Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 120
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Popular Culture Review
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-onement with one's own physical earth and air, fire and water.
Conclusion
Relish as I may the bone-deep, marrow-sweet refuge of a Homeworld, 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 linuting our very selves.
Montclair State
Stephen M. Johnson