Open-Source Religion: Co-Creating Symbols to Prevent Their Calcification

Brendan Graham Dempsey identifies a pervasive pattern in religious history he terms "retroactive canonization": the institutional tendency to take symbols and doctrines that were actively developed, debated, and transformed over time and then present them as having always carried their current meaning. Plotinus radically extends Plato, yet the Neoplatonic tradition retroactively collapses this development, claiming mere exegesis of what was always already there. The living process of symbolic evolution is frozen; its constructed nature is systematically erased. Dempsey argues that the critical distinction between an adaptive wisdom tradition and a calcifying one lies precisely in whether this constructedness is owned or concealed.

From this diagnosis, Dempsey advances a structural proposal: an "open-source religion" in which Symbol generation is explicitly collaborative, digitally distributed, and bottom-up. Canon in such a framework emerges through collective salience — what resonates and persists across participants — rather than through doctrinal imposition. The wiki-generated mandala, the collaboratively evolved sacred Image, the meaning-wave distilled from dialogue: these function not as aesthetic experiments but as epistemic mechanisms designed to keep the Mythos self-aware of its own provisional character.

The deepest claim is phenomenological: it is structurally difficult to reify or literalize a Symbol you participated in constructing. The visibility of the making process serves as what Dempsey frames as a natural prophylactic against idolatry. Participatory construction preserves the tension between continuity and openness that living traditions require — shared reference sufficient for community coherence, combined with explicit awareness that the symbols remain under construction and subject to ongoing collective revision.