While FX's The Americans — a show set during the height of the Cold War, a battle for power between ideologies — is certainly a period show about politics, it's also about how a belief system doesn't always have to involve sacred buildings or baptisms to act like religion. You might say it's a show about how everyone is religious. Whether or not your beliefs have anything to do with God, if they're totalizing enough, they shape how you live and what you'll sacrifice your life for.
In The Americans, organized religion is just one category of religion — though it's one that poses a real threat to the other prevailing religions in the show: communism and capitalism.
Read Full Article »