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Popular Culture as Religion: Faiths by Which We Naturally Live

Stephen M. Johnson

"Popular Culture as Religion: Faiths by Which We Naturally Live" first appeared first appeared in (and was copyrighted by) Popular Culture Review, V.1 (Feb 94), 107- 118. It shows how various forms of culture operate as natural religions, by providing their adherents "operating systems" for living. It includes an exploration of how the daily "secular" life of New Orleans, the local culture, functions for residents as classic African "primal religions" do for theirs. For more on culture operating as unannounced religion, see the author's forthcoming book American Matters: Civil Religion and Other Natural Faiths by which we live. For more on the "tribal" culture of New Orleans, and its derivation from the city's natural geography and topography, see the author's "New Orleans: An Unamerican Place and Its Physical Spirits"

Insisting that the question was not whether humans will be religious, but only how they will be, Erich Fromm once defined religion as "any framework of thought and action shared by a group which gives the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion." Though this helped show how secular ideologies and cultures could function as religions were "supposed to," Mircea Eliade argued persuasively that even the most consistent of secularized moderns still echo archaic religious ways of seeing and relating to their world. Even Marx and Freud, after all their economic and psychological analyses, had summarized their work and exhorted their readers in mythological and symbolic language. Describing the redemptive struggle of the suffering-servant proletarian class, or our personally necessary descent into the unconscious realm where we must contend with childhood traumatic demons before ascending, reborn, into newly authentic life, these determined heroes of rationalism could not help echoing classic religious myth. They were certainly giving down-to-earth "spins" to the archaic themes; but even exhortations to cast off our chains or to face the cold hard facts of reality were screamingly symbolic. We could not avoid this when we interpreted life in a big way, but that was all right, Alan Watts explained. After all, symbol and myth were not to tell us what is, but what it's like.

Today's General Culture as Functional Religion

Decades after Eliade's perception of our daily pursuits as archaic echoes, we still mythically transcend the limits of "real" space and time by entering into more adventurous realms through reading and television, sports and entertainment, computer games and virtual reality. True, we no longer answer the query as to what we are doing by replying that we are just "killing time" (the revelatory idiom beloved by Eliade as making his point); but we do speak of "wasting" time, a phrase that after Vietnam says the same thing more vividly. As he suggested, through such playful narratives, pastimes, and contests our workaday identities are briefly transcended, our empirical worlds vicariously expanded, our "ontological thirst" for more of reality answered.

Besides the narrative and imaging (mythic content) stressed by Eliade, however, I think today we must also emphasize the process. With hypertext offering adults the chance to join the kids in reading "choose your own ending" stories, with virtual reality giving both kids and adults the highest technology to "make . . . believe" into "almost reality," even formerly passive and solitary entertainment has become interactive. Users who may not know their fleshly neighbors' names become part of electronic network communities, sharing thoughts and feelings in new varieties of communion through ritual. The older varieties of participant-communities continue to thrive as well. Whether social elite attending museum and gallery openings, or home boys and girls rallying at sports events, we participate in elaborate rituals, identifying ourselves not only with the artist or team, but also with the group(s) whose membership (process, activity) we thus so actively share.

Traditionally, of course, religious believers were supposed to see reality and define themselves primarily in terms of their official religious faith/institution, however many archaic echoes might sound in the secular aspects of their lives. But a century of sociological studies have shown how, in Western Europe and America at least (locus of the "general culture" to which I here refer), most members of the official religions have in fact molded their faith-interpretations and ethics to fit the contours of their surrounding culture and secular ways. The effect of this on American Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish life was shown (and bemoaned) by Will Herberg back in the fifties. Unlike Amish or Hasidic believers, the mainstream religiously-affiliated seemed to him exactly what H. Richard Niebuhr later called "cultural henotheists." Whether or not they realized or chose to admit it, they were devoted to the imaging of reality and the value-ordering of the good life provided by our general culture. For anyone doubtful whether this is true of today's religiously-affiliated, the recent work of such sociologists as Bellah and Hammond provides exhaustive, persuasive evidence.

