Author: Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris
Publisher: Baylor University Press, 2010
Price: £16.99 (paperback)
Isbn: 9781602581814

Snakes and Ladders evolved in 2nd-century BC India to explain to children the rewards of goodness (the 100th square may have represented nirvana) and the downsides of being bad. Or it was invented in 13th-century Tibet. Whichever is true, religion and play have never inhabited totally separate realms. Because they transmit and reflect cultural values, they are fair game, as it were, for academic research – and provide more fun (innocent and otherwise) than most academic noodling. This is certainly the only book I’ve read with the URL for a Baby Jesus butt plug.

Religious merchandising is a money-spinner with the potential for massive brand extension: Divali Barbie is made in the same Chinese factory as hijab-wearing Fulla, which is marketed as an anti-Barbie, as are the Gali Girls which provide “strong Jewish values” and the Virgin Mary dolls that “encourage young girls to pursue biblical womanhood”. Poor old Barbie, the “Jewish doll” with “revealing clothes and shameful postures” who so annoyed the Saudi religious police…

Sales, in the case of these dolls and various board games described, are important: they may bring more people to whichever god is being promoted. Kingdom of Heaven is sold as “a miracle”, “an excellent gift”, “a powerful evangelistic tool” and most importantly as “an invaluable investment” that may return a “harvest of life eternal”.

This mixture of consumerism and religion is sometimes a little queasy. The board game Missionary Conquest (“Conquer the world – for Christ”) is “one giant game of laughter and strategy”. And as the authors point out, games that are supposed to teach religious ethics are often mass-produced under appalling working condit­ions. Furthermore, in the struggle to make leisure activies morally acceptable, games are made more like work, and if participation is enforced, is ‘play’ still ‘fun’?

The control of fun may be a serious business within the Abrahamic religions, but the Indian model of reality, maya-lila, a coming together of illusion and play, overturns this. Rather than being what Richard Schechner calls “a rotten category”, play opens up “a host of ‘interpenetrating, transformable, nonexclusive, porous realities’”: “it is what the universe consists of”.

Which leads on, of course, to a fascinating discussion of magic… Will playing with Virgin Mary dolls ensure girls pick up quiet modesty by diffusion? Fortunately, playing with dolls has subversion built in, perhaps because they look human, so they may escape the highly scripted play their buyers hoped for and end up decapitated or in sexualised play as Barbies do.

This gorgeous book shows play’s potential to exacerbate sectarian intolerance.

Get rid of the nasty aftertaste with After The Rapture Mints – “for those of us who aren’t going anywhere”.