When the cards don’t add up: Vocabularies of motive, boundary-work, and rationalization in spiritual online discourse

Abstract

Contemporary spiritual practices like Tarot reading exist in contested epistemic spaces, requiring users to negotiate legitimacy and meaning in skeptical cultural contexts. This study examines how Tarot users construct and maintain the credibility of their practice through online discourse. Based on our thematic content analysis of three Reddit threads totaling 250 user comments, this article identifies how users deploy vocabularies of motive, boundary-work, and collective rationalization to justify and protect Tarot engagement. These findings emerge from empirical data, rather than being solely derived from existing literature. Users frame Tarot as emotional reflection and symbolic self-work rather than supernatural prediction, distinguishing it from religion, science, and superstition through hybrid stances emphasizing therapeutic dimensions. When readings appear inaccurate, users collectively rationalize these moments through symbolic reinterpretation and peer reinforcement, preserving the practice’s value. Three theoretical contributions emerge: distributed vocabularies of motive function as shared explanatory resources that persist across digital interactions as collective interpretive repertoires; boundary-work operates as flexible epistemic positioning, creating permeable spaces through strategic code-switching between knowledge frameworks; collective rationalization prioritizes affective regulation over logical consistency. These findings demonstrate how contemporary spiritual practices sustain legitimacy through flexible, collectively maintained discursive strategies rather than dogmatic belief systems, contributing to sociological understanding of meaning-making in digital contexts.