Robert Putnam – Dan Harper

The Importance of Community

Readings

The first reading is a tale titled “The Strength of Community,” from the book Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, translated by Olga Marx.

It is told:

Once, on the evening after the Day of Atonement, the moon was hidden behind the clouds and the Baal Shem could not go out to say the Blessing of the New Moon. This weighed so heavily on his spirit, for now, as often before, he felt that destiny too great to be gauged depended on the work of his lips. In vain he concentrated his intrinsic power on the light of the wandering star, to help it throw off the heavy sheath: whenever he sent some out, he was told that the clouds had grown even more lowering. Finally he gave up hope.

In the meantime, the hasidim who knew nothing of the Baal Shem’s grief, had gathered in the front room of the house and begun to dance, for on this evening that was their way of celebrating with festal joy the atonement for the year, brought about the the zaddik’s priestly service. When their holy delight mounted higher and higher, they invaded the Baal Shem’s chamber, still dancing. Overwhelmed by their own frenzy of happiness they took him by the hands, as he sat there sunk in gloom, and drew him into the round. At this moment, someone called outside. The night had suddenly grown light; in greater radiance than ever before, the moon curved on a flawless sky. [Book 1, p. 54]

The second reading is from Keeping Heart on Pine Ridge: Family Ties, Warrior Culture, Commodity Foods, Rez Dogs, and the Sacred by Vic Glover [Summertown, Tenn.: Native Voices, 2004, pp. 83-83]. In this book, Glover writes about living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, keeping alive the Lakota Sioux ways, including the sacred ceremonies of weekly sweat lodges and the annual Sun Dance.

Had a house full of people again today…. We got a load of wood [for the sweat lodge] and then met back up here, where Lupe made some bean and cheese burritos. Tom came up from base camp, the Old Man stopped by, and some other Sun Dancers came through….

While sitting around the table and drinking coffee, talk led to the Sun Dance, now only four and a half months away. A number of things were discussed, including the presumptuousness of some people who circumvented the protocols of the invitation process and thought they could just show up and start dancing, without speaking to the sponsor, Tom, or the lead dancer, also Tom.

While the discussion shifted to the preparations, the same sentiments were expressed. One of the dancers remarked about his eleven years of preparing before entering the arbor, and now, ‘after three sweat lodges, they think they’re ready to dance,’ he said….

“Overnight Indians,” said another of the men seated around the table. “Everybody wants it to happen right now, and they don’t know how to go about it. They think they’re ready, but they’re not.”…

Maybe it’s the planetary alignment. Maybe it’s the Age of Aquarius. Maybe it don’t take as long as it used to. Maybe there’s a sense of urgency now…. At this Sun Dance we’ve seen more than one person come and dance one year, never to return. “Those people don’t understand,” said Loretta, one day in her kitchen. “They don’t know what commitment means, and their lives are gonna be like that. They didn’t know how hard it was going to be.”

Sermon: “The Importance of Community”

You know the phrase “kumbayah moment.” It’s a derogatory, cynical phrase. When management tells employees they all have to come to some stupid group activity in order to build community, management is trying to create a “kumbayah moment.” During the 2008 elections, conservatives made fun of Barack Obama’s calls for unity, accusing Obama of giving “kumbayah speeches.” Liberals have balked at calls to make common cause with conservatives by saying “Stop the kumbayah.”(1) “Kumbayah” has become synonymous with sappy, manipulative platitudes calling on everyone to just get along. It comes from the folk song “Kumbayah,” which was introduced into popular culture in the 1950s by white singers of the Folk Revival. Then the song became a staple of day camps, overnight camps, and church camps: the song evokes images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song.

Originally, the song had an entirely different meaning. A folklorist for the Library of Congress recorded the earliest version of the song in 1926, as sung by Henry Wylie. Wylie begins the song with: “Somebody need you Lord, come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” And he ends the song with: “In the morning, morning, won’t you come by here / Oh Lord, come by here.” According to the Library of Congress, this song was widely known in the American South. When White northern folksingers discovered the song in the Library of Congress archives, they misinterpreted the Southern Black dialect of Henry Wylie, and turned “Come by here” into “Kumbayah.” (2) In so doing, they unintentionally obscured the original meaning of the song. “Come by Here” is not a feel-good, let’s-all-get-along song. On the surface, it’s a song about hard times, and asking the Lord for comfort. Knowing that it’s an African American song reveals a deeper meaning: it’s a song about oppression and the potential for relief from oppression, and it’s a song of hope that a new day will dawn when oppression will end.

