'Radical Muslim' Clothing Line Seeks to Shatter Stereotypes

Radical Muslims. The phrase elicits images of ISIS militants and terror in the desert, perhaps grainy YouTube videos, Kalashnikovs and raised fists.

What about a man in an ankle-length garment and cotton headscarf carving the air with his skateboard?

Is that a radical Muslim?

Along with shirts bearing the “Radical Muslims” image and a Nike-like swoosh saying “Just Dua It” (dua being nonobligatory Muslim prayer, or supplications), Boston-based Munir Hassan has created an entire line of stereotype-shattering clothing for American Muslims.

In an explicit attempt to flip the script on popular images of Muslims and Islamic symbols, Hassan’s own Sidikii Clothing Co. merges cultures in fashion-forward, Muslim inspired designs.

*Read the rest of the story at Religion News Service.

A.D. & How Biblical Movies are the New Global Cathedrals

This is awkward, but when I was growing up I had a huge crush on Roma Downey. As a kid, my family would tune into "Touched By An Angel" every single week and I was glued to the television to hear Downey’s Irish-tinged angelic messages float through the cathode tubes to my waiting ears. 

With that little confession session out of the way, let’s fast forward to February 2014. To say the least, I geeked out a bit (okay, a ton) when I had the opportunity to meet Roma Downy at a Son of God screening in Houston, TX. Long story short, I was asked by the local Christian radio station KSBJ to say a few words before pastors and faith leaders from the Bayou City got a sneak peak of the film. I got to talk to Downey after the film and we talked a bit about her husband — Mark Burnett — and her and the faith-based media empire they were building together. 

First it was History Channel’s mini-series “The Bible” and then the theater-released “Son of God.” They’ve since followed this up with their most recent made-for-television biblical epic: "A.D. The Bible Continues."

Last week, I got the opportunity to preview A.D. By now, those who wanted to see it have had the opportunity to watch it (SPOILER: Jesus dies…then rises again). While I could comment on its a-little-too-fast-paced narrative (like the Gospel of Mark on steroids), the over-reliance on British actors (is that supposed to make the Bible feel more sophisticated?), or the fact that Burnett and Downey are effectively preaching to the choir with a less than stirring media rendition of a story familiar to most of the people watching it already I am more interested in the reception of the Bible on TV than in its representation therein. 

Effectively, I am wondering why is Jesus such a money maker right now? Or, broader yet, why is the Bible such a hot movie ticket and television cash cow? 

I mean, we can’t count on two hands the number of biblical movies that have been released, or are coming out, to great fanfare in 2014 and 2015: Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Heaven is For Real, God’s Not Dead, “The Bible,” Son of God, A.D., Mary: Mother of Christ (the prequel to the Passion of the Christ), The Redemption of Cain (Will Smith’s vampire remake of the Cain and Abel story…wha?!), Killing Jesus, Finding Jesus, and the list could go on. 

To say the least, biblical movies and Christian films are big money right now. Toss in Bollywood's Hindu epics and other films with religious/spiritual themes and you've got "spiritual movies/TV shows" making up a significant slice of the film and television industry. But why? 

In my estimation, there are three reasons for the proliferation of biblical blockbusters and spiritually-themed television and media: 1) the persistence of religion and the re-enchantment of the cosmos in a global age; 2) the important role of media in belief in such an age; 3) the piety of visual culture and media. 

1) Persistence of religion, re-enchantment of the world. 

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It seems, by now, that the dim prophecies of the secularization theorists — that with the advent of modernity religion would fade into the background or go completely extinct in the face of a rising tide of secularization — were overblown at best. While secularization, at the public and private level, is worth studying and is still a potent force at work in the world there has by no means been a drop off, or even a marked decline, in religion across the world. 

Indeed, it might be said that there has been the complete opposite. That in the face of late modernity and its global and fast-paced dimensions our world has been re-enchanted with divine intimations and spiritual promptings. As individuals and communities are (re)introduced to a whole buffet of religious and spiritual options to help them make sense of themselves, those around them, and indeed the entire cosmos they are finding that religious options for explanation often outweigh secular ones. 

That doesn’t mean that secular values are never present, but they are increasingly consumed, co-opted, and existing side-by-side spiritual affirmations, worldviews, and lifeways. For examples, a staunch affirmation of the theory of evolution can go hand-in-hand with the Gaia principle and a thoroughly modernistic approach can typify the structural approach of a seemingly pre-modern religious terror organization. 

