SF, Audience Cults and Hope

I've little to add to this, but wanted to reblog it here as food for thought. It's from Jason Horsley's Reality Sandwich blog:

The phrase "audience cult" was coined by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (self-identified "religious engineer") in their 1985 book, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. An audience cult is not a religion, nor is it a formal group whose members can be identified (either by one another or by themselves). And yet they can be identified-by shared interest. People who "believe in UFOs" as part of an extraterrestrial experimentation/hybridization program, for example, belong to an audience cult. People who believe in ancient astronauts from elsewhere, or in psychedelics as a tool for self-realization, in regular meditation and a vegan diet, astrology, runes, and Tarot, communicating with the dead, the power of occult rituals, and so on, all belong to one amorphous audience cult or another. These audience cults overlap with other audience cults, and membership to one does not prohibit membership to another. They also overlap with more overtly fantasy-based audience cults such as comic book fans, sci-fi fans, or "Trekkies," yet it's worth noting that the area of overlap is not as great as might be thought. Sci-fi fans are often quite skeptical or dismissive of "true believers," and vice versa. The reason may be found in the following, from The Future of Religion: "One very general but vague compensator is communicated through all audience cults: diffuse hope. If extraordinary things are possible, then one may hope for anything and everything. Audience cults proclaim the existence of cracks in the structure of the mundane world through which any imaginable marvel might suddenly appear. . . . If each audience cult projects a narrow ray of hope, then, together, audience cults project a broad if dim spectrum of hopes combining to form a vague impression of heaven. Thus, although each cult is far from being a religion, collectively, they communicate a pale reflection of the religious. . . . [A]udience cults are connected to a state of free-floating optimism-something less than true belief in the notions of the cults-the diffuse feeling that all things are possible but that nothing is certain to be true. . . . Rather than thrusting people into a storm-tossed sea of confusion without anchor or life raft, [this feeling] may compensate for an all too rigid, mundane life."