The word “community” has started to become a lot like the word “Kumbayah.” Some corporations tell their workers about the importance of community in the workplace. Some public figures talk about the importance of community in the United States, though often their notion of community only extends as far as their political allies. We give our children vague instructions to “build community,” whatever that means in practice. Like “kumbayah,” the term “community” is beginning to evoke images of camp counselors telling campers to sit around a campfire and hold hands while singing this song, whether they want to or not.

That is a serious misunderstanding of what “community” means. As we heard in the first reading, community can enable you to do things that you could not do on your own. At its best, community allows us to work with others to stop or to prevent oppression. Let me tell you two brief stories that illustrate this point.

The first story is about a young Unitarian minister named James Luther Adams; he later became the greatest Unitarian Universalist theologian of the twentieth century. But in 1927 he was in Nuremberg, Germany, watching a parade during a mass rally of the Nazi Party. Partway into this four-hour long parade, Adams asked some of the people watching the parade about the significance of the swastika symbol. He soon found himself in the middle of a heated discussion, when suddenly he was grabbed from behind and marched down a side street. The person who grabbed him, however, was not a Nazi, but an unemployed merchant marine sailor. This friendly sailor told Adams in no uncertain terms that he was a fool, that in another five minutes he would have been beaten up by the people he was in a heated discussion with, that in Germany in 1927 (six years before the Nazis officially seized power), you learned to keep your mouth shut in public. The sailor then invited Adams to his tenement apartment in the slums of Nuremberg to join his family for dinner.

During that dinner conversation, Adams learned how (to quote him) “one organization after another that refused to bow to the Nazis was being threatened with compulsion. The totalitarian process had begun. Freedom of association was being abolished.” Adams felt this last point was key: freedom of association was being abolished. Nearly a decade later, when he returned to Germany, he witnessed how churches had finally begun to offer what he called “belated resistance” to the Nazi regime; and in this resistance, Adams saw the power of free association. Adams later wrote: “At this juncture I had to confront a rather embarrassing question. I had to ask myself, ‘What in your typical behavior as an American citizen have you done [aside from voting] that would help prevent the rise of authoritarian government in your own country?… More bluntly stated: I asked myself, ‘What precisely is the difference between you and a political idiot?’”(3) So ends the first story about the importance of community.

The second story happened in New York City sometime around 1784. A group of enslaved and free people of African descent gathered together to found an organization called the New-York African Society. They formed this organization for at least three main purposes: to “promote a sense of common purpose”; to promote Christianity among people of African descent; and to provide aid and assistance to each other, and to all people of African descent. This organization was the first voluntary association organized and run by African Americans; it was organized during the early Federal period when many Americans were forming voluntary associations throughout the new country, in order to promote social welfare.

Among its early activities, the New York African Society provided education for those who were still enslaved, and of course they began organizing to bring an end to slavery. The New York African Society also felt it was imperative to organize an all-Black church. New York churches that were run by White people were not especially welcoming to Black New Yorkers. The New York African Society founded its own church, which they called African Zion, though it soon came to be known as “Mother Zion.” This was not just an group of people who got together to pray and sing hymns. They wanted a church building and a paid minister, they wanted to create a strong social institution, and they organized themselves accordingly. According to historian David Hackett Fisher: “Four of the nine [original trustees] could not write, but they knew what they were about. The trustees issued subscription books, raised money for land and a building in 1800, and paid their debts on time. … Mother Zion [church] became a major presence in New York.” Fisher documents how the Mother Zion church served not just as a spiritual resource, but also as political force. In just one small example, when crowds of young White racists disrupted Sunday morning services, the church demanded — and received — police protection from the city council.(4) So ends the second story about the importance of community, and the power of community.

And now, since this is a sermon, I’m going to draw a couple of brief lessons from these two stories.

First lesson: Many people think the sole purpose of religious congregations in our society is to support the religious beliefs of individual people. That was definitely not the case in Nazi Germany. Those German churches that stood up against the Nazis were certainly sustained by their Christian beliefs, but one of their primary purposes was working against authoritarianism. We Unitarian Universalists remember that when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Unitarian congregation in Prague became one of those congregations resisting the Nazis; and because of that resistance, Norbert Capek, their minister, died in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau.