Oh, here and there, to some extent, we might modify the surrounding culture with some correction or moral judgment from our official religion. Our overall prioritizing of goods, however, our "objects of devotion" and our dominant behaviors derive from, rather than change, the broader culture. We may actually believe that beyond this world we are destined for some other life our religions have traditionally taught, but we live most of our days as if this world were our only "framework of orientation." Most of us really are just "cultural" Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Though not with complete monotheistic-style consistency, most of us mostly believe in, count on and serve the general culture we inhabit.

This otherwise self-evident truth may be obscured by three factors. First, Western culture (especially in America) still includes and values the official religions, as part of our collective and individual lives. Confusingly, this "part" is quite optional for individuals, especially in Western Europe, where it is collectively most homogeneous. However secular, Italy is Catholicly secular. In America, where almost everyone claims to believe in God and overwhelming majorities claim religious affiliation, the actual choice, doctrines and specifics of religion are the most relegated to the private sphere. Second, even the atheists and most consciously secular among us are shaped and empowered by the traditional religions. Just as American humanists and socialists are inclined, by their national culture, to be more individualistic in their humanism and less anticlerical in their socialism than European colleagues, so do Western atheists in general still find themselves perceptually empowered by the Western religious traditions. Though not exclusively, they still tend to perceive child and family, suffering and death, all manner of oppression and liberation in the symbolic light of such master images as Christmas, Good Friday, and Passover. Even if we call such images "only" poetry or symbol, it is through the poetics of symbol and myth that we sense, make sense, and share our sense of things. Third, the "general culture" by which we live is, like all living religions, kaleidoscopically many -- no one thing but overlappingly many differing visions and combinations, constantly changing (both around and within us) . . . .

Using Ninian Smart's "seven dimensions of religion" to unpack this cultural faith by which most of us henotheistically live, we would acknowledge that science and economics dominate our lives doctrinally. "The bottom line" says that clearly enough. As faith yields ethics, we could explore how thoroughly our moral and life-style evaluations are those of capitalism's imperatives. How shameful we find personal bankruptcy; how urgent the ministrations to those threatened by it of that new priesthood, the consumer credit counsellors. The material and institutional aspects of our everyday society would more clearly reveal their "religious" aspect and observance, from government buildings, churches, and courts to police stations, schools, and jails. As cathedrals dominated medieval towns, silently witnessing where the action and values were for their peoples, so today's towers of finance and sportsdomes speak for and to us. The mythic narratives of our lives derive heavily from history and the social sciences (through which most of us would explain our official religions' coming-to-be), but increasingly also from the sharing of personal stories through the many experiential groups and networks that sustain us. We "religiously" attend the services of our twelve-step groups in person; but as television brings us more traditional liturgies, so does it welcome us into other communities. The talk-shows of Oprah and Phil provide in the convenience of our homes the sharing of pain and trouble, of preaching and benediction for which our forbears sat less comfortably in other places. All of these groups have their specific rituals, and the broader culture includes the many rituals of the entire arts and entertainment worlds, as well as all our varied-but-universal observances of key occasions in family lives (birthdays, weddings, graduations, et al.). The emotional aspects are inseparable from several of the above dimensions, and all such emotional sharing to some extent binds us together with others. Thus, much that we take for granted or as trivial actually engages us in countless overlapping communities or networks. (And how much all aspects of our groups' lives are transformed by computer technology! Its imperatives and empowerments have brought down the old U.S.S.R. and transformed Scripture studies, not to mention more obvious changes.)