The modern and secular are viewed through the lens of the late-modern religious impulse at work within many of us. Those religious systems and spiritualities that are doing best are able to bridge the chasms wrought by modernism. They are able to weave together the global and the local, the transcendent and the imminent, the spiritual and the physical, the personal and the cosmic, the individual and the communal, the imagined and the material. These successful religions are furthermore personal, portable, and practical. 

This is where the religious use of the media, and the media’s use of religion, comes to the fore. 

2)  The important role of media in belief in such an age

Dr. Stewart Hoover, Director of University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, has said that “the media determine the transnational civil sphere in important ways.” Not only does media bear witness to religious and spiritual trends, reporting, recording, and re-imagining them in audio/visual dimensions, but the media also are a source of religion and spirituality, compete for devotees and practitioners, and are indicators of religious and spiritual change.  

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The best "biblical" movie ever. Period. 

So what is the proliferation of religious media indicating to us about the trends in the re-enchantment of the world? Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has written about what he calls the shift from "doctrinal religions" to “imagistic" ones. The doctrinal mode of religion is characterized by a top-down hierarchy, involving regularly repeated daily or weekly rituals, written texts, standard teachings, and lower levels of emotional arousal. Imagistic religion is less structured, with little or no hierarchy or doctrine, characterized by periodic festivals with high levels of emotion that mark a break from regular daily life. Imagistic religions utilize ecstatic trance states and altered forms of consciousness to bring about direct divine contact; doctrinal religion employs mediators to interpret the divine. Imagistic can also be imagined in its literary sense in which it refers to a poetic movement in England and the U.S. during, and around, World War I, that emphasized the use of ordinary, vernacular, speech and the precise presentation of images to arouse reaction. 

As religious adherents are looking to personalize, localize, pragmatize, and spiritualize their religious practice (over and against corporate, global, sentimental, and institutional forms of belief and practice) they increasingly look to media in order to do so. Hoover, again, said: 

“Media provide rich symbolism, visual culture, salient contexts and practices of social participation and identity, and opportunities to make and remake identities and social relationships to fit evolving patterns of ideas and action. The media are, further, the dominant and definitive source of what is socially and culturally important in modernity. Journalism acts in this way by setting the agenda of public and private social discourse. The entertainment and advertising media do so by creating and maintaining taste cultures through which identities are given value.”

— Stewart Hoover

Media then become our new “doubting Thomas” encounters. Whereas Thomas was bidden to touch Jesus' side and feel his wounds religion in the media age invites us to see Jesus’ side pierced via "cathode ray tubes" (to use Kurt Vonnegut’s anachronism for television) and to watch his wounds on the big screen. 

3) The piety of visual culture and media

And so it is clear that in an age when the world is desiring the spiritual, but not the religious and media is a near-perfect conduit for such religious pursuits it is no wonder that we desire “visual piety.” But what is its effect? 

In his book Visual Piety: The History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, Dr. David Morgan illustrates that popular visual images — including television images, velvet paintings, prayer cards, talismans, or movies — have assumed central roles in contemporary U.S. spiritual lives and religious communities. 

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Are biblical movies and TV shows the new cathedrals of our age? 

Not only does Morgan situate American Christianity’s practice of visual piety in the longue-durée of history showing that it is not necessarily new — that it does not represent the rupture we think it does when history is taken into effect (think of icons, stained glass windows, sacred paintings, etc.) — but he also contends that religious aesthetics must be viewed in the context of social reality. That is to say, we have to understand what is happening with us in order to understand what is happening with the proliferation of religious movies and TV shows, etc. 

Morgan wrote, “The point behind the visual culture of popular piety is not principally an admiration of skill, which pertains to the manipulation of a medium, but admiration for the object of representation…We can therefore speak of beauty in visual piety as consisting…in the reassuring harmony of the believer’s disposition toward the sacred with its visualization.” 

I quote Morgan at length here to silence all the critics who complain about Kirk Cameron’s crappy acting in, well, pretty much any Christianese films he makes these days. It’s also to contend with those who want to critique A.D. based on its visuals or its score or all those British accents. Morgan is making the point that these evaluations are not all that important. 

What really makes visual piety in the form of biblical movies and Christian television beautiful is its representation of the divine object itself — in this case the beholding of the Trinitarian God of Christianity (but we could also extend this and apply it to Bollywood's representations of Hindu epics or negatively to the destruction of, and reticence to accept, images of the divine in Islam). 

