Myth is the semiotics of the social imaginary. To put it in slightly less obscure terms, myths are the signs which point to a culture’s inner life and the reasons for its boundaries and customs, its presuppositions and its truths. Beneath our institutions and ideologies, myth serves as a kind of operating system. It doesn’t merely tell stories; it encodes a communal vision of reality through narrative, image, and symbol. Myths are how societies feel their way toward meaning. They reveal what a people love and fear, what they hope for, and what they find worthy of rejection or reverence.
Unlike moral fables or philosophical arguments, myths communicate truth at an affective level. They speak to the gut rather than the intellect. Myths name how a culture imagines the world and itself. The figures who populate a society’s myths—heroes and villains, saints and sinners—are expressions of its soul, revealing how it believes order is restored when things go wrong. Myth, like stained glass, filters the light by which we perceive reality, intensifying certain colors while dimming others.
Even our disenchanted age is replete with myths. Our screens are filled with contemporary epics 
that revisit ancient themes: the lone hero who saves the world, the quest for self-realization, the triumph of progress over chaos. We may not name them as myths, yet we live inside their imaginative architecture. For example, from John Wayne to John Wick our screens pulse with action heroes who promise us that evil can be erased by destroying those who do evil. We can call this the “myth of redemptive violence” if we like, but a label and a definition is not nearly as powerful as the stories themselves and the hold they have on our view of the world around us.
As a priest in the Episcopal Church, I experience this mythic dimension most vividly in liturgy. Worship is not just ritualized behavior or moral instruction; it is a performative act of myth. The Christian liturgy re-enacts the story of Jesus of Nazareth—the narrative of divine self-giving, radical reconciliation, and the breaking of death’s dominion. Within the horizons of this mythic world, baptism is not simply a symbol of moral renewal but actual death and rebirth. The Eucharist is not merely a lesson about generosity but the manifestation of divine hospitality through broken bread. These sacramental acts induct participants into a living story that shapes how they imagine life, the world, and themselves. They move us out of what Charles Taylor calls the immanent frame, where the world is disenchanted and flat, into a metaphysically richer world.
The truth is that our society is filled with ‘liturgies,’ patterns of speaking and acting that are built around myths so deep that we rarely recognize them. The shopping mall, the stadium, schools and city halls — each one has conventions that proscribe how we conduct ourselves in ways little different from a cathedral service. These cultural liturgies, as James K.A. Smith calls them, constantly reinforce the myths that validate and give voice to our social imaginary, presenting us with notions of what a good life is (or isn’t) and how we should act (or not act) to attain it. Having created institutions around the stories that matter to us, they now in turn create us in their image.
Myth is never static; it is contested and plural. The culture wars of our age are symptoms of mythological conflicts—different imaginaries vying for allegiance. To discern the contours of the mythic imagination is to become conscious of these forces and to ask what stories are shaping our desires, our fears and our hopes. The challenge is not to escape myth but to choose the ones worthy of shaping our lives.