Okay, so reading this book less than a week after Katherine May's Enchantment was AN EXPERIENCE.
Because May is talking about finding ways to do what many of these secular religions offer, albeit often in a terrifying fashion.
And., despite being a rabbi, apparently I ALSO have a knee-jerk response that describing something as a religion is a way of saying it's adherents are unreasonable and its tenets aren't true. Anyway, some cheshbon hanefesh (soul searching) to be done there, clearly.

But I also think that Burton is doing something extremely interesting in the way she framed her book and how she brought us into it through history and her own experiences. She's convincing that religion as such is at least necessary if not good.
And simmering in the background of the entire book is the commodification of religions that become practiced through individual purchases and aesthetics. Especially wellness (tm), which is part of nearly every secular religion she mentions, as the religion of buying you way into eternal life...if you'd indulge me. In some ways, that's my biggest problem with taking the goodness of her secular religions seriously (even the ones that inform my own behavior) because of the impossibility of any lasting meaning coming from a religion where I am supplicant, priest, temple, and God and the road to heaven is paved with dollars spend on self care. *checks yarn collection guiltily* What does it mean to take a social justice community and turn everything into demands for "free labor"? (There's arakhin stuff going on here too, but that's getting way too far afield.) Even granting that the alternative is worse, the idea that justice is a commodity rather than what we are obligated to give to the world upsets me. But also I am used to balancing obligation and the limits of the self so IDK. Solving yet another problem with UBI.

What is also fascinating about this book is that, when you line up her secular religions next to each other, it becomes much easier to discuss the measure of a religion in terms of how much good or evil it does. The atavistic alt-right and similar ideologies is the only religion with a death toll. If we're evaluating new religions not (just) on their truth claims, but on the good they do in their rituals, communities, and eschatological future, it's pretty clear which one is the actual worst. (Not leaving aside the truth claims, it's also the one with the least amount of actual evidence behind it's beliefs, but I digress). That does not make dealing with it easier, but it does change the conversation about the value of each individual idea when only one of them creates murderers. (What this says about theistic religions is an exercise I leave to the reader.)

The question I keep getting stuck on, though, is that Burton talks about the deployment of bodies and lived experience in the social justice movement and notes that it's a very this-world approach with no concept of the soul. And I keep trying to figure out whether that's true.

Also, this book was written pre-COVID and it feels like it's ALSO describing things that no longer exist and it's weird to feel that a 3 year book is out of date.