Celebrity worship is a secular reinvention of religious idolatry

Evidence

The first great harvester of human attention, it must never be forgotten, was religion. The impulse to idolize has not faded in our secular age, only gone seeking after strange gods. The very expression “celebrity worship” may seem a figurative exaggeration; but insofar as intensity and duration of attention can separate devotion from other motivations, it would be hard to argue that what we have seen in our culture is anything less than an apotheosis. Still, in our predominantly monotheistic sense of religion, the idea of describing our intense regard for people who are famous as being essentially religious may ring false. But if we would remember that the ancient version of celebrity was a hero, and that the line between heroes and deities was never absolute, who could dispute that our attention industries have enabled the creation of a new pantheon? — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ADDENDUM article on sacrifice/grief and to broader work on how attention replaces religious devotion. — connects to: Oprah explicitly framed her show as a religious ministry — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 794
• SEED: Angle: celebrity worship as genuine religion — measuring attention duration/intensity as devotion, the new pantheon of heroes-turned-deities.