The mixing of perspectives within a community (as I noted) makes your example problematic, but I agree that some easy cases exist: for example, a church that preaches “faith healing” for sick children may be expected to run into a specific set of difficulties, not shared by a church that tells everyone to reinterpret texts for themselves in the light of reason. And again, I agree that pronouncements of people claiming to be Jesus may be taken as indicators of delusionality. Both cases involve belief, whereas I claim that in religion, non-propositional linguistic behavior, is more significant than propositional (as regards unusual beliefs).
I’m waiting to see if anyone disagrees with my main assertions, that orthogonal-to-facts religion can be valuable, and that it is not a modern phenomenon.
I appreciate the effort to sort out “improper beliefs”. As a philosopher with a background in distinguishing surface-level propositions from speech acts with goals that may be masked by those propositions as such, I am inclined simply to say that “improper beliefs” are NOT beliefs. I prefer reserving “belief” for the anticipatory dispositional beliefs that you call “proper”.
This is so far just a semantic difference, but the real difference comes out when you say that people have to “convince themselves they are passionate”. From my perspective, no such “convincing” is necessary when a person moves from literal to nonliteral interpretations of mythic language, because the esoteric perspective can be as exciting and full of significance as the exoteric. People can be passionate about the real, positive benefits of religious practices: psychological well-being, social connectedness, aesthetic sensibility, self-respect, etc. Discovering these benefits as the real meaning of myths can be as eye-opening as the adoption of a counterfactual, mythic perspective.