Wally Bronner, 81, died this past week.

Who’s Wally Bronner? If you’ve ever been to that little slice of Bavaria called Frankenmuth, Michigan, you’ve probably visited his life’s work, Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland. The man basically took what was a sign-painting business and turned it into the “world’s largest” year-round Christmas store. I don’t know if it’s still there, but if you’ve driven I-55 north from Cape Girardeau to St. Louis, there’s been a billboard for the Wonderland along the interstate for years.

I happened to visit the store a few years ago. Part religious shrine, part multimedia spectacle, part commercial entrepreneurship, with just enough kitsch to make it cool, it was quite the experience in Americana. But before you dismiss it as just one more example of the over-commercialization of something sacred, permit me to get a little philosophical.

We tend to think of “public religion” in terms of religion and politics, all the more so in this election year. But in a postmodern context, the “cultural logic” of religion involves so much more than simply political engagement. It is multifaceted, complex, and takes on innumerable forms once it moves from personal experience to public expression. More forms than even this blog’s forebear, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, could have ever imagined.

Even the form of a Christmas store in northern Michigan that attracts thousands of customers who are really more like religious pilgrims. As such, Bronner himself never saw his life-work in merely commercial or even simply religious terms. “Retirement is for people who work, so they can devote their time to their hobby,” he often said. “I started with my hobby.” So he never stopped working.

In short, he saw it as a vocation, part of that complex personal combination of faith, work, and daily living that are the motivation for any one of us to get up out of bed in the morning and find meaning in life.

All part of this strange brew we call public religion in America in the twenty-first century.