“There isn’t a secular molecule in the universe”

David Dark, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons And Other Pop Culture Icons:

If, in our day, religion is seen as a machine whose purpose is the forgetting of history and the ongoing neglect of the world outside, apocalyptic is the maddening corrective. It resists the appropriation of biblical language to achieve the ends of ideology and overturns our assumptions about success, power, and effectiveness. It mercifully breaks down the the images we use to congratulate ourselves. Without it, we’re desperately ill-equipped to perceive the meaning of what’s passing before our eyes in our immediate environment and beyond.

When we bring our wits to bear upon the apocalyptic expression, we find that it has a way of unmasking the fictions we inhabit by breaking down, among other things, our constructs of public and private, political and religious, natural and spiritual. It’s annoyingly resistant to our short-sighted either/or propositions and refuses all abstract (and in the case of biblical apocalyptic, anachronistic) divisions such as sacred/secular. For the apocalyptic mind, there isn’t a secular molecule in the universe, no matter outside the scope of its coming kingdom, no nook or cranny exempt from the redemption it announces. Neither Jesus nor any Jewish prophet ever instructed his listeners to merely repent “spiritually.”