Media, specifically in this case television and movies, embody and represent the very rise of modernity that was to be the harbinger of rapid social change and secularization. The likes of Marshall McLuhan warned of the advent of a new age with the introduction of digital and screen media and the secularization theorists were ridden with a foreboding prophecy of atheism and non-religion just on the horizon. What we have instead found is that all forms of media — from comic books to computer screens, from smart phones to cinemas — have been imbued with sacred images and representations. This means that instead of chasing religion out, media has presented a new conduit for visual piety. Media has become a new way for admire “the object of our [religious] admiration” and over and against the dangers of secularization, late modernity, and pluralism, attest to the reality, the portability, and the visual-tangibility of “our God” via the screen whether we be Christian or Jewish, Hindu or Neo-Pagan.

To sum up, A.D. should not be evaluated based on its award-winning effects, writing, production, acting, or lack thereof. Instead, it should be appraised as a benchmark of the re-sacralization of the world in a new media age. As media and modernization threaten to strip us of our religious imagination these new forms of visual piety are important mediums for confirming, or challenging, our religious curiosities and convictions and bearing us forward as religious beings in a global age. In effect, they are the cathedrals and temples of our age, where we go to encounter the divine.

With that, expect more biblical movies and Christian-themed television shows to come. Just as the faithful have given of their time, talents, and treasures over the years to build edifices to their religious sentiments and to bear testament to the divine in brick and mortar, stone and stained-glass, so too we will shell out our hard earned cash to see a movie that reassures us of our beliefs in visually appealing forms such as TV shows and movies. 

Nintendo's Power Glove & the Hand of God: Religion & Culture in the Digital Age

Over the last decade the study of religion has expanded its multidisciplinary reach by looking to see the ways in which religion and culture intersect with media and digital technology. Questions range from "How is religion represented in the media?" to "How are religious organizations using media and technology to promote their faiths" to more ambitious questions about the role media plays in shaping, and perhaps deputizing the role of, religion. 

As Dr. Stewart Hoover wrote in Religion in the Media Age, “It has been argued that the media are today the most credible sources of social and cultural information, setting the agenda and the context for much of what we think and know about reality. Religion, which addresses itself to such questions, must be expressed and experienced differently as a result.” So too must the study of religion. Increasingly, individual and communal religious actors are engaging with media religiously or encountering religion through various forms of digital media.

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The University of Florida's religion department is interdisciplinary in nature. In approaching religion, the program  encourages students to draw on work in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. 

However, we would be naïve to posit that it is only the forces of media that impact religion and not vice-versa. As the twenty-first century comes of age, religion continues to prove a potent local, regional, and global force that is shaping the way we interact with, view, and create media. Indeed, both media and religion compete for the central constructive roles in the formation of social solidarity and thus, studies merging the two streams of cultural production are necessary and beneficial to understand religion, and/or media, in the digital age. Hence, the purpose and pertinence of the Graduate Student Conference "Religion and Culture in the Digital Age" held January 24, 2015 at the University of Florida. 

The conference sought to bring together graduate students from diverse academic backgrounds and scholars who conduct research in the digital humanities. The daylong event included three panels and a roundtable with Dr. David Morgan (Duke University), Dr. Stewart Hoover (University of Colorado at Boulder), Dr. Dragan Kujundzic (University of Florida - Jewish Studies), and Dr. Sid Dobrin (University of Florida - English). 

The papers presented at the conference, and the topics covered, were diverse and wide-ranging. What follows is a short overview of each panel and the roundtable talk, covering highlights and the most pressing issues and/or questions that emerged from each. 

Panel 1: The Creation of Sacrality and the Role of the Audience (Commentator: Dr. Terje Østebø)

At the fear of being partial to my own paper, I will start with the other two panelists. Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera (University of Florida) presented about the role of the audience in transcendental spiritual films, discussing films like Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007) and Don Hertzfeldt's "The Meaning of Life" (2005). Entitled, "Film as Temple" the presentation artfully explored the ways in which spiritual movies can often move the viewer beyond themselves much like sacred texts and ritual.

Alfredo Garcia (Princeton University) presented the results of a sociological study entitled, "Tolerance in an Age of Social Media: An Experimental Design Examining Muslims and Mosques in the United States," in which he and a co-author found that having a Muslim friend, or even interacting with Muslims on social media, did not significantly alter attitudes about the building of mosques in the U.S. 

