Epiphenomenalism sits at the far end of the spectrum from nearly every religious account of mind, since a soul that causes nothing, that never actually moves the body it inhabits or answers the prayers it seems to offer, does very little of the work a soul is traditionally supposed to do; the position is consequently almost entirely a philosophical and scientific one, with essentially no religious tradition adopting it as a description of the soul, in contrast to interactionism, occasionalism, and even property dualism, each of which has genuine religious analogues. Its main philosophical rivals are interactionism, which restores full two-way causation at the cost of the interaction problem, and physicalist identity theory, which avoids the causal-inertness worry entirely by denying that mind and brain are even two things capable of one causing the other, holding instead that they are strictly identical.
Contemporary defenders of epiphenomenalism, a minority position even within analytic philosophy of mind, generally argue that it is the most honest way to take both physics, which seems to leave no causal gaps for mind to fill, and consciousness, which seems undeniably real, seriously at the same time, whatever the cost to common-sense intuitions about free deliberate action.