God in the Details

American Religion in Popular Culture

Eric Mazur, Kate McCarthy, Eric Mazur, Kate McCarthy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780415485371
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136993121
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the blurred boundary between religion and pop culture, God in the Details offers a provocative look at the breadth and persistence of religious themes in the American consciousness. This new edition reflects the explosion of online activity since the first edition, including chapters on the spiritual implications of social networking sites, and the hazy line between real and virtual religious life in the online community Second Life. Also new to this edition are chapters on the migration of black male expression from churches to athletic stadiums, new configurations of the sacred and the commercial, and post 9/11 spirituality and religious redemption through an analysis of vampire drama, True Blood. Popular chapters on media, sports, and other pop culture experiences have been revised and updated, making this an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

Part I
Popular myth and symbol

At a conference on using popular culture in the university classroom, an English professor makes the case that the popular 1990s sitcom Friends was a clever repackaging of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, that Star Wars retells Book One of The Faerie Queene, and that The Simpsons is really a contemporary take on Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. A given culture, such parallels would suggest, has a finite number of good stories to tell. But good stories are capable of infinite retelling.

Some of the best stories with some of the richest symbols are to be found in the religious traditions that have had profound effects in shaping cultures. Virgin births, hero journeys, stories of death and resurrection, battles between good and evil, revelatory encounters with supernatural beings— these are what enliven the sacred scriptures of the world’s religions. In a monocultural society, common knowledge and public retelling of such myths reinforce the religious and social identities of community members. In a culturally diverse and officially secular society such as the United States, there is no central fire around which a singular set of stories gets told by an authoritative narrator. Instead, as the following chapters explore, the myths and symbols of various religious traditions resurface—by themselves, in fragments, and in strange combinations—in what look like wholly secular spaces, in a process that both keeps the stories alive and radically reframes their meaning.

Many of the narratives that inform traditional religious institutions are alive and well in American popular culture, though those “reading” them— in song lyrics, movies, even in Victoria’s Secret swimwear—may be completely unaware of their sacred roots. In some cases, the stories are preserved with their basic narrative structure and cultural function largely intact. Kate McCarthy (Chapter 1) traces the language and imagery of the biblical Exodus account through three decades of Bruce Springsteen’s music, where it serves, as it has for countless Jewish and Christian generations, as a powerful symbol of personal and collective promise, as well as “an indictment of America’s failure to make real its transcendent promise.” McCarthy sees this myth and all its troubling ambiguities being retold not only in Springsteen’s song lyrics, but also in concert parking lots, internet chatrooms, and in the persona of Springsteen himself. While listeners may or may not catch the biblical references, she argues, Springsteen’s use of the story of deliverance from bondage into a promised land of opportunity and grace makes the ideological stakes higher here than they are in most rock music.

A mythic genre from the other end of the Bible, apocalypses akin to the Revelation of John, also survives in secular popular culture, according to Jon Stone’s analysis of popular film (Chapter 3). Stone defines the genre carefully, reminding us that not all accounts of a cataclysmic end of the world are apocalyptic. Rather, apocalypses involve a consistent set of markers, including otherworldly revelation and warning and heroic intervention. Stone goes on to examine three types of apocalyptic film that reveal how compelling and flexible the genre has been in allowing several generations of Americans to reckon with the fear of perceived threats to our world—whether they be nuclear, environmental, or technological—just as it helped first-century Christians cope with Roman persecution. The difference is that those who absorbed these and other mythic stories through Scripture as interpreted by traditional religious communities understood the texts as divinely revealed, while contemporary fans of Springsteen and the Terminator movies are conscious of the wholly human origin—in the mind of the filmmaker and musician—of these cultural products. An interesting question raised by these discussions is what difference this difference makes: is confidence in an otherworldly source requisite for cultural narratives to have life-shaping impact, or has the human imagination now taken over that role?

The stories of exodus and apocalypse, though they are radically resituated, largely maintain their original shape in the popular manifestations considered by McCarthy and Stone. Other religious narratives arrive in popular culture in fragments, their powerful component symbols resurfacing alone or in interesting combination with other secular and religious elements. James Shields’ contribution on the controversy surrounding a Victoria’s Secret swimsuit emblazed with iconographically accurate images of the Buddha (Chapter 4) raises questions about the implications of extracting such a symbol from its religious context and inserting it into one that is non-religious and, in fact, highly sexual. Questions about the intent of symbolic representation are important to consider here, and help explain why the stakes are so high when those doing the representing are seen as outsiders to the religious tradition. According to Shields’ analysis, the outcry of protest against the “Buddha bikini” is in one sense surprising, given the long tradition of Buddhist representation of both the Buddha and sexualized female figures. The setting of this particular symbolic representation, though, angered many Buddhists from around the world for its trivialization and exploitation of a non-Western sacred symbol for Western commercial purposes. The encounters represented by this episode—East–West, commercial–religious, sexual–sacred, reverence–iconoclasm—prompt reflection by scholars and lay people alike about the religiousness of religious symbols when they are also highly sexualized products for sale in an ostensibly non-religious market. In this case, do long-running intra-Buddhist conversations about iconography and iconoclasm even apply? How do the terms of such a conversation change when the cultural setting is global, multireligious, and profit-driven?

