We all know about shopping the Friday after Thanksgiving: the crowds, battered shelves, harried and short-tempered clerks, pushing and shoving.

I don't get it. Going shopping the Friday after Thanksgiving is like going to church on Christmas Eve: crowds, scrunched seating, long Mass. Of all the days to go to church, Christmas Eve isn't the one to choose.

Unless, of course, there's a religious reason to go. And, of course, there is, which is why the faithful — and the unfaithful visiting their parents — throng the pews.

And that got me thinking: Is there something religious about shopping the Friday after Thanksgiving? Why else would people do it, unless there was something higher impelling them? They could, after all, shop the weekend before or the weekend after. (Although the weekend after would still be crowded with Christmas shoppers, the pressure of humanity lessens.)

And if there's something religious about shopping the Friday after Thanksgiving, doesn't that imply that, in certain circumstances and in certain people, there might be something religious about shopping in general, just as there's something religious about going to church on an ordinary Sunday?

I guess it depends on your definition of “religious.” If religious means worship of God, then, no, there's nothing religious about shopping. But that definition is awfully narrow. Under that definition, there would be nothing religious about the cults and sects that worship false gods.

Likewise, there would be nothing religious about the hordes of fanatics that latch onto a particular idea or cause with fanaticism, like the French Revolutionaries, Nazis and Communists of previous eras, many of whom were willing to undergo great self-sacrifice, some willing even to sacrifice their lives for the cause, to the point that most scholars agree that the movements assumed religious-like proportions.

And that's really what religiousness is: Latching onto something higher to the point of forgetting yourself. If you're willing to put up with great inconvenience — like sitting in a crowded pew on Christmas Eve — for the sake of something greater —paying homage to the birth of the Christ child — then you're engaged in a religious pursuit.

Shift back to the Friday-after-Thanksgiving shopper. Incredible personal inconvenience, time spent in lines, sometimes pain. For what?

Just to shop — and maybe get some discounts and be able to grab more stuff than normal.

On first blush, it's difficult to call shopping a religious pursuit since there's nothing higher at stake. No god, no ideal. Just stores and clothes. No Trinity, just banality.

But here's the rub: If the banality of shopping is the reason we can't properly call it a religious pursuit, it's even more troubling to see people pursuing it with religious fervor.

And there's little doubt that, as a culture, we are pursuing shopping with religious fervor. Shopping is getting out of hand. There's the example of shopping the Friday after Thanksgiving, but there's other evidence as well. Malls and outlet stores have sprung up quicker than dandelions. Opryland Amusement Park in Nashville was shut down in favor of opening a new mall. Shopping has become the No. 1 activity for vacationers, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. Many people are taking trips to shopping sites like people used to take pilgrimages to holy spots. (At the Birch Run Outlet Mall in Michigan, the fourth largest in the country, more than 1,000 buses visit annually from other states, including New York, California and Texas.) On their travels, my parents once met a couple who, as their retirement goal, were striving to visit every Wal-Mart in the United States.

It also seems like we might be on the cusp of experiencing a new type of mental defect: shopping addiction. According to Dr. Susan Pattison, “Although there is no formal mental health diagnosis for compulsive shopping, such behavior is real and appears frequently in the therapy setting.” It is often accompanied with other mental disorders, like impulse-control disorders. I sometimes wonder if Pope John Paul II was intimating the same thing in Centesimus Annus (The Hundred Year), when he wrote that modern consumer attitudes can be “objectively improper and often damaging to (one's) physical and spiritual health.” Physical imbalance and spiritual disease often walk hand-in-hand with certain forms of dementia.

And the evidence of a widespread shopping dementia is out there. I once had neighbors who held a well-stocked garage sale twice a year because they couldn't stop buying things. I've known women who tell their husbands they're going to the store for 15 minutes, then get so caught up in shopping that they don't come home for three hours. And we've all heard the stereotypical stories about enraged husbands cutting up credit cards because their wives won't stop spending.

This is disturbing stuff. And it's the type of stuff that happens when mundane things assume religious proportions. Which might be one reason God made “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” the First Commandment. Cynics sometimes say God was selfish for making that commandment, like he did it to protect his turf. I suspect he did it because he knew the problems that result when people violate it. Like the madhouses we call malls on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Eric Scheske (www.ericscheske.com) is a freelance writer, a contributing editor of Godspy and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.