Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times by David Lyon (review)

480 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 David Lyon. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times Polity Press 2000. xii, 188. US $66.95 For generations the children of the Enlightenment have been predicting the demise of religion, rather as orthodox Marxists believed in the withering away of the state. As we all know, religion has neither withered nor died; it has mutated, dwindling on the surface of some settings (like Europe) but enlivening other cultures and ideologies and giving fire and fibre to their sense of identity and their aspirations. Not long ago in Anaheim, California, Disneyland made a one-day substitution of a Christian evangelist and Christian artists for its usual attractions. David Lyon takes that event as a metaphor for religion=s capacity to adapt, and to adapt to a postmodern context in particular. He leads his readers from the classical dream of secularization through the breakdown of traditional faith and structure systems, to the emergence of a piety which is, in keeping with its time, driven in part by consumer values and methods and the impact of information technology. The >new= religion does not necessarily conform to the relativism of the age: it may, in reaction, adopt a fundamentalist stance or it may embrace an almost mystical spirituality of the present moment (although Lyon seems strangely negative on this point), but the world-view of a postmodern age is its source of energy. Lyon writes in the dialect of sociology, a language with which this reader is only marginally familiar. One could wish that the interaction of social forces might have been balanced by a greater recognition of the inherent power of symbols and myths as they spring from the human imagination and return to inform it B perhaps a little less leaning in the direction of Durkheim and a little more in the direction of Jung would have drawn a more complete picture. (I note that Lyon never mentions Jung, not even in the extensive bibliography.) But perhaps that is the task of someone else. Lyon provides the tools for an understanding of the dynamic of religion from the point of view of an age driven by relativism, consumerism, and the collapse of time and distance under the pressure of electronic systems of data transfer. In his conclusion he even suggests some positive contributions that religion may make B a challenge to the >God and Mammon= spirituality of unbridled consumerism, the affirmation of universal values expressed in particular people and events, and a slower-paced alternative to the headlong speed of our current >instant= world. But his chief contribution is his insistence that we must take seriously one of the oldest and ultimately most durable of human phenomena and the various forms in which it appears. It has not gone away, so we had better try to understand it. Lyon takes a helpful step in that direction. (PAUL GIBSON) Myrna Kostash. The Next Canada: In Search of Our Future Nation ...