What is Eagleton arguing with these two quotes in relationship to religion, culture, and public life? In what way[s] do you agree or disagree with what you think Eagleton is stating in the quotes above?

 'Once literary experts delved into the study of film, media, and popular literature, there could be little question that they had some credible claim to importance,' according to The Hubris of Culture. After all, they were working with artefacts that were consumed by millions of regular people'. Eagleton claims that this centrality has resulted in the emergence of the creative industries, an industrial process that "amounts to capitalism [incorporating] culture for its own material goals, not that it has fallen under the spell of the aesthetic, gratuitous, self-delighting, or self-fulfilling." "Creativity," which Marx and Morris saw as the antithesis of capitalist usefulness, is driven into service of acquisition and exploitation.'

The book goes on to argue that multiculturalism and identity politics, whatever beneficial they may be, are part of an illusory assumption that everything is merely cultural, and that any attempt to address difficult, intractable political issues may be rejected as "essentialist." "The major challenges that confront mankind as it enters the new millennium are not cultural ones at all," he claims. Hunger, narcotics, weaponry, genocide, sickness, and environmental calamity all have cultural dimensions, but culture is not at the heart of them.

Eagleton likes the term "social unconscious" to describe culture, which he defines as huge store of instincts, biases, pieties, moods, half-formed beliefs, and spontaneous assumptions that supports our everyday action, and which we seldom bring into question. He made it apparent that culture is no longer considered as a means of bringing people together, nor as something "absolute and transcendent," capable of filling the God-shaped void in modern cultures.

"Culturally speaking, we are all to be shown equal respect, yet economically speaking, the divide between the clientele of food banks and the clients of merchant banks becomes even bigger," the author writes, in a style that, another very good writer, Williams would have enjoyed. The inclusiveness cult serves to obscure these material distinctions. While the right to dress, worship, and make love as one pleases is respected, the right to a reasonable salary is denied. Although culture does not recognise hierarchies, the educational system is rife with them."

"The most powerful, persistent, universal, tenacious, deep-seated form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed," writes the author, "one that offers to bridge the gulf between mass and minority, laity and priesthood, everyday behaviour and absolute truth, culture as spiritual and culture as anthropological.". Culture is incapable of matching this goal since it has proven to collaborate with authority rather than oppose it, and it is far too self-centred. "Rather than saving us," he writes, "it may need to be forcefully placed back in its place."

He further drew parallels between this and the materialistic culture of the United States, where the most successful politicians come from a strong familial, business, and military background, as well as a strong Christian faith. Nonetheless, they are essentially opposed to one another. He claimed that as time passed, we needed a sincere believer to fight for something revolutionary. He claims that capitalism has gradually presented us with a more "feasible" metaphysical story through assessing our success.

All his famous writings are based on similar topics and his complete exposure would define why the term culture appears ragged and overworked. It conceals too many things when pulled too tight and stretched too thin, making it difficult to face straight on.