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Trying to let the bow-tie do the talking for me. 

Honored to share alongside these two scholars, my paper presented the findings of my two-month long ethnographic experiment as a participant-observer on the "Latino Muslim Facebook Group." Latina/o Muslims in the United States are quadruple minorities (Latina/o and Muslim in the U.S., Latina/o in the Muslim community, Muslim in the Latina/o community). As such, Latina/o Muslims seek to create their own identity and supportive community. While national para-mosque organizations and local entities create some sense of shared identity, new media, specifically social media, play an increasingly important role in constructing a cohesive Latina/o Muslim community and creating causeways for greater inclusion in the global umma. By liking one another’s posts (the most common form of interaction on the page), Latina/o Muslims are doing more than having fun on social media. They are intimately, and actively, engaged with creating a hybrid community, crafting a worldview on the borderlands between the digital and real, between being Muslim and Latina/o, and shaping a Latina/o Muslim identity that will be applied online and in the “real” world. 

The discussion following this panel revolved around questions of methodology in the digital humanities and whether or not there is such a thing as an "ethnography" of a digital sociality. 

Panel 2: Digitized Hinduism (Commentator: Dr. Phillip Green)

Yael Lazar presents on "digital darshan" as Bhakti Mamtora, Nick Collins, and Dr. Phillip Green look on. 

Following this discussion and some refreshments provided by Harvest Thyme Café, Yael Lazar (Duke University) presented her paper examining the use of the internet and its shaping of Hindus, and Hinduism, through the practice of "digital darshan." Darshan, (Sanskrit: "auspicious viewing") is the beholding of a deity, guru, or sacred object (esp. in image form). The devotion is perceived as reciprocal in some traditions and the idea is that the viewer will receive a divine blessing. Some Hindus are taking to the internet to perform darshan and receive their blessings digitally, though the potency of such a practice is contested. 

Bhakti Mamtora (University of Florida) examined the websites, social media sites, and mobile apps of Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, known as BAPS, a major Swaminarayan organization. She argued that through sleek designs and highly visual and interactive elements, which introduced immediate and personal experiences (e.g. "Daily Satsang"), BAPS is able to help craft technologies that aid individuals in their spiritual endeavors and contribute to the formation of a global tradition.  Mamtora emphasized how this area of Hindu culture and practice, in addition to Lazar's study, needs more focused research and necessitates a focus on practice to understand the multiple levels of meaning that individuals ascribe to online practices as active social agents in community construction in a digital landscape. 

She argued that through sleek designs and highly visual and interactive element, which introduced immediate and personal experiences (e.g. “Daily Satsang”), BAPS is able to craft technologies that aid individuals in their spiritual endeavors and contribute to the formation of a global tradition.

Nick Collins (University of Florida) rounded out the panel by talking about the "digital super nature" available to Buddhist practitioners experiencing the anomic experience of a fractal mind and self. He called the various media online and the networks of connections available to practitioners as an "invisible school" offering an opportunity to enter into the Vedic mind. He wrote, "In the contemporary digitally mediated cultural landscape, the traditional lineage lines, forms, and structures of cultural systems, including religious traditions, have become 'cut loose' from their (prior) cultural bodies and aggregately integrated into a single, all inclusive spatial-temporal environment, a discarnate, nonlocal, and ever-present now represented by the interconnected digital media landscape."

He closed by emphasizing the importance for the scholar of such a tradition to "enter into experiential contact with such practices" and "Be a Weirdo" in both society and academia. 

Panel 3: The Mediazation of Myth and Learning (Commentator: Dr. Robert Kawashima)

The final panel of the day focused on Christian traditions. Chris Fouche (University of Florida) talked about the potential promises and pitfalls for seminaries and other theological institutions offering distance education while at the same time seeking to form deep Christian community. Using Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Finkenwalde seminary project as a litmus test of sorts, Fouche recommended hybrid models for online/offline theological education and underlined just how difficult online education is in the creation of authentic community. 

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Michael Knippa brings McLuhan into the digital age, arguing the Bible might be seen differently now since "the medium is the message." 

Michael Knippa (Concordia Seminary, St. Louis) discussed the transformation of interpretation and meaning of biblical texts due to their various media: scrolls, codices, amulets, collections, book form, and digital representations. Pulling on the theory of Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message") he argued that in the shift from print to digital we can't pretend that the digitization of the Bible will not have an impact on its reception and its message. He offered that digitized Bibles will transform our methods & theories of interpretation, perhaps more mythologically. Only time will tell.

