I didn’t think of punishment as a secular religion until now. But re-reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish made me realize how often he uses words like “rite”, “ritual”, or “liturgy” when describing the historical forms of torture and public execution. It may well be that all these are figures of speech only, but it’s still worthy of consideration whether anyone would agree that ritual or liturgy are enough in themselves to define something as “religious.” I, of course, don’t think that anything offered by anyone so far is enough, but others may think otherwise. Or, if someone thinks that punishment does have another side, an object of worship, I wonder what that would be.