• Fox News, Thursday, July 29, 2010 2:07 PM

Amid highly-publicized hardware glitches and ongoing service shortcomings, what explains Apple's soaring consumer approval ratings? Blind faith, experts tell Fox News (hardly a foreign concept to Fox). "Apple is the new religion, say several academics," it writes. "It's not a matter of rationality, it's a matter of faith."

Research published this month by two professors at Texas A&M University contends that the only way to understand the "slavish adoration and over-the top financial success of Apple and its 'Jesus Phone' (the iPhone) is to understand its minimalist, white-walled stores as the new churches of the tech generation," writes Fox. "The religious-like behavior and language surrounding Apple devotion/fandom is an example of 'implicit religion,'" says Prof. Heidi Campbell, one of the authors of the study. Furthermore, as Fox reports, the researchers believe that implicit religion can happen when the use of, say, technology becomes a substitute for belief and behaviors once attached to religion and religious practice.

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