Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation

Bucars sharp insights, shot through with humor and self-awareness, are exactly what we need the next time we reach over to borrow from someone elses religion for our own therapeutic, political, or educational needs.
Gene Demby, cohost and correspondent for NPRs Code Switch

So finely written, so intelligent and fair, and laced with such surprising discoveries that it deserves a readers full attentionAs the act of walking a religious pilgrimage does invite greater self-awarenessStealing My Religion is now an essential part of that worthy endeavor. Kurt Caswell, Los Angeles Review of Books

Lively in style and backed by solid, unobtrusive scholarship. Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement

With interpretive subtlety and ethical vision, Liz Bucar explores the moral risk of intercultural theft. Stealing My Religion is a powerful intervention by a leading scholar of religion into the illiberal results of everyday religious exploitation. Highly recommended. Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion

Liz Bucar unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, economic, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from anothers religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Bucar sees religion as an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because faiths overlap and imitate each other and because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. Indeed, if we are to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are.

Stealing My Religion guides us through three revealing case studiesthe hijab as a feminist signal of Muslim allyship, a study abroad pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, and the commodification of yoga in the West. We see why the Vatican cant grant Rihanna permission to dress up as the pope, yet its still okay to roll out our yoga mats. Reflecting on her own missteps, Bucar comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isnt to borrow less but to borrow moreto become deeply invested in learning the roots and diverse meanings of our enthusiasms.