From the up the road in religious studies land, Carson Bay (Florida State University) examined various Christian reactions to the film Noah released last summer (2014). He discussed the film's platform and whether or not it was perceived as legitimizing or delegitimizing certain narratives in the Bible. Regardless of various negative lines on the reception of Noah among Christians, evangelicals used the movie as culturally-relevant tool for proselytization, with attendant theological corrections (e.g. with 'the Watchers' and Noah's abortive mania). 

The discussion following this panel was the most lively of the day as the discussion centered around McLuhan's theoretical system and whether or not it was viable. As Dr. Hoover mentioned, these young scholars were entering into a very long, and historical, discussion about media and religion. That was where he, and others, would begin during the roundtable discussion that rounded off the day. 

Roundtable Discussion (Moderator: Dr. Manuel Vásquez)

Featuring four scholars each with their own unique, and significant, contributions of the field of religion and digital humanities, the roundtable discussion was the highlight of the conference. 

David Morgan's major interests are the history of religious visual and print culture and American religious and cultural history. He opened by reminding students that this area of study "is not always about being sexy, it's about contextualizing the new to give it historical depth." He further offered that it is healthy and helpful to "bring a hermeneutics of suspicion to media studies and the investigation of religion and material culture in the digital age." Speaking to earlier discussions about ethnography in the digital age he underlined the need for hybrid methods. He said, "There's no 'pure' digital ethnography. We have to develop the tools to track people between both online and offline worlds."

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Dr. Manuel Vásquez, Dr. David Morgan, and Dr. Dragan Kujundzic listen as Dr. Sid Dobrin presents his angle on religion, interpretation, and the digital age. 

Echoing Morgan, Stewart Hoover, Professor of Media Studies and founder/director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, underlined that while "the 'digital age' is different, we must view religion and media through an historical lens...looking at the issues our research presents over time." Furthermore, he talked about how he is not interested in studying the media on the screen people are viewing, but watching the people who are watching the media. Beyond this ethnographic perspective, he encouraged researchers in this area to think cosmopolitan-ly. He closed stating, "religious transnationalism, globalization, and the like must be considered in our study of religion & digital media."

Kujundzic and Dobrin each added their own perspectives, with the former focusing on the post-modern lens and the study of religion and media and the latter bringing his perspective from literature studies to the consideration of religion in print media, film, music, and digital media. 

Feeling as if they had drank water from a firehose all day long, the participants and presenters retired to the Keene Faculty Center for a reception to interact and continue the discussion. 

As wine glasses clinked and the conversation circled back to the various topics presented throughout the day the general conclusion was that the day was a success. Not only were the papers and topics scintillating and interesting, each in their own regard, but the atmosphere of the conference was prosperous in that it brought together core academics and new scholars to discuss an apposite interdisciplinary field that is of special interest to anyone concerned with religion, digital media, or the intersection and intermeshing of the two in the 21st-century and beyond.   

Special thanks to Dr. Manuel Vásquez, Dr. David Hackett, Dr. Terje Østebø, Dr. Phillip Green, and Dr. Robert Kuwushima for their support of the conference. Thank you also to the conference's graduate student organizers Prea Persaud, Jason Purvis, and Caroline Reed for their efforts in making this first annual grad conference with #UFreligion a major triumph and contribution to the fields of religious studies and digital humanities. 

Why 1/3 of Countries Have Religious Symbols on National Flags

Yes, you read that right. According to Pew Research, 64 nations around the world fly "national flags that include religious symbols."

Pew further clarified the flags according to the religions they represent:

“Of the 64 countries in this category, about half have Christian symbols (48%) and about a third include Islamic religious symbols (33%), with imagery on flags from the world’s two largest religious groups appearing across several regions.”

— Pew Research

And if the number of religious standards flapping in the wind is a surprise for you, that's nothing compared to national anthems which contain religious themes. Upwards of 126 different nations have explicitly religious titles, themes, lyrics, or metaphors embedded in their official state song. That's somewhere between 64-66% of nations (depending on your worldwide count, ranging from 189-196 sovereign countries).

So much for the separation of church and state. 

