Religion in the Media Age

Stewart M. Hoover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134380763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Looking at the everyday interaction of religion and media in our cultural lives, Hoover's new book is a fascinating assessment of the state of modern religion.

Recent years have produced a marked turn away from institutionalized religions towards more autonomous, individual forms of the search for spiritual meaning. Film, television, the music industry and the internet are central to this process, cutting through the monolithic assertions of world religions and giving access to more diverse and fragmented ideals.

While the sheer volume and variety of information travelling through global media changes modes of religious thought and commitment, the human desire for spirituality also invigorates popular culture itself, recreating commodities – film blockbusters, world sport and popular music – as contexts for religious meanings.

Drawing on research into household media consumption, Hoover charts the way in which media and religion intermingle and collide in the cultural experience of media audiences.

Religion in the Media Age is essential reading for everyone interested in how today mass media relates to contemporary religious and spiritual life.

Chapter 1

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What this book could be about

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A book with the title “Religion in the Media Age” seems ambitious. It also might seem pretty clear and straightforward what it is about. But it could actually be about a number of different things. It could be about the history and future prospects of religions in an era dominated – in the way ours is – by the institutions of the mass media. It could be about the practice of religion, the way that religion is done in the context of media culture. It could even be a “how to” book of some kind. It is likely, though, that the title also evokes a more particular kind of idea: that the project here is to uncover the relationship between religion and the media. If so, it might be assumed that the idea is to look at the kind of effect that the media have on religion or vice versa.

There is good reason to suspect such a direction. Much of what we know about the worlds of media and religion seems to predict frisson between them. It can be said that they occupy the same “turf,” and it is even easy to think of ways that their interests might conflict. Much of our “received” story of the origins of the media in the West – beginning with the development of movable-type printing in Europe in the fifteenth century¹ – carries with it the implication of conflict with religion. Printing, it is thought, ushered in an entirely new era for the established religions of the time because it made it possible for a more “democratic” situation where a reading public could have access to sacred texts and teachings outside the control of clerical authority or the institution of the Church. In fact, the history is much more complex than that. Both Catholic and Protestant churches eventually came to an accommodation with the emerging media realm.

Accommodation was, indeed, inevitable because “the media” were not going away once they came into being. As historian Elizabeth Eisenstein has shown² printing was significant not only for the spread of printed works and later the spread of literacy, but also because of a structural realignment that it brought about in the economic and market sphere: the emergence of a new center of social and cultural authority – the publisher. Whereas the Church of Rome (itself already an established institutional, economic, and social power) had enjoyed a good deal of autonomy in the cultural realm prior to printing, afterwards it had to account for an alternative context of cultural autonomy in the form of the publishing industry.³ This became inevitable because publishing was at the same time an economic activity that gradually integrated itself into the emerging mercantile and market economies as early modernity moved through to industrialization. The fact that publishing (and its successor – “the media”) was commercial and produced commodities is fundamental to its implications for religion. Its gradual centrality in social, civic, and state affairs is something we accept as a given today, but that has origins going back five centuries.

Our analysis needs to stress that the centrality of the media is rooted and expressed both in their political economy and in their relationship to culture. Their economic basis in capitalism gives them a powerful autonomy and a permanence not enjoyed by all human endeavors. Their cultural location is derived from their capacity – described in a range of ways – to be both shapers of culture and products of that same culture. This “double articulation” of the media makes their role and impact particularly difficult to pin down, and is one of the reasons that, today, we are still unsure of the nature and extent of their significance.

Some commentators have gone beyond these structural considerations to see the historic relationship between media and religion in more fundamental terms. Marshall McLuhan, for example, famously suggested that the media have radically reoriented the way we perceive and know things.⁴ Walter Ong has articulated a more complex and nuanced argument along these same lines, suggesting that successive changes in the dominant mode of communication has shifted human sensorial capacities from the dominance of the eye to the dominance of the ear.⁵ Ong and others base their theories very much in realms central to religion, looking at changes in the way social contexts and practices we think of as fundamental to “traditional” religion, such as oral culture, folklore, and storytelling, have been changed and altered, performatively as well as perceptively in an era dominated by modern mass communication.⁶

These two tendencies – to see the relationship between religion and media in institutional-structural terms on the one hand or in more fundamental, almost organic⁷ terms on the other – share in common an implicit dualism. They conceive of religion in particular, but also “the media” as coherent, transhistorical, unchanging forms that can be thought of as independent and potentially acting independently upon one another. This dualism holds sway in much of the scholarship that has been devoted to media and religion. From the earliest studies in the 1950s⁸ through a flurry of research that followed the emergence of the phenomenon of televangelism in the 1970s,⁹ to more recent work on religion and the press,¹⁰ the assumption has been that we can and should look at religion and media as separate realms.¹¹ This fact has been one of the major reasons that this discourse at the scholarly margins has failed to find much interest nearer the centers. Seen in the context of traditional ideas about secularization, the dimension of religion – as an ideal or inductive category – was of fading interest. In spite of the fact that some of this literature verged on provocative themes and ideas of more central interest to media scholarship¹² the fact that it was about, well – “religion” after all – meant that it could be left at the side. It now emerges, though, that this work was not just about “religion.”