Similarly, the African Zion church founded by the New York African Society was founded as a spiritual resource to Black New Yorkers. But that church also served as a moral and physical center where Black New Yorkers could work together against slavery, and organize themselves to influence the politics of the city of New York. In other words, religious congregations do serve as spiritual centers, but religious congregations also have long served as places where individuals join together in order to become a force for good in wider society. So ends the first lesson.

Second lesson: These days, I think many Americans have the tendency to think of congregations as a kind of leisure time activity. An American adult can spend time with Netflix and video games, or listening public radio, or indulging in sports and boating, or having fun with any number of fun hobbies. Americans with children have all the children’s activities on top of that: school plays, music lessons, Model U.N., sports, Scouting, and so on. Americans ration out their limited leisure time among all these attractive leisure activities. Americans also ration out their limited financial resources; so that, for example, a parent may tell our child that they cannot play hockey this year because they don’t have two thousand dollars to spend on equipment and rink time. With all these attractive leisure-time activities, it’s kind of hard for increasing numbers of Americans to justify spending time and money on old-fashioned religious congregations.

A new documentary film is coming out that provides an interesting response to all this. Brother and sister filmmakers Rebecca and Pete Davis have titled their new film “Join or Die.” In the film, they profile Robert Putnam, a professor of political science at Harvard, whose famous book Bowling Alone documented the demise of community organizations in America. Putnam concluded that civic organizations — everything from congregations, to Parent Teacher Associations, to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows — make major contributions to democracy and good governance. Putnam, and the fmilmmakers, argue that the demise of these organizations is one of the things contributing to the erosion of trust in America today. In a recent interview, filmmaker Pete Davis puts it this way:

“A lot of people think of religion theologically. One of the ways [Robert Putnam] thinks of it is sociologically. Religions are not just beliefs. They’re organizations where people meet. They’re places where you build relationships and develop leadership. They’re places where you meet people different from you and do a lot of volunteer work and political work. Religious spaces provide half of all social capital in the U.S.”(5)

I will make a stronger statement than that: When Americans play videogames at home instead of going to Sunday services, they are actually contributing to the erosion of trust and the weakening of democracy. When we are sitting here in our historic Meeting House, we are not engaging in another leisure time activity. We are not just exploring our personal spiritual beliefs. We are participating in democracy. We are making democracy stronger. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are resisting the growing trend towards authoritarianism.

To this you might respond: But what about those Christian evangelicals who espouse Christian nationalism? They go to church, but they’re using church as a means to promote authoritarianism. This is true, but at the same time, they’re doing exactly what I’m talking about: using the power of freedom of association to promote their own particular agenda. They get it. They understand the power of freedom of association. Yes, they’re using the power of freedom of association in order to restrict the freedom of association for others. What I’m telling you is that we need to use the power of freedom of association to stop them from taking over our country.

So it is that First Parish is not merely a leisure time activity, it is one of the bulwarks of democracy. To use Robert Putnam’s term, it’s where you build social capital. In today’s political climate, I would say that religious congregations and similar organizations are critical for maintaining our democracy. Those who prioritize leisure time activities over building social capital are acquiescing to the growth of authoritarianism.

In fact, if First Parish were just another leisure time activity, I wouldn’t be here. But over and over again, I’ve seen how our Unitarian Universalist congregations actually do make a difference in the world through building social capital. We actually do change society for the better.

I’ll conclude by noting that this is Stewardship Sunday. The Stewardship Committee wants me to make to talk about our fundraising campaign. I feel this whole sermon has been about why you should support First Parish with your presence and your money. But to keep the Stewardship Committee happy, I’ll add three short sentences. It’s a matter of public record what I earn each year. To show my commitment to my principles, I’m pledging three percent of my gross annual earnings to First Parish for the coming year. I wish it were more, because I believe strongly in the power of our congregation to be a force for good and a bulwark of democracy.

