Faith or Fraud: Fortune-Telling, Spirituality, and the Law by Jeremy Patrick (review)

Faith or Fraud narrates a history of fortune-telling in England, Canada, Australia, and the United States with the salutary goal of expanding the scope of religious freedom law. Jeremy Patrick, who is a sensitive and critical reader of his sources, shows how the law has traditionally favored organized and monotheistic traditions, especially the historically dominant forms of Christianity, which have long set the standard for what counts as religion across the Anglophone world. Unfortunately, Patrick does not engage the burgeoning religious studies scholarship on the limits of religious freedom or the cultural politics of the category of religion. Still, he builds a compelling case for how and why legal conceptions of religious freedom can change to better accommodate nonmainstream forms of spiritual practice.

The book is admirably organized to meet this goal. An initial chapter maps the terrain by offering a definition of fortune-telling and historically related terms—including divination, crafty science, witchcraft, and channeling—and explains the choice of fortune-telling as the term most commonly deployed in popular culture and case law, as well as the relevant scholarship. Chapters 2 through 5 detail pertinent legal histories, country by country, starting with England as the historical foundation for the other three. Chapter 6 synthesizes these histories to note that legal practice in all four countries has tended to assume the fraudulence of fortune-telling. Courts have consistently raised the question of whether such practices should always be illegal or whether that judgement should require a finding of fraudulent intent. Patrick challenges the premises of that debate by arguing that fortune-tellers serve functions that cannot analytically be distinguished from those offered by counselors or by more traditionally recognized religious practitioners. Fortune-telling and related “spiritual” practices, he concludes, should be protected by religious freedom law.

Thinking with a wider range of historical and religious studies scholarship could have significantly deepened this argument. Patrick only barely notes the gendered, racial, and imperial contexts that framed the legal histories he narrates. It is no accident that early English restrictions on fortune-telling developed alongside vagrancy laws to regulate the perceived problem of “Gypsies” (Romani). Patrick’s examples—but not his analysis— make it clear that the legal regulation of witchcraft, fortune-telling, conjuring, and curanderismo have most often targeted women, especially women of color. He also slides a bit too easily from an Anglophone history of regulations on fortune-telling into contemporary questions about the New Age and an array of nontraditional spiritual practices. Such practices also draw on Indigenous and immigrant traditions that have been legally restricted in ways that are distinct from the story Patrick tells. Thinking more broadly about the racial and imperial politics of these regulations, at least in broad strokes, would only have strengthened this book. Including Indigenous and immigrant practices and practitioners in the story would raise a different set of questions, too, about cultural appropriation and the limits of an individualistic framework for religious freedom.

Patrick could also have deepened his analysis of the tension between the individual and the corporate body in religious freedom law. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2020), for example, reveals that U.S. law has privileged not just Christianity but the church as a corporate body. Sullivan’s earlier books (2009 and 2014) also show how Christian conceptions of religion have shaped U.S. law. Patrick does note that legal standards have privileged organized churches, delegitimizing the more diffuse and often more individualistic practices, such as “spiritual counseling,” that have been gaining popularity in recent years. Armed with a broader set of disciplinary interlocutors, he might have offered a more trenchant analysis of why these limits on religious freedom have been so persistent and so difficult to transcend.

No single book can do everything, and perhaps it is unfair to rehearse the themes that Patrick has not fully addressed. As a detailed history of the debates over fortune-telling in four different countries, and as...