Folk Piety

A powerful religion permeates all the affairs of life and lends color to every movement of the spirit, to every element of culture.

In time, of course, those things come to react upon religion, and indeed its living core may be stifled by the ideas and images it once took into its sphere. The "sanctification of all the concerns of life" has its fateful aspect.

[...]

Now, no religion has ever been quite independent of the culture of its people and its time. It is just when religion exercises sovereign sway through the agency of literally written scriptures, when all life seems to revolve round that centre, "when it is interwoven with life as a whole," that life will most infallibly react upon it. Later, these intimate connections with culture are no longer useful to it, but simply a source of danger; nevertheless, a religion will always act in this way as long as it is alive.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen