Obama and the Religion of Popular Culture

It is a self-evident truth that religion may seem to be on the decline, but is always present within a society and a culture in one form or another. Secularization is not the decline of religion, but rather the decline of spiritual religion in favor of cultural religion that is simply background noise. Just as atheism, though it may lack a creator figure, forms of a belief system in a particular worldview and an accompanying set of values, so too religion is very much present in a secularized society. It is simply not religion as we understand it anymore, it is popular culture, and Obama is its key messianic figure.