A judge in Nebraska has ruled that Pastafarianism is not a religion and that prisoner Stephen Cavanaugh may not wear a colander on his head; he had claimed that this was a requirement of his beliefs, and so protected under the first amendment. Since Pastafarianism was clearly invented as a spoof on fundamentalist Christianity, and, in particular, the demand that literal creationism be taught in science classes, the judge was obviously right.

But the case of Pastafarianism does raise the question of what makes a religion religious. To a certain sort of secularising imagination, the answer is obvious: religions are distinguished by demanding belief in ridiculous things that can’t possibly be true. That’s certainly the reasoning behind Pastafarianism. Of course it is absurd to suppose that the universe was created by a giant bowl of spaghetti, but is it any more absurd than to suppose that dead men can be resurrected, or live prophets ride horses through the sky?

When Bob Marley shouted “Rastafari! Appointed by God” at the end of a concert in London, no one laughed but, if he had shouted “Pastafari! Appointed to God”, the effect would have been very different, even though you would have to have a brain baked to the consistency of a hash brownie to suppose that Haile Selassie was actually divine. Absurdity on its own will not usefully distinguish religion from other forms of belief.

The appeal to common sense turns out to have quite strict limits. Almost everything that modern science tells us is intuitively untrue, and much more interesting than common sense can imagine. If the defence of scientific knowledge is that it can be supported by evidence, this too turns out to be more complicated and much less secure than seemed obvious 150 years ago. The things that we take for granted – democracy, equality, human rights, and so on – turn out to be very easy to deny, in theory, as well as in practice, and impossible to justify except by their fruits. They are just as vulnerable to the charge of absurdity as most religions are.

But if the secular world doesn’t understand religion, it’s just as arguable that the religious world doesn’t either. The idea that “religion” can be separated from other parts of life implies there is also a sphere of “irreligious” or “secular” life. Not all societies make that distinction. It is absolutely fundamental to American Protestantism, of which Pastafarianism is an outgrowth. Religion, in this sense, is taken to be a special sort of belief which people ought freely to choose. But that is not what makes for deep and strong beliefs.

Pastafarian wedding ceremony on Akaroa harbour, New Zealand Guardian

You can see this by comparing Americans’ attitudes to the Bible with their attitudes to their constitution, which they really do hold to be a sacred and authoritative text that contains the secrets of human flourishing, and the methods to untangle any political problem. To think about the Bible like that marks you out as a fundamentalist, but to think of the constitution in that way just makes you an American. So the strongest religion is one that doesn’t understand it’s a religion at all.

The same kind of thing applies on a personal level. It’s not theology but ritual that makes a religion, and the strongest rituals are those performed without any clear idea of what they mean. The real future for Pastafarianism is not to be found in Nebraska, but in New Zealand, where a couple have just got married in the first Pastafarian ceremony. Weddings, however frivolously entered into, do end up meaning something, but the meaning is not in the vows. It emerges, for good or ill, out of the subsequent marriage.