Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 120

116 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