Religious imaginations: religious literacy as the reading of signs

Drawing together Charles Taylor’s idea of the social imaginary and the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, this article develops an account of religious literacy as the expansion of imagination. It argues that a conventional description of ‘world religions’ is reductive and essentialised, while the counteracting focus on instances of ‘lived religion’ fails to do justice to the organising power and scope of religious traditions. Both approaches draw on an imaginative framework of signs that shape the believer’s understanding of the world and their place within it. Religious literacy is an awareness of the key features and contours of these contrasting imaginative landscapes. Seeing religious traditions in these terms gives a better account of how they can be pathologized as they are drawn away from the mystical, analogical reading of signs that characterises any religious imaginary. To illustrate the theories set out, two contrasting examples of the Christian imagination are explored: American Christian Nationalism and the Forest Churches of Ethiopia.