So, though we might argue over particulars, it seems clear enough that we so-called religious believers and unbelievers share, in Fromm's words, a "framework of thought and action" that so orients our world-perception and participation that we live it like folks used to live their religion. Functionally, our common faith is the daily secular culture we serve and count on. Its community is continually assembled, shaped, and celebrated through the electronic and print media. Popular opinion on everyday events is chosen, articulated, and preached by anchorpersons, columnists, and radio-talk hosts. Long-term interests and values are reinforced by television series; and when social ideals are "prophetically" proclaimed in widespread consciousness-raising ways, it is by entertainment or sports figures' joining the cause, hosting a benefit, etc. At the same time, paradoxically, secular culture is also reinforcing, if not reinventing, tribalism. Besides the frightful ferocities of neighborhood racisms, count here both disturbing and more hopeful effects currently associated with the "culture of complaint," the "new separatism," and varied aspects of multiculturalism.

Finally, let us not forget the power-objects of our shared secular culture. As "primitives" carried their magical mana-bearers in pouches worn on their bodies, so do we postmodern sophisticates carry the magical things without which, without whose powers, we cannot function . . . our keys, our ATM and credit cards, our driver's and other licenses, our membership cards and other identifications, our makeup. All these things we dare not "leave home without," these things we hold close, in purses and bags, in wallets and pockets.

A Local Culture Today as Living Tribal Religion

Here I cannot speak for others, for those from other places, but late in life I discovered that my own home town provides a living tribal religion, right in the midst of modern life. "Way down yonder," I found, is no mere metaphor of "tribal," but the real thing -- which I who grew up there had not realized. I had left home young, eventually settling up north; "outgrown" my Roman Catholicism, content to acknowledge my atheism while positively describing myself as a humanist; and ended up in New Jersey near New York City, learning such things as "you can't go home again."

True, as my first marriage had nosedived into its terminal bitterness, I had bought some LPs of good New Orleans jazz and blues, and played them a lot. And yes, as part of post-divorce building of complete family "on my side" for my daughter, I had visited back home for the first time in years. But surely that had been about the family, not the place! Oh, it had been touching to sit again in the crotch of the huge, triple-trunked live oak out back, where as a kid I had taken refuge under the Spanish moss with Beau, my cocker spaniel, to gaze out at the world. But surely that had been mere sentiment! And true, after that trip, reflecting on my longtime lack of any formalized religious observance, I had consciously realized that the metaphoric navel of my psychological universe was Jackson Square, French Quarter, New Orleans, whose hometown blues and jazz and funky r & b functioned as my holy music, through which I harmonized with the universe. But I still assumed that was all just part of a sophisticated secular person's "making do" with Eliadean echoes of the archaic in the modern profane world.

Eight years later, however, came the trip home to bury my mother, in the very midst of the time when every important aspect of my personal life was hitting rock bottom. Just six months after that burial, I (who had so very rarely visited before) was back in New Orleans again, though not much with my family. I was just being there, just be-ing . . . uptown and downtown, breathing the familiarly fragrant heavy air, letting the native foods of neighborhood places nourish me while I bathed in the sounds of the music, played where it was born. From salt-water breezes off Lake Ponchartrain to the moist smell of old oak, moss, and homes on Carrollton near Riverbend; from the Garden District's flowery freshness to the Quarter's more acidic sidewalk smells. . . . From po-boys on the porch at Sid-Mar's in Bucktown to the Camellia Grill's pecan pie; from College Inn's crawfish etouffe to good breakfast eggs and grits at the Hummingbird Grill; from Buster Holmes's red beans and rice to the Acme's raw oysters. . . . From live brass band in Jackson Square (competing with steamboat's calliope) to old jukeboxes playing truly old records in countless nearby coffeeshops and taverns; from accidentally discovering Rockin Dopsie and his zydeco band playing at noon in Lafayette Park (with very old and very young all dancing, Cajun or improvised style) to seeking out Charmaine with Reggie, Amasa and friends in the evening over at Snug Harbor; from the post-retirement legends playing young at Preservation Hall, to the current masters jamming (much later!--till dawn) at Benny's, to the unknown youngsters singing old (at all hours) over by Lucky's. . . .

