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

But, other scholars have argued, religion isn’t just about social glue. It’s also about making sense of the world around us: answering the question What does it all mean? Another foundational scholar in the field, Peter Berger, argues that religion is ultimately about creating a coherent and meaningful narrative.

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.

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 adu

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

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

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.

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

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.