By J. Terry Todd

Religion isn't the first subject that springs to mind when you think about the San Diego Comic-Con International, the globe's largest annual pop culture klatsch that just wrapped up its 40th season. What started in 1970 as a modest confab for self-described "nerds," mostly sci-fi and comix fans, has evolved into a sprawling convention covering every aspect of mass media and every genre from anime to 'zines.

Over 150,000 people flooded San Diego's Convention Center for seminars, shopping, and parties, sharing their mutual devotions, dressing up like their heroes and alt personas – vampires, werewolves, zombies, and even old school characters like Yoda and Wonder Woman.   And they came to hang out with the stars.  This year's celebrity roster included, among many others, Will Farrell, Jeff Bridges, Tina Fay, and Angelina Jolie, there to promote her new movie Salt on the flick's opening weekend. 

Where was religion in this mix?  Cast members at the Glee panel dropped teasers for the new season, including word of an episode where Mercedes will take Kurt to church, and someone (Kurt? Mercedes? A duo?) will sing REM's "Losing My Religion." The most visible Comic-Con religion story was the showdown between fans and a traveling troupe of apocalyptic protesters from Westboro Baptist Church, the congregation best known for its "God Hates Fags" motto and for picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers and people who've died of HIV/AIDS. Although it's not clear why the WBC folks, all four of them, turned up at Comic-Con, other than to warn of impending judgment, they were met by a raucous carnival of counter-protesters, including a robot sporting a "Kill All Humans!" sign. A jolly Jesus was also on hand, in the form of a real-life incarnation of Kevin Smith's Buddy Christ from the 1999 flick Dogma.
 
True, there's nothing particularly newsworthy about the WBC pickets other than the cleverness of the counter-protesters, but there is something notable about Comic-Con itself.   Leave it to the grand old dame of evangelical publications, Christianity Today, to recognize it. As far as I know, CT was the only media outlet to find a religion angle at Comic-Con, referring to it, in a notable turn of phrase, as a "giant pop culture hajj." On its website it ran a feature about the Rev. Tony Kim, the minister of Newsong, an Irvine California church, whose blog babbleon5 carried the pastor's daily dispatches from Comic-Con. 

What I found fascinating about the CT feature is that Kim (and the CT editors?) seem to have intuitively grasped the similarities between fandom and religion, between "fandom and the kingdom," according to the article's tag line. "What I think really draws people to Comic-Con," Pastor Kim said, "are those core ideas and philosophies of a savior, of redemption, of people who are dying for something that's greater than their own cause."   True, as well, of the corporate sponsors of the event, I wonder, including Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, and Showtime? 

Still, Pastor Kim is onto something.  Of course he wants to witness to – and covert – the Comic-Con crowd.  He sees himself as a traveler in a strange land, but a sympathetic visitor who just might make the bridge between his world and theirs, deploying a different variety of superman language he senses Comic-Con fans might just understand.

More to the point, though, is what fandom more generally can tell us about religion.  Is it possible that fandom is a kind of religion?  Or that religion is a kind of fandom? It's not easy to follow this logic, if we think we already know what religion is and where to look for it.  But as Gary Laderman argues in his 2009 book Sacred Matters, there's a superabundance of cultural experience that flies beneath the radar unrecognized under the category "religion," and if we care to look, we'll find these sacred grooves etched into everything from sports to movies to celebrity culture. Laderman claims – and I think he's right –that looking through a more expansive lens would help us better see the contours of religious life, both in the U.S. and elsewhere as well. 

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J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.