The Postmodern Sacred

Abstract

I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms: the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist—and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces postmodern media culture and is itself always already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Passion of the Christ and Left Behind that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity.

A Sense of Belonging in Re-Membering: Anthropocosmic Connection in the Twenty-First Century

“…In postmodern contexts, this transference of object/spaces to a level of quasisacredness-in either temporary or relatively permanent timeframes-is a distinct blurring of the duality sacred↔profane (Everett, 2000;Rock 2003;McAvan 2010). 4 There are areas where there is a symbolic shift from the profane to the sacred as imbued by the constituent members of a given group, as a developing sub-culture, or clan sentiment (again, possibly temporary), and indicative of the processes of re-membering.…”