If you Google the phrase “movies with the word ‘love’ in the title,” you could spend an amazingly long time reading list after list of endless films. Hollywood knows that the word “love” is like pouring gasoline on your marketing campaign’s fire—it could go very badly, but it is going to get a lot of attention. In the last decade, producers gave us Love Actually (2003), P.S. I Love You (2007), and I Love You, Man (2009). With only two years down this decade, movie theaters have already shown Eat Pray Love (2010), Love and Other Drugs (2010), and now Steve Carell’s Crazy, Stupid Love (2011). There are many, many more, going back decades. Even for the cynics, there is always Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964). What is Hollywood’s obsession with selling love? It probably has something to do with a phenomenon that Simon May describes in his book Love: A History, that love is nearly the only belief that all modern people hold sacred. If movie producers have to cater to a broad audience, the best way to do that is to deal directly with what May calls the modern world’s only religion.

Love as a universal religion rose beginning in the eighteenth century, and followers modeled their “doctrine” on the Christian God’s love: it is eternal, unconditional, and most importantly, it gives our lives meaning. In relationships that hold love to be the highest ideal, each person deserves from the other the type of love “that was formerly reserved for God.” Its ability to imitate God attracts devotees and satisfies even atheists’ need for the divine. It is “divine” because it is no longer a means of returning to Paradise and winning Heaven but an end in itself, the only part of us that survives death. In an increasingly secular age, love naturally filled the gaping hole left by a loss of faith in God. So is watching movies with the word “love” in the title part of this new “religion”? Maybe not, but it seems we are certainly ready to watch anything that reinforces our beliefs.