Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

Harry Potter, in other words, isn’t just a story we enjoy reading. Rather, it’s had a measurable impact on a whole generation’s moral universe. In an age when fewer and fewer people read the Bible, the media properties of fan culture are the closest thing the Remixed have to sacred texts.

We do not live in a godless world. Rather, we live in a profoundly anti-institutional one, where the proliferation of Internet creative culture and consumer capitalism have rendered us all simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity. America is not secular but simply spiritually self-focused.

Kek wasn’t “real” in the sense that nobody believed he was metaphysically out there, offline. But he was real in the sense that he served as a celebration of the randomness of online culture, which relished in the chaos that Trump seemed poised to bring to America. That chaos, they knew deep down, reflected the structure of the world all along.

Much of the responsibility for that shift belongs to institutions themselves. Traditional religions, traditional political hierarchies, and traditional understandings of society have been unwilling or unable to offer compellingly meaningful accounts of the world, provide their members with purpose, foster sustainable communities, or put forth evoca

The ultimate object of worship he sees in a society’s church is society itself. “God,” he writes in Elementary Forms, “and society are one of the same.… The god of the clan can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined” as a totem, be it plant, animal, or deity. “Religious force,” he ultimately concludes, is “nothin

One fan created his own special coin to “tip” the bellhop who escorts guests from the bar into the show proper. Another developed his own costumed character—a lumberjack named Clyde—and took to haunting the McKittrick’s (non-ticketed) rooftop garden bar while studying for his university exams, delighting in the fact that most people never quite fig

In his 1911 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim argues that religion is basically the glue that keeps a society together: a set of rituals and beliefs that people affirm in order to strengthen their identity as a group. Religion, he writes, is a “unified system of beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community cal

As journalist Amanda Hess writes in the New York Times, “Shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a purchase need not have any explicit social byproduct—the materials eco-friendly, or the proceeds donated to charity—to be weighted with significance.

Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences.