They prioritize intuitional spirituality over institutional religion. And they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems.

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.

Consumer-capitalist culture offers us not merely necessities but identities. Meaning, purpose, community, and ritual can all—separately or together—be purchased on Amazon Prime.

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.

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

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

Back in 2007, 15 percent of Americans called themselves religiously unaffiliated, meaning that they didn’t consider themselves to be members of any traditional organized religion. By 2012, that number had risen to 20 percent, and to 30 percent when it came to adults under thirty.3 Now, those numbers are higher still. About a quarter of American

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.

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