Not Secret Belief

Secular people are not secretly reciting doctrine when they eat toast.

That would be a lazy claim.

Cultural inheritance is not the same as hidden belief. A person can inherit a calendar, a proverb, a school meal, a holiday food, or a hospitality script without accepting the theology that helped form it.¹

The same caution applies inside religion.

Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, secular, and immigrant food cultures do not relate to bread in one way. Jewish bread memory, for example, includes Sabbath, Passover, blessing, and exile in patterns that are not simply Christian.

The Study Edition’s claim is narrower.

Western Christian history gave bread a dense symbolic career. Secularization did not erase that career. It often made the inheritance harder to see.

That is enough. The book does not need a theory in which everyone is secretly Christian. It needs a theory in which old practices remain socially available after their explanations fade.

Related sections: Scenes Where Bread Disappears; From Diagnosis To Practice.