Apparently God was playing more of his "I’m gonna pretend to high-five you, then pull my hand away at the last minute and say ‘Psych!’” games with all of us.

Look at the political base of the Democratic Party: it is single mothers who run a household. Why? Because it’s so tough economically that they look to the government for help and therefore they’re going to vote. So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two parent families, you eliminate that desire for government.

We could even say that occupiers' refusal to give uncomplicated answers to the question of whether their motivations are rooted mainly in religious, secular, economic or political identities holds up a useful mirror to the very messy, complicated social and economic morass that they critique. This is another way of saying that sussing out religion in Occupy Wall Street might be  easier through attention to the origins and effects of the impulses playing out in groups that identify with the phenomenon. To the ways that they draw upon or resonate with atmospheric connections among religion, capitalism andAmerican identity. If Wall Street is an "abstraction," as one astute observer has put it, and the question of "how to occupy an abstraction" is being worked out as we watch, then we should ask how spirituality, one of the greatest American abstractions, is present in this working-out. It is reasonable to expect that occupiers will turn to the largely uncategorized trove of practice, theology and identity that we have often dismissed as the "spiritual"--and which might turn out to have deeper political dimensions than anyone knew.

Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected: They all like to play.

All animals of a certain level of complexity, Bellah explains, engage in forms of “useful uselessness,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s term for behaviors that do not contribute to short-term survival yet do ensure long-term flourishing. In the play of animals, we can see a number of interesting elements: The action of play has limited immediate function; it is done for its own sake; it seems to alter existing social hierarchies; it is done again and again; and it is done within a “relaxed field,” during periods of calm and safety. Put another way: Play is time within time. It suggests to its participants the existence of multiple realities—one in which survival is the only measure of success, and another in which a different logic seems to apply.

It may be true that the house of liberal Protestantism has nearly burned to the ground and we’ve been standing there screaming with our water hose for almost a century, but, brothers and sisters, we must recognize that our own kitchen is on fire and within one generation, the whole evangelical house will soon be engulfed in flames.  If liberalism is guilty of demythologizing the miraculous, we have surely been guilty of trivializing it. If liberalism is guilty of turning all theological statements into anthropological ones, surely we must be found guilty of making Christianity just another face of the multi-headed Hydra of American, market-driven consumerism.  If liberalism can be charged with making the church a gentler, kindler version of theKiwanis club, we must be willing to accept the charge that we have managed to reinvent the gospel, turning it into a privatized subset of one’s individual faithjourney.

Let me preface this by saying that I write as someone who has struggled with these issues both as an academic and as someone who has lived in the prison of chemical dependency. I have experienced the despair of finding out I had an “incurable disease,” as well as the despair of being told it could only be arrested by a Protestant-by-proxy twelve-step program. I know as well the process through which disease-identity is cultivated within the walls of Narcotics Anonymous. I experienced firsthand how the disease of addiction is a cipher for all sorts of projections and even, to a certain extent, a symbolic transformation of the Devil himself into the language of medical discourse, echoing the ancient struggle of God, or a “Higher Power” with the Devil, or “the disease of addiction.”