Rhetoric Race and Religion
Where is Lou Reed? I know he’s dead, but I mean now that he is dead, where is he? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Heading toward the light? Nowhere? Everywhere? I ask this because so many of the obits and essays and celebrations and testimonials speak of Reed’s accomplishments, music, style, and so on while alive, but not a word about the afterlife, or the non-afterlife.
Perhaps this is another sign of how irrelevant religion is in twenty-first century America. After all, if religion is about anything, it’s about death, and the afterlife, and transcendence of death and the meaning of life. Reed’s death clearly had a major impact and represents a significant loss to many people who identified with the rock star, or loved his music, or appreciated his cultural presence, and so the religious meaning of his death is absent, with the popular response an exercise in secularity and atheistic perspectives on mortality.
Perhaps though, on the other hand, we are witnessing something else about religion in the widespread and heartfelt mourning and remembrances, something about the changing contours of religious cultures and the messy mixing up, and mashing up, of the sacred and the secular. What I would suggest is that religion is highly relevant, and present, in the public responses to the death of Lou Reed, as well as so many other dead celebrities from the last 100 years or so.
Even though traditional religious traditions put a premium on postmortem journeys and transformations to help adherents make sense of the inevitable, unavoidable reality of death, new forms of religious culture take a different tack, and focus on a different set of values than what we are used to seeing and hearing in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on. These new religious cultures are mixing with and in some ways replacing older traditions, and providing Americans with a radically different set of conceptions and practices to make sense of death — that most religious of human experiences — in a meaningful way.
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