Francis University (Loretto, PA)
aremillard@francis.edu