While different nations have different notions of the separation of church and state and others make no distinction nor erect any partition between the two, many (if not most) countries have some imperative to differentiate between the role, expression, or function of religion and state respectively. Still, this is a tricky issue seeing as religion continues to play a role, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the formation of many a nation-state -- not to mention "national identity." 

*For more on religion and culture, follow @kchitwood

Indeed, there are varying degrees of delineation between "church" and "state" depending on the legal parameters and constitutional mandates that speak to the appropriate relationship between religion and politics in each respective nation. While there may be laws governing the separation, there are varying degrees of distance wherein religion and state function as two independent bodies or wherein pluralism is tolerated, but there is still an official state religion (a la in the United Kingdom). In addition to being known as "separation of church and state," the idea is encapsulated by other concepts such as secularism, disestablishment, religious liberty, pluralism, or constitutional tolerance. Essentially, the idea of "separation of church and state" is fluid, and thus slippery, to comprehend and apply. 

Beyond this nebulous concept of "separation," why do so many countries appeal to religious symbology in elements for their national imagery and imaginary?

It seems to me that mixing religious symbols with state power is still, despite the augury of the prophets of secularization, a viable option for nation-states and institutions to offer a relative degree of control to their leadership in a world ever more chaotic because of economic, political, and social instability and time-space compression due to the forces of globalization. “The use of a simple symbol in a film, a book or an advertisement says far more than any wordy explanation ever could” wrote Adele Nozedar in The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Signs and Symbols, “Signs and symbols, our invention of them and understanding of them, transcend the barriers of written language and are the very heart of our existence as human beings.” Thus, symbols are powerful. And religious symbols even more so as it reaches beyond this temporal realm into eternity. Thus, if a nation or leader is looking for an anchor to unify and stabilize her people, religious symbols seem a robust option. 

Indeed, these religio-political symbols might be said to offer what David Morgan calls a “web of communication," giving the nation an almost iconic status. Morgan talks about the "sacred gaze," which denotes any way of seeing that invests its object—an image, a person, a time, a place—with spiritual significance. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Morgan investigates how viewers incorporate and attend to religious symbols and images and how that encounter furnishes a social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Essentially, Morgan argues that religious symbols -- be they Protestant, Catholic, or otherwise -- are not to be viewed in isolation. Rather, they must be seen within their social contexts, which includes more than theological ideas, but devotional attitudes and practices, everyday rituals, personal testimonies, and "the sacred space of the home." Building on this proposition, it would be fair to say that these symbols in the flags are powerful regulators of human passions and perspectives on others, especially in the context of nation-states.

Basically, these flag symbols not only solidify an independent group identity, but attempt to create a political or national identity that cuts across urban centers, rural villages, regions, or states. In countries where religious pluralism dominates, or there are significant religious minorities, this may mean that these flags cut across religious boundaries as well, in order to regulate not only institutional relationships but personal and familial ones as well. These religious symbols are able to do so, because they are attached to a symbol of massive power -- the national flag -- which produces a sense of awe, enormity, and transcendent grandeur that in turn provides a shared reference point for members of a community with similar, or in some cases dissimilar, world views. While religious minorities may contest the symbology, the symbol is able to -- because of cultural, social, economic, or religious context -- unite enough of the nation to provide a mainstay for shared civic character. 

Even countries without explicit religious symbol rely on the same potency of shared imagery. In the U.S., our flag may be bereft of religious images, but the waving Stars and Stripes resplendent in the wind has been known to evoke iconic ecstasies and rapturous emotions in the patriotic members of the U.S.'s civil religious. Has it not? While the U.S. flag doesn’t employ an explicitly religious symbol it is still imbued with attendant symbolical meaning and religious effect. 

According to Emile Durkheim’s definition, religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices which unite individuals in to one moral community. While Durkheim may certainly be critiqued, the sociality that religion provides cannot be denied. If the role of politics and state institutions is to establish its hegemony over a people and have the same people accept that state's authority as normative for their lives, both individual and communal, then religion, as a cultural phenomenon, becomes a primary tool wherein to establish said community and suffuse its compliance to state-craft with divine intimations. Religion is the soothsayer of the magic of state.

As such, a religious symbol in a flag is used to great effect as a sibyl of state authority. Hence, why so many nations around the world employ such images even today in what is supposed to be an every more globalized, pluralistic, and secularized modern world. 

*For more on religion and politics, you may want to read "Is Kim Jong-un a god? 'The Interview' and the Juche idea." 

*For more on religion and culture, follow @kchitwood