Fiction and religion: how narratives about the supernatural inspire religious belief – introducing the thematic issue

Abstract

This article introduces a thematic issue of Religion that interrogates the religious use of fantasy and science fiction in the contemporary religious field. The overall aim of the thematic issue is to identify those textual features that make it possible for a given fictional story to be used as a religious narrative, that is, to inspire belief in the supernatural beings of the story-world, and to facilitate ritual interaction with said beings. The contributions analyse the religious affordance and actual use of a wide range of texts, spanning from Harry Potter and Star Wars, over The Lord of the Rings and late 19th-century Scandinavian fantasy, to the Christian Gospels. Over the course of the thematic issue, the conclusion emerges that there exists a hierarchy of three levels of religious affordance that fictional narratives can possess: to afford belief in the supernatural beings of the story, a text must present those supernatural beings as real within the story-world; to afford ritual interaction with said beings, a text must include model rituals and inscribe the reader into the narrative; to afford belief in the historicity of the narrated events, a text must anchor the story-world in the actual world. Although we focus on the religious affordance of fictional texts, we also spell out implications for the study of religious narratives in general, and for the narrativist study of religion.