On the way home from the EASR 2024 Conference, I just ran into the latest issue of the German magazine Stern that showed Kamala Harris as an “Erlöserin” (literally, a “savioress” or female redemptor). The most interesting thing here is not that journalists use such bombastic religious language – for religion still has this rhetoric force in our allegedly secular societies – but that the illustration itself shows a double secularization of the religious:
Since the savioress, the new presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is here depicted in the guise of the Statue of Liberty (which was already a secular-religious symbol replacing the statues of old gods with that of a new goddess), one is inclined to say that the use of religious imagery is more than just a journalistic cliché. It rather expresses the constant migration of the holy from its traditional sources to our allegedly secular culture.