Sympathizer

A sympathizer is someone who has affinities with or interests in a religious tradition, but who does not affiliate exclusively with that tradition. Sympathizers are attracted to some elements of one religious/cultural tradition or another; they also tend to combine different aspects from different traditions. Some sympathizers are unaffiliated, while others belong to a different religious tradition than the one from which they are borrowing.

Most people who self-identify as “Daoists” in America are sympathizers. They tend to have neither commitment to the religious tradition which is Daoism nor formal standing in the Daoist religious community. Some even go so far as to deny, dismiss or denigrate the cultural and socio-historical factuality of Daoism as a religious tradition.

Further Reading: Daoism: A Short Introduction/James Miller; Daoism and Chinese Culture/Livia Kohn; Daoism Handbook/Livia Kohn (ed.); Daoist Identity/Livia Kohn and Harold Roth (eds.); Daoism in China/Wang Yi’e; Faces of Buddhism in America/Charles Prebish and Kenneth Tanaka (eds.); Taoism: The Enduring Tradition/Russell Kirkland; The American Encounter with Buddhism/Thomas Tweed; “The Dao of America”/Elijah Siegler; “The Taoism of China and the Taoism of the Western Imagination”/Russell Kirkland; “Tracing the Contours of Daoism in North America”/Louis Komjathy; Westward Dharma/Charles Prebish and Martin Baumann (eds.).

See also Adherent, Americanization, Daoist, and Daoism.