The great theorist of religion (or, historian of the study of religion) J. Z. Smith talks in his essay “Sacred Persistence” about religion as a form of obsessive behavior. Cicero made the connection long ago, suggesting that the word religion (or its equivalent in Latin) came from relegere, meaning to gather, to repeat, to go over again. In his essay “Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices,” Freud suggested that neurotic and religious acts were analogous. Of course the similarity is harder to see for those of us who live in a culture as Protestant-influenced as what we have in North America today.

Coming from the opposite direction, I know a professor who, when teaching students about pilgrimage in Tibetan Buddhism, always makes a comparison with going to Disneyland (note that he’s comparing religion to going to Disneyland, not comparing Disneyland to religion as Porter is doing). Your religion/culture suggests that you should go there; your desire to do so is often vague; while there you want to collect things to take home with you (souvenirs; relics, holy water, etc.); it’s a break from the routines that dominate your everyday life; going earns you a certain degree of esteem; people often want to talk to you about it when you get back, and so on. Not that anyone should argue that the two things are “the same,” but something interesting can come from making the comparison.