Three Hundred and One

Readings

The first reading is from the book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, by sociologist Carolyn Chen (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022, p. 209). In this book, Chen shows how work has become religion in Silicon Valley, and she documents how destructive the worship of work can be. She then says:

“How do we break the theocracy of work? The late writer David Foster Wallace observed, ‘In the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism. Everybody worship. The only choice is what we get to worship.’ We can stop worshipping work, Wallace suggests, by choosing to worship something else. But we cannot do it alone, in the private sanctuary of our personal prayers and devotions. Since worshipping work is a social enterprise, choosing not to worship work must also be a collective endeavor. We can do this by intentionally building shared places of worship, fulfillment, and belonging that attract our time, energy, and devotion. These are our families, neighborhoods, clubs, and civic associations, as well as our faith communities. We need to recharge these ‘magnets’ that have grown weak. Contrary to what time management pundits tell us, we do this by letting these magnets attract more and not less of our time, energy, and passion. This is not a call to end work; it’s a call to energize non-workplaces. It’s an invitation to reflect on how we as a society expend out collective energy.”

The second reading comes from Rabbi Howard I Bogot, from his 1979 essay “Why Jewishness?” in the Journal of Jewish Communal Service (vol. 56, no. 1, 1979, p. 108).

“For many years I have carried with me an Emerson-like quote which reads as follows: ‘The gods will write their names on our faces, be sure of that; and man will worship something, have no doubt of that either. He may think that his tribute is paid in secret, in the deep recesses of his heart but it will out. That which dominates his imagination and his thought will determine his life and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.’”

Sermon: “Three hundred and One”

On Tuesday, December 13, First Parish will celebrate its three hundred and first birthday. This past fall, I’ve given a few sermons looking back at the past three hundred years. So today, just before the end of our three hundredth birthday year, I thought I’d give a sermon about the future.

I am not, however, going to try to predict what the next three hundred years will hold for our congregation. I’m willing to try to look ahead for a dozen years, or at most for twenty years — in other words, look ahead for another generation. Think of the youngest child in our Sunday school, and think ahead to when that child heads off to college or to a job: what will First Parish look like then? I’m not willing to look ahead for the next three hundred years, but I’m willing to try one generation.

But even trying to look ahead one generation is difficult. We are in the midst of a major change in American religion. When I started out working in Unitarian Universalist congregations, back in 1994, we could feel pretty confident that in 2014 our congregations would look much like they did in 1994. During the teens, though, we started seeing an increasing number of people who had no religious affiliation at all. Sociologists began to call these people the “Nones,” as in when you asked them what their religion was, they’d respond, “None.”

In the past decade and a half, the number of Nones in America has just kept increasing. Many people assume this is a trend towards increasing secularization, but I don’t think that’s a good assumption. Surveys show that a large percentage of Americans continue to believe in God or in some higher power. (1) It’s not that religious belief is going away; rather, it’s a matter of people not affiliating with religious organizations.

This is partly due to another demographic trend. Since the 1960s, Americans have been disengaging with all forms of community and organizations. Political scientist Robert Putnam popularized this idea back in the year 2000 in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. (2) Putnam blamed much of the disengagement on individualized entertainment that was first delivered through television, and later through the internet. Think about it this way: on Sunday morning, it’s easier to stay home and look at NetFlix or TikTok than it is to drive to Cohasset center, find parking, and walk over to this Meeting House. Maybe the quality of interaction is better here in the Meeting House than what you’ll find on TikTok, but for many people the convenience and the ability to individualize one’s interaction makes up for the lower quality of interaction.

Interestingly, right after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the authors Thomas E. Mann, Norm Ornstein and E. J. Dionne, pointed out that many people “rallied to [Donald Trump] out of a yearning for forms of community and solidarity that they sense have been lost.” (3) I think there’s a lot of truth to that. Whether you agree or disagree with Donald Trump’s politics, there is no doubt he was adept at bringing a crowd of his supporters together, making them feel a part of something larger than themselves. In fact, his rallies look to me more like religious revivals than political rallies. Nor is it only Republican candidates who create that feeling: recently, we’ve seen how Raphael Warnock uses that feeling of a religious revival to rally people to vote for him.