Though not really reflective about it at the time, I was instinctively sure of what I was doing, and I did sense it was about healing. Hurting more ways than I could simultaneously feel, having lost everything but my job, I needed no new stimuli. I did need, and somehow knew it, my home place. Then, promptly upon my return to New Jersey!, I stubbornly interpreted the whole experience as mere midlife crisis, relieved by middle-aged indulgence in nostalgia and a visit back home, all tastefully brought back up to Montclair by my finally learning to cook for myself some of the Creole and Cajun foods I love. As it turned out, however, no matter how good a roux and gumbo I learned to make, no matter how tasty my beans and rice, how fine my own shrimp creole, these dishes away from home were just good favorite food. And no matter how often I played my audio collection of home music, or how often New Orleans performers came to play live in Manhattan clubs, there it was just great music. Even in the wrong place, though, the best of its foods and music were enough to let my bones know and my blood taste again "what it's like to miss New Orleans."

So it was that my practices changed, and with change of praxis came new understanding. For the next several years in a row, instead of the usual vacations, I made annual trips back home. Though my crises had passed and I was no longer hurting, the trips were somehow still about healing, or at least about wholeness. Though often in their company, I was not visiting my actual family so much as the intensely local/insular culture and physical reality of New Orleans. So also, I have learned, does the classic African tribal member, who ordinarily lives and works far away in the modern capital, sometime need to return to his tribe and his family "crawl." He returns sometimes for healing, sometimes for guidance, but all times for wholeness. We may rightly interpret this as getting flesh-and-blood reconnected to one's source. What it feels like, back home in one's own air and water, earth and ways is that finally one can breathe . . . Deep and fully relaxed, with no need to confront or calculate, once can fully just be . . . . And so I finally came to understand that my home place's powerfully unique context functions for me as primal place and tribe always have. As Ron Eyre put it in Africa, "primal religion is not available for export." The man or woman "who leaves the tribal land goes into ceremonial exile." She and he cannot again participate in their primal reality until they return.

This is because the primal individual is no full self, save as she or he is in, with, and of the tribe and its ways. And the tribe is really itself only as it is physically in, of, and at one with its land. Thus the restorative goodness, for an exile, of any return to New Orleans. It's very much a matter of enjoying the same food or music in the same old-wood or stuccoed rooms, sharing the same ceiling-fanned ambience with other natives (none of whom you may know). It's very much that you consciously "live, move, and have [your] being" physically in and of the same hot, humid air, very flat earth and plentiful vegetation, all the textures and scents as you grew up on. This might be easier to imagine if speaking of some bucolic Swiss mountain village or even some quaintly decaying Acadian town way out on Bayou Teche; but oddly enough, for a New Orleanian it includes the decrepit neighborhoods' shotgun houses and the smellier pavement and stones of the Vieux Carre. And always, of course, the night smells and mournful sounds off the Mississippi, sometimes accompanied by breezes or a solitary clarinetist whose deep woodwind fills Jackson Square with echoes of Barney Bigard. The river is the living, flowing crescent in whose embrace this tribe has always lived. (So much so that here the very directions are never the north/south/east/west compass points the rest of the world uses, but simply the riverside or lakeside, downtown or uptown directions. No other references make sense where daily the sun rises from and sets on the west bank of the river, and where many main avenues reflect its lengthy crescent.)

This has of course nothing to do with idealizing or praising New Orleans. I cannot even recommend my hometown to anyone else, not without severe qualifications and warnings. Despite "new" enhancements like the Superdome, Interstate 10, a splendid aquarium and zoo, and the wonders of Jazzfest (already a quarter-century old), its unchangingness includes appallingly old-fashioned and casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. Physically, much of the town is shockingly decrepit and tacky, having set records for consecutive decades of going unrepaired and unpainted. Worse yet is the spread of bad drug problems, overtly dangerous even in the Quarter, and the material and sociological decay and demoralization brought by more than a decade of bankrupt economy. Nonetheless, for worse and better, I confess that for many New Orleanians, their physical place and local culture really root them, defining their world and selves, uniting and individuating all their other (officially different) religions, values, and social identities.

