Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 113

_Po£ular^Culture^s^^

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"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 u s). . . .
Using Ninian Snnart'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