Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 111

Popular Culture as Religion:
Faiths by Which
We Naturally Live
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
modems 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