The building is shaped like a chapel. The lights hang down low from long wires....

The Casino and the Cathedral: 

On Recovering Our Abandoned Culture

by Jeffrey Tucker

Today’s pagan temples and chapels—capitalistic institutions bent on money making no matter what—have appropriated Catholic styles, symbols, art, liturgy, and rubrics just as Catholics have lost confidence in them. They are winning and we are not. It’s time for Catholicism to become newly aware of the richest of our own symbols lest we lose out completely.

Here’s an small example. A few years ago, I sat in a Taco Bell trying to figure out why the art is placed where it is and what the colors in the place are trying convey. Eventually it clicked. The whole structure is modeled on a parish mission chapel. The pictures on the wall are iconographic. The colors are stucco like the mission. The building is shaped like a chapel. The lights hang down low from long wires.

I can’t believe that I had never realized this before: the bell in Taco Bell itself is of course the church bell.

We are surrounded by such institutions that borrow from the history, art, architecture, and even ritual of the Catholic faith. Maybe this is not an intentional imitation. The forms and practices of our Catholic past are part of the cultural air we breathe. But those who capture them, however inadvertently, and instantiate them into secular and commercial forms, are thinking through their model carefully and testing their effectiveness against their driving purpose, which is of course to make money.

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