Yale professor and religious scholar, Kathryn Lofton acutely defined parallels between the collective culture of Wall Street and religion in a Sunday afternoon lecture at the Newberry Library. Yes, the overall argument was: Wall Street, bad — though the 63 employees she interviewed would beg to differ. Reading the chapter on the subject from her new book “Consuming Religion,” which puts religious context into everything from nonprofit universities to the Kardashians, Lofton began with a story about when she met with a former student of hers who had taken a job at Goldman Sachs. She, a self-described “nerdy humanist,” was fascinated by the way those who worked at the financial giant seemed to give up their individual “I” for the collective culture of “We” — all seemingly willing to equate their economics work with that of the golden rule, one that also lies at the core of what many people see in their religious beliefs, and how this conflation should give us pause to reassess our role in it. Goldman, like religion, finds its true success in selling us things we can’t see, and it’s our belief in these systems — that there will be some ultimate payout that’s good for the whole — that keeps them in power, for better or worse. Lofton argues that these systems need each other or they would cease to exist, for materialism has always been the expression of our beliefs. Lofton quoted her student from the story, “If you knew what the economy was really like, you’d think we were mobsters. The line between a mobster and a rabbi is how you understand the law — and both really know how to read the law.” She paused, then picked back up in her former student’s voice, “I thought the Old Testament God was a mobster, that’s why I stopped going to synagogue.”