Autism and the Supernatural: Experiential Dimensions of Religiosity, Spirituality and Imagination

Autism is typically framed as a condition characterized by difficulties in understanding other minds. From this idea, a seemingly straightforward conclusion has followed: if autistic people struggle with social mindreading, perceived relationships with invisible gods, spirits, and other supernatural agents should be unlikely-and perhaps even impossible. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Autism and the Supernatural invites the reader into the everyday worlds of autistic young adults who describe themselves as religious or spiritual. Based on close, collaborative ethnography that treats autistic accounts as essential sources of knowledge, this book reveals a rich landscape of supernatural meaning-making grounded in sensory perception, narrative worlds, emotional attachment, and embodied experience. These findings demonstrate how such experiences emerge at the intersection of cognition, culture, and lived bodily reality-and how autistic perspectives bring the limitations of dominant models into view while opening new conceptual possibilities.

Engaging with the cognitive science of religion, anthropology, and critical autism studies, Autism and the Supernatural offers fresh insights into the diversity of religious experience and argues that cognitive difference is not a problem to be explained away, but a vital resource for rethinking belief, imagination, and the human enactment of the world.