Leonard Primiano observes another process of symbolic dislocation in his analysis of the religious imagery and themes of the HBO vampire drama True Blood (Chapter 2). Focusing especially on the series’ weekly introductory credits, Primiano finds a “fantasia on American religion” that exposes new patterns in lived or “vernacular” religion and the traditional symbol sets in which it is enmeshed. True Blood’s vampires, Primiano argues, inherit the dark sexuality of their classic ancestors, but also reflect the recent literary trend of valorizing vampires as “undead anti-heroes” characterized by emotional and moral complexity. Situated in the context of rural Louisiana religiosity, these characters are part of a new iconography of American religion, in which traditional symbols and theological narratives are fragmented, inverted, and reimagined. The pronounced individuality and eclecticism often observed in contemporary American spirituality is evident in Primiano’s treatment of True Blood, in the downplayed, if not damning, images of organized religion, and the show’s continuous evocation of the “power derived from an appreciation and acceptance of one’sown unique talents and abilities, and the subsequent openness to others and their differences.”

But Primiano’s mediation on the spirituality of True Blood goes a step further. In addition to a kind of splintered iconography in which pecan pie becomes sacramental and the American flag trumps the cross, Primiano finds a new and quite radical American iconoclasm in the show’s – and especially the opening title sequence’s – implicit theology. That montage, and the characters’ experiences across the first two seasons, express a dark ambivalence about a God who is real but distant, absent from the usual venues, and usually disappointing if not openly hostile. To the emerging picture of contemporary American religion, Primiano adds the suggestion that this ambivalence is a significant element since 9/11, and especially for many gay people, who have felt abandoned by organized religion, if not by God, for much longer.

One of the most exciting things going on in the popular retelling of sacred stories and reworking of sacred symbols is the emergence of countless new voices in the storytelling process itself. Who tells the story, and who has the authority to interpret it, are critical factors in determining the meaning or meanings of a given myth or symbol. The vampires of True Blood can easily be seen as a metaphor for gays and lesbians and others struggling for assimilation, according to the show’s openly gay creator and producer. Bringing them and their complex human counterparts to the center of the narrative shifts interpretive authority from institutional and cultural sources to individual religious experience which, however bleak, involves authentic moments of transcendence and redemption.

But all these reinterpretive sites, though populist and potentially empowering, are also, these authors remind us, commodified and conflict-ridden. Because popular culture sites are very often commercial sites, their role in religious meaning-making is always ambiguous. Certainly, the “products” of traditional religious organizations have always been commodified in various ways, but the central (and legitimated) place of commercial interests in the television, fashion, and film industries that are the vehicles of these popular myths and symbols add an additional layer to the retelling of these classic stories. While such sites can be venues for the self-expression and redefinition of marginalized groups, they can also, and simultaneously, represent back that marginal status when to do otherwise threatens the profitability of their stories as products. Sensitivity to this possibility certainly lies behind some of the vociferous objections to the Buddha bikini by Buddhists in America and around the world who (erroneously, Shields notes) often assumed that Western religious symbols would never be subject to comparable treatment.

Because they are so multivocal, popular use of myths and symbols makes visible a truth that is not always evident within traditional religion: the abundance of their interpretive possibilities. A story whose meaning is fixed and universally agreed upon is not, by definition, a myth; the potency and longevity of myths lie in their ability to mean different things to different people in different historical settings. Paradoxically, while myths unite groups of people in common appreciation of the story, they also serve as venues for intragroup conflict. As historian of religion Wendy Doniger puts it, “[a] myth is like a gun for hire, like a mercenary soldier: it can be made to fight for anyone” (Myth and Method, University Press of Virginia, 1996, 119). This conflictual element is prominent in McCarthy’s treatment of Springsteen, where she highlights the odd ways his music brings together those with very different ideological identities, from liberal intellectuals to disenfranchised Vietnam veterans to working-class conservatives. Shields notes that one of the most interesting aspects of the Buddha bikini controversy was the degree to which it drew out a single, nonsectarian Buddhist consciousness; angry responses coalesced from culturally and denominationally diverse communities of Buddhists around the globe.

The power of symbols and myths, these chapters show, is this power to connect, amiably or confrontationally, those with otherwise very disparate lives and views. In a multi- or nonreligious society, the power of myth is somewhat obscured but no less real. The stories become divorced from their institutional and doctrinal contexts, get fragmented and remixed, and reappear in sometimes startling ways in popular culture. From campfire, pulpit, and family dinner table, the telling of the myths shifts to, among other places, concert hall, television, chat group and, oddly, sexy swimwear. We learn from the popular materializations of these stories some things that might not otherwise be clear. Television vampire shows reveal that Amer-icans are still deeply interested in the supernatural; Victoria’s Secret swimwear catalogues tell us that anxiety about sensuality and spirituality is a global phenomenon complicated and intensified by globalization; the popularity of Bruce Springsteen indicates that Americans are still profoundly idealistic (and therefore in conflict) about what it means to be an American; apocalyptic films expose our deep and persistent fear of the military, industrial, and technological powers we so celebrate. While they lose the specificity of their transcendent referents, sacred stories and symbols as employed in popular culture continue to help us reckon with questions of meaning and identity and to promote real cultural encounters in a society for which that is increasingly difficult.

Chapter 1
Deliver Me from Nowhere

Bruce Springsteen and the Myth of the American Promised Land

Kate McCarthy

We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, heaven’s waiting on down the tracks
Oh come take my hand
We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land

Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road”

The importance of bar bands all across America is that they nourish and inspire that community. So there are the very real communities of people and...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Popular myth and symbol
• Part II Popular ritual
• Part III Popular spirituality and morality
• Part IV Popular “Churches”
• Index