Perhaps the ancients were a little more honest than us when they explicitly built temples dedicated to their local deities. Athens had Athena, Pompeii had Venus, and Sardis had Cybele.

Modern Americans are reluctant to say such and such a place is our city’s temple, and even more averse to admitting a local deity. As opposed to many places in Asia, we don’t have gigantic traditional temples where people bow before statues or light incense to the gods. Therefore, we imagine that those practices are not something we engage in.

But we do, in fact, have our own local gods that come to us in a more culturally relevant form. You can call them whatever you like, the powers and principalities, or maybe it’s less weird to say the “vibe” of a place.

They’re the things people run after and aspire to. They’re the things everyone is seemingly trying to appease. The local people offer their praise and offerings in exchange for the goodwill and protection of the gods. For some places the local god is beauty and fame, for others he is an unhealthy form of nationalism or bad religion. But no matter where you are, the god of a place is as clear as the nose on your face if only we will look.

Detroit’s local deity is surely is the god of work. We believe in redemption through labor and worship the power of productivity.

Just down the road from my house sits the factory where Henry Ford’s Model T first rolled off the line and changed the world forever. It gave this city an identity for a time – a place of innovation and ingenuity. The wealth and earthly talent that follow cutting edge technology flowed into the area from around the world.

Though the factory has long since closed, the mentality it expressed endures. The Detroit god sits atop this city. His voice is pervasive and alluring, his siren song calls to you all day long.

The act of “working hard and grinding it out” is truly intoxicating. We want to see progress as the result of our actions, to stack completed work upon completed work and watch it pile up. You can feel it in all things both large and small here. It is in the delight one feels when mowing the lawn, or chopping vegetables. It is present in finishing a creative project or building something with your own two hands. Like all compulsions - it starts as a healthy desire, but quickly turns obsessive and self-destructive.

We all embrace the gritty, blue collar identity of “hard working people”, though the reality is far from it.

We are not special. There is exactly the same ratio of hard-working people to lazy people in this town as everywhere else in the world. And though most of us don’t work on the assembly line, putting engine blocks into F150s all day long, we still worship work and praise workaholics as saints and martyrs rather than the sinners they are.

We are blinded to the power of our local deity, which is odd given our surroundings. Perhaps more than anywhere else in America, Detroit is capitalism’s cautionary tale. It’s streets seem to scream “don’t put your faith in work to save you!” To live here is to be reminded daily of our god’s false gospel. On full display are confirmations that the shrines we build are in fact sliding sand castles.

There sits the mighty Ford plant, once the pride of America and the arsenal of democracy. Now it is a boarded up and crumbling edifice. The walls of the temple are cracking and the local god has betrayed and failed us. He is a worthless idol with no power to provide us with something that lasts. He cannot make all things new, or make these dry bones come alive again, and yet there’s a line out the door as the faithful come to offer their incense and sacrifices at the altar of work.

Detroit's local deity