Pete Ward’s God’s Behaving Badly: Celebrity as a “Kind of” Religion captures the importance, vastness and vacuity, and the “spirituality” of contemporary celebrity.
In this book he argues that celebrities and celebrity culture have become in many ways a kind of religion, in which they are “seen as in some way performing a number of functions that were previously fulfilled by religion.” Much like religion, celebrities offer those in the culture who follow them a source of identity. Thus for youth in particular who are in the process of forming their own identities, it is no wonder that celebrities and pop culture have such an influence on their generation.
Ward argues that celebrities and popular culture portray a kind of theology:
In this sense, celebrities are akin to the Greek gods or the saints. They exist in a mythic world of stories and tales. They’re godlike, not in the Christian Trinitarian way, but in a mythic sense. Celebrity stories are kind of like tales from Mount Olympus. When we read about celebrities, they are like us and yet not like us. They live in a sort of parallel world, which is real and yet unreal. Like Greek mythology and the stories of the saints, celebrity stories are peopled with the incredibly beautiful and the hopelessly flawed, with angels and demons, saints and sinners, the venerable and the venal. Celebrity stories are in many ways like morality tales. They portray possible ways of being good or bad, faithful or unfaithful, ideal or not ideal.
Celebrity stories therefore offer a source of identity and belonging through presenting the culture with different ways of living. It “offers various takes on what it means to be human or superhuman, what it means to be gay or straight, what it means to be male or female and so on.”
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