Archive for July 8, 2012

Mod­ern Myth

… some things that should not have been for­got­ten were lost. His­tory became leg­end. Leg­end became myth. And for two and a half thou­sand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge…

— Gal­adriel, from the Walsh, Boyens, and Jack­son screen­play of The Lord of the Rings: The Fel­low­ship of the Ring

Last week, I dis­cussed the rift that exists in West­ern soci­ety between our cul­ture and our dom­i­nant reli­gions. The rift mat­ters, because it means the those reli­gions can’t per­form the func­tions in our soci­ety that a reli­gion his­tor­i­cally per­formed. This has given rise to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the pur­pose of reli­gion, and a mis­use of reli­gion within our national conversation.

It is vital to under­stand this. For rea­sons I alluded to last week, and will expand on here, it may be impos­si­ble to ban­ish reli­gion from the pub­lic sphere. If this is true, then under­stand­ing what reli­gion is sup­posed to do can help us pre­vent it from being used inap­pro­pri­ately. (more…)