It was the same appeal of a surrogate religion.

Football is often described as a surrogate religion.

Here the NHS is our surrogate religion, a guarantor of life eternal in these godless times.

In an electronic technology, cultural changes occur more rapidly than value systems can accommodate them, and in the resulting confusion technology itself becomes a surrogate religion.

They also described them as "pseudo-religions", "substitute religions", "surrogate religions", "religions manipulated by man" and "anti-religions".

At one level, Freemasonry had spiritually disavowed Catholicism, seeming to be a surrogate religion, without dogmas, which would replace Catholicism.

But for many Jews, he says, there came to be new definitions of faith, ones that he says turned the ideology of the Jewish state into "a surrogate religion."

According to Das, criticism of "Freudian psychoanalysis as a surrogate religion" are as old as psycho-analusis itself, and the criticism of Invading the Sacred is therefor not surprising.

A significant contemporary manifestation of that belief, and a vivid instance of how 'modern' sexuality became a surrogate religion, somewhere for an essentially religious notion of integrity to survive in a mutated and displaced form, was at the prosecution for obscenity of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960).

As The Very Model of a Man is full of angels and story-tellers - two essential ingredients of 'magic realism'- there is clearly a strong hint that Jacobson is attempting to rewrite not just the Bible but our contemporary literary orthodoxies, which are in danger of assuming the status of a surrogate religion.