Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (review)

Macabre as it may sound, it is death that enlivens Gary Laderman’s recent exploration of the diverse, often godless manifestations of the sacred in American culture. Anticipating yet another overview of the ways in which religion appears throughout the different elements of popular culture in the United States, I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued by Laderman’s incorporation of death as a binding element in this text. With his prior work on cultural attitudes toward death and practices surrounding death, he brings a unique angle to the study of religious life in America, looking at how popular cultural expressions invoke not just the sacred, but the sacred as framed by its inevitable entanglement with issues of mortality. Dead actors and rappers, the NRA, the film The Sixth Sense, and even S&M are, for Laderman, all potential expressions of a secularized religiosity that is strongly, even if not uniquely, American.

Crediting media hype over a renewed sense of right-wing religiosity in the United States as the impetus for the book, Laderman argues that Americans actually find and express sacredness in a myriad of ways, many of which do not involve a divine figure or even a religious institution. Instead, he suggests, Americans from all religious backgrounds—or none—struggle with issues of meaning and value within other, less traditional cultural frameworks, particularly film, music, sports, celebrity culture, science, medicine, war, sexuality, and, yes, the rituals surrounding death. For him, it is the overwhelming expression of religiosity found in these cultural venues that truly captures the new (or not so new) quest for the sacred in the United States, rather than the recent growth of conservative Christian churches. It is also in these expressions of religiosity that we see the breakdown of the traditional division between the “sacred” and the “secular.”

Despite its unique emphasis on death, Laderman’s text does not fail to include the almost de rigueur exploration of religious elements in various pop culture genres typically found in such studies. Citing a few illustrative examples, primarily Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz, he provides a lucid introduction to theatre-going as religious practice, and film as a source of religious myth and holy relics. In the chapter on music, he explores the creation of community and communitas through the Blues and raves, as well as the ways in which Grateful Dead concerts functioned as religion, even after (or especially after) the death of Jerry Garcia. The field of sports is also shown to have its sacred spaces (stadiums, halls of fame), its religious heroes (Michael Jordan), and its high holy days (the Superbowl). Finally, in discussing celebrity, he highlights the “idol worship” revealed in the death of Rudolph Valentino and the religious phenomenon of Oprah, and challenges those who depict these as delusional religious approaches.

While the topics mentioned above are typical in studies of religion and popular culture, the areas Laderman covers in the second half of the book are less so. Science fiction and certainly Star Trek are no strangers to this area of study, but his exploration of science and medicine as religious fields, of pills as fetish objects, and of scientists and doctors as religious practitioners is an interesting addition. In a chapter on violence, he argues that the United States is a nation obsessed with war and guns and, therefore, with the holy. War brings a society’s ultimate values and existence into “bold relief,” and guns convey the godlike power of life and death. America’s obsession with the Western film genre and with cowboys, in general, is, in essence, a religious obsession.

Ironically, I found his chapter on sexuality to be the least, well, satisfying part of what is an otherwise alluring book. Although connections between sex and the sacred...