When I was a high schooler, it was the done thing to write the name of your favourite band on your school backpack, broadcasting your allegiances and through them assert your identity. Canvas bags were festooned with the lightning font of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, lined up outside classrooms as far as the eye could see. And then there was my bag, with “Life is God” in big bubble writing along the flap, the smell of the permanent marker filling my head with the feeling of floating heavenwards on the wings of truth.

I was prepared to be scorned, spat upon, ridiculed. There was nothing I wanted more than to be persecuted, like the early Christians, in order to prove my devotion to God.

Devotion has its roots in the Latin devovere, to vow. It goes beyond love, implying an active, passionate desire to prove one’s love. Swifties know what I mean.

Devotional practices extend back hundreds of years before pop stars began cashing in the human inclination to revere. Thirteenth-century Christian flagellants would whip each other to atone for sins and share in the suffering of Christ,........

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