**1. Introduction**

Is music fandom a realm of spiritual practice? Do fans use their connections with heroes to adopt practices like veneration, sanctification or idolatry? While appearing to be magical and important social figures, stars are not necessarily deified. In the two decades since I started researching Elvis fandom, I have never met anyone who was "saved" or redeemed by Elvis Presley. On the other hand, I have met many fans that have been seduced, fascinated, empowered and inspired by his music. They all say that he has changed their lives for the better, but none expect heavenly rewards because of their fandom. I will begin my discussion by referring to comment that started this piece. It was made by the British singer Cliff Richard, someone who remains both an avid Elvis fan and dedicated Christian. His description of Elvis as someone who "is always going to be a special person in our lives *because of what he did for our lives*" (emphasis mine) expresses the emotional appeal of a singer who was welcomed as a stellar performer, not worshipped as a deity. Richards not only claims that Elvis served fans, however. He raises the possibility of idolatry by saying that those fans should never actually *worship* Elvis. This notion is problematic, for Richards, not because *God* would not like it, but because *Elvis* would not have liked it. When discussing the ethics of fan behaviour, Richards' appeal is therefore primarily to what *Elvis* would have wanted. Be rejecting "someone who might fall before him and worship him", he wards off the *hypothesized* possibility of fans indulging in acts of religious devotion and misguidedly using Elvis as an *idol*. Richards draws on the assumption that fans would, notionally, wish to keep *Elvis* interested in *them*. He can count squarely on fans seeing Elvis as their centre of attention. Contemporary religious studies scholarship has a tendency to gloss over the distinction between *paying attention* to one's hero and relinquishing one's individuality (submitting). In his book *Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstacies*, *The Living Dead and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States*, for example, Professor Gary Laderman claims that the Presley phenomenon is "seemingly secular but abundant with religious meanings" and its star "saves…the masses" [2]. His work takes it as self-evident that Elvis is positioned as a deity by fans. Laderman is not the only scholar to propose that spiritual identification shapes the Elvis phenomenon. His work comes in the wake of a range of scholars who hold similar views, such as Erika Doss, Robin Sylvan, Rupert Till and Christopher Partridge [3–6]. Slyvan, for instance, claims that Elvis and Beatles fan cultures "had powerful but unconscious religious dimensions" not just because of "West African spirituality implicit in the music, but also because they were deifying their musical heroes and engaging in what might be described as a form of worship" ([4], p. 72).

My argument in this piece of work is that Elvis fandom is best approached as a *secular* activity that can be understood by modifying Emile Durkheim's classic sociology of religion. Compared to ideas positing the neo-religiosity of fan practices, attention to aspects of Durkheim's work improves our understanding in both an ethical and analytical sense. What follows will develop in three parts. The first shows how Durkheim's notion of religion can be modified to help readers recognize Elvis fandom as part of a *secular* experience that is both social and emotional. The second considers where the neo-Durkheimian model differs from neo-religiosity scholarship. The third part explores three limit cases that begin to challenge a secular, neo-Durkheimian reading. These cases do not suggest that fans directly worship Elvis (as in Richards' vision of idolatry), but they do contest the notion that Elvis fandom is a secular process by showing—at least upon first inspection—how the singer and his fans have engaged in acts of *Christian* worship.
