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I went to Antigua Guatemala in April. Their claim to fame is the world\\u2019s biggest Easter celebration. I wasn\\u2019t even there for Easter. I was three weeks early. But already the roads were choked with pre-parties, practice parades, and centurion cosplayers.

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I couldn\\u2019t go out and grab dinner at 9 PM because all the streets looked like this

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Day. Night. The hours of the morning when tourists are trying to sleep and don\\u2019t want loud Spanish singing outside their hotel windows. It didn\\u2019t stop. Some people bore the floats on their backs (they weren\\u2019t motorized, they had to be carried like a sedan chair). Other people crowded into empty lots and backyards, putting finishing touches on art or costumes or paraphernalia. Children and teenagers ran around in Easter purple, jockeying for the best spots on the parade routes. Civic dignitaries stood around, practicing looking important for their turn in the celebrations.

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This was around the time I was reading about\\xa0cultural evolution, so I couldn\\u2019t help rehearsing some familiar conservative arguments. A shared religion binds people together. For a day, everyone is on the same side. That builds social trust and helps turn a city into a community. It was hard to argue with that. I\\u2019m no expert in Guatemala. I don\\u2019t even speak Spanish. But for a little while, everybody, old and young, rich or poor, whatever one Guatemalan political party is and whatever the other Guatemalan political party is, were caught up in the same great wave, swept together by the glory of the Easter narrative.

It was the sort of thing, I thought sadly to myself, that would never happen back in America, where we didn\\u2019t have the same kind of shared religious purpose, where the liberal traditions like the separation of church and state prevented the same kind of all-consuming state-sponsored dedication to a single narrative. Right?