Hip hop artist Coolio was on the radio a lot in my younger days. One of his songs starts out:
This is some of the lingua-fringa of da funk business,
And people come from miles around
with an almost religious devotion to get on down…
Their dedication to dance at the club and to pick up chicks is “almost” religious. It’s analogous to it at least, right?
A few years earlier, when I was too young to listen to the radio, Madonna could be heard singing:
When you call my name it’s like a little prayer,
I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there.
Conversing with her lover is like talking to God.
More recently, Bruno Mars blurs the lines even further by using a metaphor instead of a simile (like Madonna) or quantitative comparison (like Coolio). On “Locked out of Heaven” he croons:
Never had much faith in love or miracles, Never wanna put my heart on the line.
But swimming in your world is something spiritual
I’m born again every time you spend the night
OK. So blurring the line between romantic love and divine love has a rich and long history. But I think this works its way into other quarters as well, like the devotion to Mammon over and against devotion to the creator.
Have you seen those ads from Charles Schwab with the middle-aged man pretending to be a hot stock trader from the comfort of his living room? More than a few people have pointed out that the stock ticker is like an oracle for those who worship at its altar. Our politicians speak constantly of “development” and “growth” being the instruments of our salvation. The “invisible hand of the market” is spoken of as there were very little to distinguish it from the providence of God.
The same goes for those who are devoted to some exciting consumer product and spend hours pouring over prophecies about its next iteration and some even traveling thousands of miles on a pilgrimage to catch a glimpse of it’s face. Look at these two photographs below – the first of several people fawning over an iPhone prototype on a pedestal and the other of a woman burning incense to the Buddha. Do they honestly look like activities of different natures?
What is going on here? I think all these kinds of devotions are the same. It is not that stuff directly involving God is “religious” and all this other stuff isn’t. With regards to how we direct our minds and use our bodies and time and energy, they are completely the same. They are essentially their own religions.
James K.A. Smith says as much here:
[George] Lindebeck recognized the French Revolution as a “quasi-religious phenomenon”. But why only QUASI-religious? In fact, it offers an “idiom for dealing with whatever is most important” and functions as a “ritual reiteration of certain definitions of what is ultimately good and true”. I’m suggesting that we drop the “quasi” and recognize such formative “secular” rituals as properly “religious.”
I use the term secular loosely since one of the implications of this analysis is that there is no secular. If humans are essentially liturgical animals, and cultural institutions are liturgical institutions, then there are no secular (a-religious or nonreligious) institutions.
-Desiring the Kingdom, footnotes on p.88
To eat or not to eat is not a viable question in life. “WHAT are you going to eat?” is. In the same way, to worship or not to worship is not the right question. The right question is: “WHAT are you worshipping?” What are you ascribing value to?