Once upon a time religion and spirituality coexisted in mutual respect and service. If someone was deeply religious we would say that they were a spiritual person and vice versa. This is no longer true. In today’s increasingly diverse world of faith and belief spirituality and religion are no longer wedded together, in fact, they are divorced. It seems that religion’s day is done.

Now of course, many people still derive benefit from the practice of faith within the major world religions, but an increasing number of people no longer find religion to be a source of comfort or guidance when it comes to issues of faith and the sacred.

There has been a shift in our view towards religion. We no longer see religion as a resource for reducing tension in society but more as a source of conflict. The rise of fundamentalism and the threat of terrorism only seem to confirm society’s view that religion poses a danger because of its dogmatism and blind insistence on its particular view of things.

There is at least a century’s worth of reasons for this shift in attitude. More than any other time in human history, the 20th century has advanced in ways that have threatened the stronghold of religion over affairs of the sacred. Whether it is in the development of Alcoholics Anonymous which allowed people to publicly speak about God in generic terms, or the advent of the Pill, which not only heralded a sexual revolution, but also empowered women who were already beginning to move into areas of society that were previously closed off to them, there are loads and loads of things that saw the hold of religion slip away in our society.

There is a growing sense that religion holds onto a pre-modern view of the universe while we have shifted socially to a post-Newtonian view of cosmology that sees everything in terms of quantum physics.

Pop culture, which has become the prime vehicle for the sharing of ideas, is a medium that trades best in mystery and not propaganda. Ideas about faith and the sacred formed in this kind of crucible will tend to be much less ordered and rule-based. Marshall McLuhan said that whenever we adopt a new technology it changes us. The alphabet and print-based technologies fostered a fragmented process of communication, a process of specialization and detachment; Electric technologies that dominate today’s world encourage unification and mutual involvement.

It is not difficult to see why this would challenge the authority of religion that focuses on specialization and fragmentation. People today are immersed in a pluralistic world where choices abound for every single issue of life—there is no one answer, not about Cornflakes and certainly not about God.

Part of the journey on this portion of the site will be to explore various ideas about the sacred wherever they pop up in pop culture today. Alongside of this we will be exploring all the diverse and interesting ways that global culture is reshaping the way we understand what it means to be human. There will be resources to explore, articles, snippets, cool ideas to think about, challenging images to look at and the occasional essay from guest writer from somewhere around the globe.

ARCHIVE

• 5 key trends shaping the Western world