Direct democracy and secular religion

For Exalted, I'd had an idea of an Athens-analogue in the West which held its assemblies (aka "Deliberative") of the voting citizens every week, on the day devoted to the Unconquered Sun. (I'm assuming some parts of the world have seven-day celestial-named weeks.) This works because of a historical body in Exalted, the Solar Deliberative.

From there it was a rather minimal step to bounce back to the real world and to imagine an aggressively (secular and democratic) society replacing Sunday church with Sunday town meetings. Absent that, one as an individual could dedicate part of Sunday to catching up with the news (if one doesn't on a daily basis) and maybe writing congresspeople or whatever other activity beyond "paying attention and voting in November" earns democratic merit.