Indeed, both the Republican party and the Democratic party have begun to resemble religions. Each party has doctrines and dogmas that they promote; and they are eager to denigrate the doctrines and dogmas of the other religion — sorry, of the other party. Each party has a mythological dimension, myths that they tell about heroic figures. There are rituals specific to each group, including things like chanting and pilgrimages. Adherents of each party can have strong emotional experiences, akin to traditional religious experiences like praying or worshipping in a church. There’s even material culture associated with each party, objects that take on almost religious significance, like MAGA hats or Barack Obama posters. All this looks a lot like religion to me. (4)

But it’s not just political parties that have taken on religious dimensions. Other forms of social interaction are also taking the place of traditional religious congregations. Think about sports events. The World Cup, with the special fan clothing, the fans making long pilgrimages to a distant land, the chanting and sense of identity — this all looks like religion. Or, closer to home, as someone who grew up in the Boston area, I can tell you that around here, baseball often feels like a religion. I found it difficult to explain to people in California how belonging to Red Sox nation was more like a religious affiliation than simply rooting for the home team. I’m told Red Sox fans are quite similar in this regard to Green Bay Packers fans. So you can see that for the true believers, sports looks like religion to outsiders, and from the inside, to true believers, sports feels like religion. (5)

And then there’s work. Over the past few years, sociologist Carolyn Chen of the University of California at Berkeley has focused her research on Silicon Valley workers. She finds that these workers “point to their jobs and careers” when they are asked “what brings meaning to their lives.” That’s the ultimate purpose of religion, isn’t it? — to help us bring meaning into our lives. Instead of turning to sports or politics, many Silicon Valley workers are finding the ultimate meaning and purpose of their lives through their work.

I could go on, and tell you about other social and cultural phenomena look a lot like religion — celebrity worship, humanistic psychology, network Christianity, yoga, and so on. But you get the point. Religion is taking on new forms. No longer is religion confined to local churches and synagogues. Religion can no longer be neatly categorized into denominations and world religions. American religion now includes sports, and politics, and work.

So where does that leave First Parish? How can we compete with a Raphael Warnock rally, or a Donald Trump rally? How can we compete with Red Sox baseball, or with downhill skiing? How can we compete with the jobs of knowledge workers? What we can do is we can offer an alternative.

For there’s a problem with sports, politics, or work as religion. Each of these things asks our devotion, not for our own sake, but for the sake of another. Donald Trump and Raphael Warnock ask us to participate in the religious rituals of their political rallies, not to make us better people, but so that they can win an election. There’s nothing wrong with supporting a political candidate, there’s nothing wrong with helping someone get elected. But when our support of them starts looking like religion — when we start getting our personal meaning and fulfillment out of it — then someone else is using our fulfillment to meet their own ends and goals.

Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with sports. I sometimes worship at the altar of the Red Sox, and will happily tell you about the time I got seats four rows back from the visitor’s dugout when the legendary knuckleballer Tim Wakefield was pitching against the New York Yankees. But we have to remember that professional sports is a business. If when I get my personal meaning and fulfillment in life by boosting someone else’s profit, I’m no longer an end in myself; someone else is using me as a means to their own ends.

Perhaps most troubling to me is when knowledge workers find their entire life’s meaning in their jobs. When you work for a corporation, you are a means to an end. You may get something out of your job, but the ultimate end of your job is to create profits for the company. As important as your work may be, you are more than your job. To be fully human is to be an end in yourself.

In the second reading this morning, Rabbi Howard Bogot talks about a quote he carried around with him for many years, a quote from an anonymous twentieth century source. That anonymous but wise person pointed out that those things which dominate our imaginations and our thoughts have a tendency to determine the course of our lives and our characters. Therefore, concludes this wise anonymous source, “it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

This anonymous quote helps us understand the big change in American religion that’s going on right now. People are leaving the old religious organizations, the churches and the synagogues — leaving the traditional religious groups like denominations. But that doesn’t mean that religion is going away; religion is simply taking new forms.

Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with religion taking on new forms. But there is problem with some of these new forms of religion: they have the capacity to tear our society apart. When politics becomes religion, it can take the relatively benign form of political rallies. In a more extreme, more toxic form, it can turn into something like Christian militias and Christian nationalism. And Christian nationalism has gotten to the point where one proponent is calling for the United States to be governed by a Christian Taliban. (6) Thus, in an extreme form, politics as religion can wind up being dangerous to democracy.

