Worship / Idolatry
Worship, in Taylor Swift's songs, is love, and sometimes fame, treated as a religion, with the person loved made into the god you worship. It is not the asking that Prayer is, or the sacred object that the Altar is. It is devotion itself: giving yourself over to someone the way a believer gives themselves to faith. Sometimes she says it outright, calling a relationship the thing that became her religion in Cornelia Street, or admitting that even if it is a false god, we would still worship this love in False God, the song that lays the whole idea out most plainly. Sometimes the beloved is the idol: the person built into a temple in tolerate it, the lover haloed and prayed over in Don't Blame Me. In Clara Bow it is fame that is worshipped, each new star becoming the new god we are worshipping until the next one arrives. The place can be made holy too, the patch of ground where the love happened in Holy Ground, or a bed turned into a sacred oasis in Dancing With Our Hands Tied. And it can go wrong: in it's time to go a man kneels praying to his greed, worship pointed at the wrong thing entirely.
At heart this is devotion that has slipped past ordinary love into something closer to faith, with all the surrender and the risk that carries. Naming a person your god is a way of saying how completely you have handed yourself over, but it also admits the danger, since a false god is still false and the worship can outlast any proof that the person was worth it. It works both ways across the catalogue: pointed at a lover it can be tender or reckless, and pointed at fame, or at greed, it turns into a warning about what people will bow down to. It sits beside the Altar, the sacred place or object, and Prayer, the act of asking, but where those name a part of the rite, this names the believing itself.
Appears in 12 songs
“Even if it's a false god, we'd still worship this love”
The song lays the whole idea bare, love kept up as worship even once it is admitted to be a false god.
“The new god we're worshipping”
Fame is cast as a religion with a rotating idol, each new star the new god we are worshipping until the next arrives.
“I choose you and me ... religiously”
The choice of the lover is made an act of faith, chosen religiously, desire raised to the level of belief.
“You sacrificed us to the gods of your bluest days”
The relationship is offered up as a sacrifice, given over to the gods of the partner's depression as if to a demanding faith.
“But Lord, you made me feel important, then you tried to erase us”
Addressed as Lord, the older lover is made a substitute god. Angela reads the relationship as the speaker's stand-in religion, the thing she worshipped and was then erased by. The idolising is the wound, not just the faith.
“I made you my temple, my mural, my sky”
She builds the beloved into a temple, a devotion the song then watches go unanswered.
“In his palace of bones praying to his greed”
Worship turns rotten, a man kneeling in a palace of bones and praying to his own greed, devotion aimed at the wrong god.
“Sacred new beginnings that became my religion”
The relationship is named outright as a religion, the street and its memories made sacred ground.
“Halo, hiding my obsession”
The beloved is haloed and prayed over, love sung in the language of salvation and sainthood.
“You had turned my bed into a sacred oasis”
Lovemaking sanctifies the ordinary, the bed remade as a sacred oasis set apart from the world.
“So you were never a saint”
The saint reference invokes the religious standard against which the beloved is measured and found humanly wanting, but the finding is tender rather than condemning.
“Right there where we stood was holy ground”
The patch of ground where the love happened is consecrated, made holy by what took place on it.