As many African tribal members blend Christianity and modern medicine with traditional practices and tribal ways (with that combination now being traditional), so native New Orleanians blend their Catholic or other official religion and their modern scientific and technological skills with their town's older, ancestral ways. As primal tribes include different family clans, so the extended "tribe" of New Orleans includes many intense sub-groupings each of which could be sociologically analyzed as tribe or as sect. The old white elite society of the Boston Club, the elite Creole society of their cousins the "high-yellow" brahmins, and the neighborhood clubs of Blacks dressing Indian all quite thoroughly enable, define, and limit their members' particular lives. But all of these, like groups of actual voodoo followers, as well as the many Mardi Gras "krewes" and less prestigious though more open local fellowships, are individual parts of the broader kaleidoscope that is New Orleans as an intense living whole. If even a no-class white kid from Metairie living for decades up north finds it a full-blooded and restorative tribal culture whenever he returns, then no wonder so shockingly few natives ever leave for more than their college or service years. And no wonder those who do expatriate say that if we live long enough, we all go back home.

From Mardi Gras balls to king-cake garage gatherings, this raucously polytheistic culture parties. "Laissez les bon temps roulez" is motto because its spirit lives, transforming even N. F. L. contests in the Superdome into something unique. Any day of a weekend that isn't something's "festival" this year will be by next year. Weekend and workdays alike, the native blues and jazz, the r & b and now zydeco from the surrounding swamps are pervasive. Inhaled with the air, they rhythmically provide background, listening and dancing, mythic explanations of life, and ritual sharing of emotions. In this place the live music and the food, those most ephemeral of goods, are the most prized "material expressions." Beyond dispute, food holds pride of place and function, is this society's holiest sacrament. Even sexual communion comes after or between the times for good food -- its preparation, enjoyment, and discussion. The "holy places" are those where the food and music are served and enjoyed, from Galatoire's and Dooky Chase to Mother's and your neighborhood tavern, from Maison Bourbon and Preservation Hall to Tipitina's and the Maple Leaf, and always back again to beignets and coffee by the river's edge. Louis and Sidney Bechet are long gone, Professor Longhair and James Booker more recently departed, but Wynton and Dr. Michael White, Allen Toussaint and "Dr. John" all carry on the "high priestly" function of the master musicians, as do many, many others. Ellis Marsalis's whole jazz clan, like the Neville brothers' funky family, still live and practice, play and teach in their original neighborhoods, passing on the "sacred" ways to the younger generations.

Thus the lived religion of New Orleans is participation in its unique life. Like classic primal religions, this tribe's culture is a "nature religion," not a "historical" one. It does not mandate conquering other tribes, nor ethically equip one for changing other societies. It does give its members their own tribe and ways for hearing its voices, for embodying ancestral sense and sensation and sensitivity, for working out whatever-all that might mean. It offers them their primal selves, giving each individual ways for union among their many internal selves. Living and dying, it offers at-one-ment with one's own physical earth and air, fire and water.

Conclusion

Relish as I may the bone-deep, marrow-sweet refuge of a Home-world, I also cry for the simple empirical safety of my hometown as its everyday civility crumbles. Its plague of drug/crime symptoms is only the most obvious invasion by the cancers eating away our national body. The health of my local mellow crawl, like that of all American towns and cities, depends in part on the welfare of the nation, on some saving transformation of its secular faith or "civil religion." Locally, nationally, and worldwide, Niebuhr once observed, we are each of us "in history as the fish is in water." We do not be at all, save we be entirely historically, culturally conditioned. So too, then, our official religions are "in" culture like fish in water, their mainstream followers embodying their faith in and through and by immersion in the worldly cultures where they live and move and have their being.

We postmodern people are in the water so far downstream that the river itself is confluent from countless sources. Among them, some of us still feel the flow of a local tribal culture, many ride (very divergent) currents of historic national faith, and all of us are borne by the quickest forces of the technical/materialistic/consumer culture created by the West. Any one or combination of these cultures can and does function as effective religion, transmogrifying our official religions, empowering while limiting our very selves.