When work becomes religion, it can take the relatively benign form of someone absolutely loving their job, so much so that they’re willing to work more than 80 hours a week and sleep on a couch at their workplace. In an extreme form, as in Silicon Valley where workers are expected to spend most of their lives at work, sociologist Carolyn Chen has documented the the destructive side effects of excessive devotion to jobs: destruction of families, destruction of civic organizations, and disinvestment in public government. Thus, in its extreme form, work as religion can become dangerous to our society. (7)

As I gaze into my crystal ball and try to catch sight of what next ten or twenty years will look like here at First Parish, I spend a lot of time thinking about this big change in American religion. How should we here in First Parish respond to this drift away from organized religion?

First of all, our kind of religion is no longer the norm. We cannot automatically assume that when someone walks into our Meeting House, they will know what we’re doing, what’s going on here. We now have to explain what organized religion is like, what it does. We now have to explain that religious congregations like First Parish are civic organizations, places where we join together both to help ourselves and our families, and to make our communities stronger. Religious congregations like First Parish are cornerstones of democracy. Religious congregations like First Parish exist, not for the sake of the congregation, but for the sake of each person in the congregation. We come here, not to profit someone else, but to profit ourselves.

We used to spend a lot of time explaining to newcomers what we believed. We would tell people that we didn’t have a creed or a dogma, that we search together for truth and goodness. In the past, that was how we differentiated ourselves from other religious congregations. But now, I’ve been finding newcomers are more interested in learning what it is that we do. When I try to explain what it is that we do here at First Parish, a few things come immediately to mind.

First of all, each week in our worship services, we affirm our highest values. We recall ourselves to our deepest humanity. We strengthen ourselves for the week ahead.

Next, we are the leaders of our congregation. While we do have paid staff, leadership is shared among all who are part of our community. We all make the decisions together, we all staff the committees, we are the volunteers.

Next, we join together to make the world a better place. We support charitable causes, we volunteer together, we help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

Perhaps most importantly, we raise the next generation to become moral, joyful, humane people. And this is yet another way in which we help bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.

As you can see, what we do is quite different from what the new forms of religion do. Again, the new forms of religion — work and politics and sports and so on — are mostly done for someone else’s profit. No one is making a profit from what we do here in First Parish. What we do benefits each one of us, and all of us collectively. What we do benefits the wider community, and ultimately the whole world.

In addition to telling people what we believe and showing them what it is that we do, there’s another way we should be explaining ourselves to curious newcomers. We need to show people that we have a different way of being in the world. Our kind of being is not a selfish kind of being. Our kind of being is being-with-others. As an old prophet once put it, we strive to love our neighbors as we love our selves. (8) Sometimes I like to call this inter-being, or or sometime we might use the phrase “the interdependent web of all life.” When others sense within us this love for neighbor and love for self, they may find that they want to be a part of this community. They may want to feel part of the interdependent web of life.

When I look ahead to the next ten or twenty years at First Parish, this is what I hope we put at the center of our community: loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. Or if you prefer, living as if the interdependent web of life truly mattered. These are the permanent center of our religious community. And if we can keep these at our center, if we can show in our lives and in our being that these are of greatest importance to us, we will continue to be a force for good in the next ten years, in the next twenty years, indeed for the next three hundred years of our existence.

Notes

(1) See e.g., Pew Research Center, “Nones on the Rise,” 9 October 2012, www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/ accessed 10 December 2022.
(2) Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
(3) E. J. Dionne Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).
(4) To help define define religion, I’m using Ninian Smart’s seven dimensions of religion from his book Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998). Smart’s seven dimensions of religion are: Ritual; Narrative and Mythic; Experiential and emotional; Social and Institutional; Ethical and legal; Doctrinal and philosophical; Material (i.e., objects that symbolize the sacred). According to Smart, different religions emphasize different dimensions of the sacred.
(5) There is a great deal of scholarly writing about sport as religion. For just one example, the book From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Mercer University Press, 2001), ed. Joseph L. Price, contains a collection of essays on this topic, with titles like “The Final Four as Final Judgement,” “The Super Bowl as Religious Festival,” and “The Pitcher’s Mound as Cosmic Mountain.”
(6) Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes has called for this, according to “Who Is Trump’s Dinner Companion, Nick Fuentes?,” Religion News Service, 27 November 2022, religionnews.com/2022/11/27/who-is-trump-and-kanyes-dinner-companion-nick-fuentes/ accessed10 December 2022.
(7) For more about the destructive side effects of work as religion, see the final chapter of Chen’s book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton Univ. Press, 2022).
(8) Jesus of Nazareth, as reported in the Gospel according to Mark, 12:31.