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Popular Cultural "Worlds" as Alternative Religions
Theodore A. Turnau, III, Ph.D.
International Institute for Christian Studies
Lecturer at Anglo-Americký Institut Liberálních Studií
Copyright © 2002, by Theodore Turnau.
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You sit in the Neptune Theatre waiting for the thin, overhead lights to dim with
a sense of respect, perhaps even reverence, for American movie houses are, as
everyone knows, the new cathedrals, their stories better remembered than legends,
totems, or mythologies, their directors more popular than novelists, more influential
than saints enough people have seen the James Bond adventures to fill the entire
country of Argentina. Perhaps you have written this movie. Perhaps not.
Regardless, you come to it as everyone does, as a seeker groping in the darkness for
light, hoping something magical will be beamed from above, and no matter how bad
this matinee is, or silly, something deep and maybe even too dangerous to talk loudly
about will indeed happen to you and the others before this drama reels to its last
transparent frame. Charles Johnson, "Moving Pictures"
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This rock `n' roll music, it came to Memphis out of whorehouses, juke joints,
churches and cotton fields. And it flat-out changed the world. I believed in it before
and I damn sure believe in it NOW! Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, the
man who "discovered" Elvis Presley.
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I have a picture at home from the cover of a free weekly circular listing the cultural
events in the city in which I used to live. It is a portrait of Elvis, smiling that boyish smile of
his, with a halo and a crown of thorns. The title of the article is: "Why Can't We Get Over
Elvis? Is It Time to Find Someone New to Worship?"
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Setting aside the blasphemous
connotations, the picture does make a certain amount of sense, as does the metaphor of the
movie theater as cathedral, or rock `n' roll as a source of faith. There is something
undeniably religious about much of popular culture.
1
In Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, ed. Robert Shapard and James Thomas (Layton, UT:
Peregrin Smith, 1986), 190.
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Ed Baumgardner, "New Orleans Blues," Winston-Salem Journal, 15 August, 1999, A-5.
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Harry Blair, "Elvis," illustration, Triad Style, vol. 13, no. 10 (6 March, 1996), 1.