Losses and Gains. Religion did all that culture was later to do, but far more effectively. It could enlist countless millions of men and women in the business of ultimate value, not just the few well-educated enough to read Horace or listen to Mahler. To assist it in this task, it had the threat of hell fire at its disposal – a penalty which proved rather more persuasive than the murmurs of cultivated distaste around those who hadn't read Horace. Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, even though almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassedly ignore it.

Through ritual and moral code, religion could link questions of absolute value to men and women's everyday experience. Nothing was less abstract than God, heaven, sin, redemption. Just as art fleshes out fundamental issues in sign, sound, paint and stone, so religion brought them home to everyday experience in a whole iconography, devotional sensibility, pattern of personal conduct and set of cultic practices. It planted the cosmic Law in the very depths of the individual, in the faculty know as conscience. Faith bound together the people and the intellectuals, the simple faithful and the clergy, in the most durable of bonds. It could create a sense of common purpose far beyond the capacity of a minority culture. It outlined the grandest narrative of all, known as eschatology. It could interweave art, ritual, politics, ethics, mythology, metaphysics and everyday life, while lending this mighty edifice the sanction of supreme authority. It was thus a particular shame that it involved a set of beliefs which seemed to many decent, rational people remarkably benighted and implausible.

It is no wonder, then, that culture has been in perpetual crisis since the moment it was thrust into prominence. For it has been called upon to take over these functions in a post-religious age; and it is hardly surprising that for the most part it has lamentably failed to do so. Part of religion's force was to link fact and value, the routine conduct of everyday life with matters of ultimate spiritual importance. Culture, however, divides these domains down the middle. In its broad, popular, everyday sense, it means a set of ways of doing things; in its artistic sense, it means a body of work of fundamental value. But the connection between them is fatally missing. Religion, by contrast, is culture in both senses at once.

After Theory, by Terry Eagleton