Summary: Gramsci viewed popular religion as having the possibility of being a progressive movement against the bourgeois hegemony produced and reproduced in symbiosis with official religion and the state. In this pre-mass consumption society, there was, in this popular religion, the germs of a revolt that could help the revolutionary push needed and guided by earlier Marxists. The goal of this paper is to argue that with the entry of popular religion in the consumer societies of the western world (one aspect being the merging of religion and popular culture found in, for example, hyper-real religions), popular religion has lost its oppositional characteristic against the state. Following Simmel and Beck, I will argue that popular religion (and especially hyper-real religion) like money, now individualises and standardises. I will claim that when popular religion entered consumer culture, this moment not only liberated this type of religion from state control, but paradoxically through standardisation, made it lost its oppositional strength against the state.
