Page - 70 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

original. In the realm of popular music and especially after the two world wars, the Apocalypse was passionately embraced as synonymous with imminent catastrophe, generating a mainly dystopian discourse. As a tool for analysis, the concept of “critical dystopia”2 has provided a useful connection between apocalyptic menaces, re-enchantment of the world, and social protest. Yet “au- thenticity” is a sacred dimension within rock, an antidote to commercialism and “mainstream” as musical prostitution, very much in biblical style; for this reason, authenticity constitutes a key notion for doomsday scenarios. The connection between apocalypse and authenticity is therefore immediate and natural, with the former the desired and eschatological consummation of the latter’s victory against evil or the forces of falsehood and part of both an aesthetic and a moral universe of personal engagement, highly respected by rock fans. Authenticity becomes revelation of the divine to worshippers and a cathartic projection into the future/salvation. The volume The Attraction of Religion, edited by Jason Slone and James Van Slyke, is founded on the question of why so many people are attracted to reli- gion, which seems to be an evolutionary puzzle dependent on functional adap- tations.3 Since the Enlightenment era, massive secularization and high technolo- gy have triggered the abandonment of conventional monotheistic religions, but the human spiritual principle probably remains in new formulas and neo-pagan tendencies to re-significate reality. Currently almost any cultural space can host spontaneous reactions that reify the inherent religious ontology of individuals. Media are constantly circulating the tropes and narratives of popular religion in ways that serve to “deepen an association rather than to comment on religion per se”.4 Instead of religious language disappearing, it has been diffused, re-ap- propriated, and heightened through the blending and borrowing of various tra- ditions and practices.5 Em McAvan describes the postmodern sacred as never directed toward one religious truth but instead “pastiched together from the fragments of spiritual traditions that do have that ontological foundation”.6 In everyday life there are transformations of a spiritual nature outside the religious sphere: “salvation, or analogues of salvation, are sought, found, or unconsciously implied in the every- day, in the vernacular”.7 The suggestion that religious forms may belong to or- dinary life has already been explored in terms of “implicit religion”, (E. Bailey), 2 Moylan 2000; Swanson 2016. 3 Slone/Van Slyke 2016. 4 Clark 2007, 72–73. 5 Swanson 2016. See Campos 2016. 6 McAvan 2010; emphasis original. 7 Bacon/Dossett/Knowles 2015b, 5. 70 | Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 69–94