Standing on Holy Ground: Exploring Taylor Swift Fan Culture as a Modern Religion
Standing on Holy Ground: Exploring Taylor Swift Fan Culture as a Modern Religion Phoebe Salomon HONR 490 Christopher Newport University April 19, 2024 Copyright 2024 Phoebe Salomon In today’s world, there are fan groups for almost anything one can think of. Trekkies, fans of the Star Trek franchise, are often considered the first media fandom. Potterheads and Whovians, fans of Harry Potter and Doctor Who, respectively, are two other famous examples. Through the growing prominence of popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the rise of social media, there are more fandoms than ever before. The devotion fans have to a television show, a movie franchise, or a specific celebrity has led some scholars to draw connections between fandom and religion. While others take issue with this comparison, largely due to the complexity of religion, several key components in religion can be identified in fan culture—everything from rituals and symbols to spiritual exper...