The story I will tell is so ubiquitous in Western Modernitymodernity and has so many narrative forms that it is impossible to contain them all in a short presentation, hence its heuristic rather than exhaustive character. However, a concise argument can helpfully encapsulate what all those diverse accounts have in commoncommons, contributing to what I will later call the politico-metaphysical matrix of Modernitymodernity What follows then is based on an argument about failed modern secularization that resulted in a concerted effort to counter the de-divinization of culture by replacing the vanished source of meaning with new, less expected ones. I will flesh out the basic parameters of this divided logic of modernitymodernity in the first part as clearly (and shortly) as possible to move on to the second part to offer a very particular example from the American culture that I find illuminating regarding the underlying argument.