I preface this article with a consideration of why Jim Morrison can be discussed within the discourse of religious studies. I suggest four possibilities. The first is the place of religion in late modernity; that is, as individualized, subjectivized and deinstitutionalized. These factors contribute to the circumstances in which Morrison can be understood in religious terms because of the conditions they create. Religion may be deinstitutionalized (Luckmann 1967; Bibby 1990), but people are still religious (Chaves 1994). This allows religion to exist in other ways; one way is through dead celebrity. In an article titled “Is Elvis a God? Worship, culture, questions of method”, observes John Frow (1998, 208-209), after having discussed the apparent failure of the secularization thesis,1, “. . . religious feeling. . . it has migrated to many strange and unexpected places, from New Age trinkets to manga films to the cult of the famous dead. . . we must take religion seriously in all its dimensions because of its centrality in the modern world.” Furthermore, religion as individualized and subjectivized (Hervieu-Léger 2000) allows people to create their own systems of meaning and transcendence. The dead celebrity, using Morrison as an example, is a system. The second possibility follows from the first. Regarding the changing nature of religion in the 1960s, religious studies scholar Gail Hamner (2003, 447), wrote that “popular culture became subject to deification or at least spiritualization.” Although this article does not intend to provide an account of the process of sacralization of some celebrities in the 20th century, it should be noted that there is literature on the topic. A seminal work, in this regard, is The Work o...... middle of paper ...... supplemented by relevant academic literature and popular biographies of Morrison. It is with these four possibilities, religion in late modernity, scholarship on religion and celebrity, how we think about and define religion, and Riddell (2008), that I consider Jim Morrison and religion. There is a paucity of academic literature on Jim Morrison, but a reasonable amount of popular literature, which I am engaging in my evaluation. Scholarship on dead celebrity fandom has made progress over the past decade; however, in 1998, John Frow (1998, 200) stated that “we almost completely lack the tools to make sense of [the process by which dead celebrities are sacralized].” My hope is that by delineating Morrison's role in the self-dissemination of his own myth, combined with a posthumous documentation of this process, I will contribute to the literature on dead celebrity fandom..