Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith

Carole M. Cusack is a professor of religious studies at the University of Sydney with no membership in Discordianism or any of the other deliberately invented religions the book examines, and it was published by an academic press specialising in religious studies monographs. It is treated in the study of new religious movements as a standard scholarly account of religions consciously created as fiction, including Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius and Jediism, arguing that a religion's origin as a deliberate invention does not by itself settle whether its practitioners hold it sincerely. Cusack draws on Discordianism's own published Principia Discordia and on secondary accounts of its practitioners rather than reproducing the movement's own voice uncritically. This record has not independently traced a documented history of scholarly rebuttal to Cusack's specific claims. Use it for Discordianism's place among deliberately invented religions and the question of sincerity its own self presentation as a joke raises; use Adam Gorightly's insider history for the movement's detailed internal narrative.