Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction Markus Altena Davidsen (Leiden University, The Netherlands) 9780367892128

The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and certain other works of fantasy and science fiction have inspired some of their readers and viewers to believe that the superhuman powers of the story-worlds, such as Gandalf and the Force, exist also in the real world. We can say that such fictional narratives possess 'religious affordance', for they contain certain textual features that afford or make possible a religious, rather than just a fictional, use of the text.

This book aims to identify those features of the text that make it possible for a fictional narrative to inspire belief in the supernatural beings of the story, or even to facilitate ritual interaction with these 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. 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. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Religion.

"Whether or not religion scholars are interested in fantasy literature, the analysis of affordances in this volume has a number of exciting theoretical implications for the field. I found these insights applicable to horror texts such as The Exorcist, which a number of historians have connected to the resurgence of exorcism and deliverance ministry in the 1970s. There are also important implications for the study of conspiracy theories and what political scientist Michael Barkun called "fact-fiction reversals," in which conspiracy theorists claim that nominally fictional stories are actually true. More broadly, the authors demonstrate that narrative is an incredibly important, yet surprisingly understudied dimension of religious studies. We will likely be reading about affordances again in the future."

Joseph P. Laycock, Texas State University