Q&A with Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

You’ve argued that the secularization thesis—the idea that societies become more secular as science and technology advance—misses the mark. How so?

I think that secularization theory, as it’s classically been formulated, left out a lot of different groups of people. It left out women, it left out people from minoritized communities, and there was a whole class-dependent focus, given how much of secularization theory has hitherto been preoccupied by a predominantly white middle class. One of the things that I’m hoping to do is to provide a counterbalance to dominant theories about secularization or secularity. Most of the secularization research has been focused on elites and church/state relations. And so, part of what I’m doing is recovering a whole body of material that often got omitted precisely because it didn’t fit cleanly into categories of specific religions, but often serves as the interchange between them. Many contemporary debates around popular belief are completely misguided and misdirected because the contemporary period is much more “enchanted” than it has historically been accorded.

Enchanted how?

Disaggregating secularization and disenchantment gives you a window into our contemporary history that I think people have hitherto tended to ignore. According to some accounts, we should be living in the age of sparkling reason and rationality. But if you look at the survey data, it’s something like 73 percent of Americans have at least one paranormal belief. If we look at sociological data that compares Western Europe to North America, even in the United States, where something like 90 percent of Americans are still saying that they believe in God, or a deity, or a higher power, in Europe, even as there is a decline in belief in God, there is no similar decline in belief in things like ghosts.

How do you see this enchantment playing out?

For example, you can go to Walmart and buy spirit crystals. You can summon an Australian witch on eBay and get them to curse someone for you. New Age publishing is a very significant form of publishing in the United States. This is a whole area that is very understudied—incredibly understudied—because most scholars in religious studies have focused on big traditions, so-called, or world religions. Also, most folks looking at contemporary folk magic or psychical practices have done so as part of anthropological encounters with a putative non-West.

The examples you gave have a distinct economic angle. How does economics play into your research?

So, in line with secularization theory, there was a narrative that capitalism and the economic logic of the market would strip away different kinds of values and different kinds of irrationality. So, there was a model of human nature as if humans were basically rational choice actors. But it turns out that capitalism has its own enchantment spelled into it. Looking at the numbers, I think economic precarity is actually one of the drivers for, say, consultations with fortune tellers.

And there’s a long history of fortune tellers of the stock market as well. Wall Street has often hired various forms of prognosticators from the 19th century to the present. And so, this isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has come and gone in waves.