Holy Order of the Claw : Memetisk religiositet mellan shitposting och allvarifiering

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines Holy Order of the Claw (HOC), a Facebook group that has, since 2020, gathered hundreds of thousands of members around the idea of creating, caring for, and ultimately ”worshipping” a future leviathan lobster deity: the Lorb. The study asks how HOC emerged and developed organizationally, which practices and symbols structures its communication, and how the group can be understood as a religious community in relation to comtemporary concepts of religion. Empirically, the analysis combines semi-structured interviews with key participants and a corpus of digital documents (posts, comments, and internal texts). Methodologically, it applies a theory-driven thematic analysis. The theoretical framework integrates Teemu Taira’s notion of liquid religion with perspectives on digital third spaces and carnivalesque approach to parody and sacrofanum. Findings show that HOC’s religiosity is not best described as a linear shift from ”joke” to ”religion”, but as a gradual stabilization of forms that remain ambivalent. The group’s origin operates as a carnivalesque legitimation: participation becomes possible without confession as members ”play” their way into a shared sacred semiotics. During the pandemic, Facebook functions not merely as a channel but as a gathering place where recurring expressions (memes, catchphrases, commandments) and collaborative projects become a kind of memetic liturgy. Creativity is ritualized through collective production, while ”semiotic upscaling” lends epic weight to ordinary or technical language. Through an as-if ontology and deferred teleology, members can act as if the narrative were true without committing to fixed transcendent belief. These dynamics are synthesized through the concept of sincerification: a process in which an initially ironic, low-commitment expressive system becomes socially durable as religiosity – not by abandoning irony, but by concentrating meaning through repetition, relations, and shared investment.