It is the major argument of this book that media and religion have come together in fundamental ways. They occupy the same spaces, serve many of the same purposes, and invigorate the same practices in late modernity. Today, it is probably better to think of them as related than to think of them as separate.¹³ To some readers, such an argument will seem to be a tall order, and I will spend a number of chapters on it. For now, though, let’s look at some of the other things this book might have been about. We need to do this because there have been ways to think about religion and media available to us all along, obvious to a project such as this, but less obvious to a media-scholarly discourse that has marginalized religion.¹⁴

This book, then, might have focused any of a number of questions about media social scientists have addressed. Many of these have obvious connections to religion, and beg asking. It has been suggested that the primary significance of the media lies in their technological arrangements and their ability to transcend space and time.¹⁵ If this is so, then social and cultural practices that are largely rooted in temporal and spatial discourses, such as religious ones, must be implicated. It has been argued that the media are today the most credible sources of social and cultural information, setting the agenda and the context for much of what we think and know about reality.¹⁶ Religion, which addresses itself to such questions, must be expressed and experienced differently today as a result. A number of studies have suggested a central role for the media in community and social solidarity. This has been claimed particularly for youth and young adults.¹⁷ Religion and religious organizations have traditionally been thought to fill this role. What is the implication if that task is now assumed, particularly for younger generations, by the media?

Much has been made of media content and its putative cultural and moral values. Much of this is a critique of media, lamenting the negative and anti-social (even anti-religious) messages that are said to dominate there.¹⁸ What are the prospects for religion and religious values if the dominant sector of public discourse – the media – consistently carries contradictory and antagonistic views? Media have been claimed to be a negative psychological force, deteriorating the quality of individual and social life, tantamount to an addiction.¹⁹ Media have been claimed to structure the flow of daily life, determining when we eat, sleep, socialize, even procreate.²⁰ These are clear and taken-for-granted roles and functions “traditional” religion is interested in, at least, and are surely profound functions for the media to assume, creating at least a condition or context within which religion must find its place.

A more nuanced view of the media is that they function as a kind of mirror of the culture, or even a “cultural forum” through which important relations in the culture are aired, debated, articulated, and negotiated.²¹ This latter view stands in some obvious contrast to much of what I discussed above. Readers who are familiar with the history of mass communication and media theory will recognize the earlier set of issues are consistent with the so-called “dominant” paradigms, the ones that stress media “effects” rather than their relationship to, or embedment in, culture. The idea of the media serving as a “cultural forum” represents a major alternative view in the field of media theory, seeing the media as part of culture, even constituting culture, rather than as somehow separate from it. Such a role for the media would obviously condition the prospects and practices of religion. Religious leaders, institutions, practitioners, symbols, values, practices, and ideas would all find themselves involved in this ongoing discourse, rather than separate from it.

There is also a large and growing body of thought focused on generational differences in media use, significance, and functions. The largest part of this work has been focused on children and the behavioral and value implications of media, including film, television, the Internet, and video games.²² A substantial body of work has followed a different direction, seeking to understand how media function, are used, and are integrated into the lives of children and particularly adolescents.²³ Important recent work has addressed directly the questions of religion that follow from such a direction. If the media are such a significant source of socialization and acculturation for children, how should religion, which aspires to be directly involved in those processes, respond? Important work on adolescent media use has shown something more profound than such “direct effects” – that media serve to orient and articulate much of teen culture.²⁴ What are the prospects for religion? How is it adapting or must it adapt to such a situation?

The media have been claimed to be at the center of social and cultural ritual in contemporary life. Some of this is almost commonsensical and taken for granted. We all know and experience the role that the media play in conveying and articulating public events, social conflicts and crises. A more substantive scholarly literature has developed, however, which argues that these processes are articulated, in a fundamental way, into the warp and woof of contemporary common life.²⁵ In the post-9/11 era, it has even been argued that the media assumed, around that event, a role that can best be described as a “new civil religion of commemoration and mourning.”²⁶ The implications of such a situation for “traditional” and “non-civil” religion are fascinating. Formal religion has always had to contend with the civil variety, particularly in the US. What happens when – as the evidence seems to show – the civil rituals are more widely circulated and participated in than the traditional ones? It is important to point out that most scholars would argue that such rituals play an important social role in developing and maintaining social solidarity, conveying fundamental values and ideals. But to separate those from “religion” (particularly in as “religious” a context as the US) is still an important challenge to our evolving understandings of contemporary religion.

There has also been a great deal written and said about media and globalization. We live in an increasingly globalized economic and social environment, and the media are directly implicated in these developments.²⁷ The world has shrunk, at least for some social sectors and social classes, and our knowledge of the world and of “the other” is a different kind of knowledge than our parents or grandparents had. Religion depends in some fundamental ways on ideas about the world, about difference, about solidarity, and about the conditions of meaning and truth rooted in understandings of place. Scholarship in the world of religion has recognized the effects of globalization for some time,²⁸ but a more sustained focus on the role and implications of media in these issues awaits doing.²⁹

What scholars know as debates over postmodernity and late modernity have also outlined a role for media that has implications for religion. Socalled “medium theory”³⁰ has held that one important implication of the media for social consciousness rests in their tendency to expose both the “frontstage” and “backstage” of social, civic, cultural, and political action. Combined with increasing levels of public knowledge and education, this has led to a situation where the public is far more self-conscious and reflexive about how things work publicly and about their place in those things than in the past.³¹ Whether this is empowering or disempowering is a matter of some debate³² but it obviously conditions a wide range of social contexts, practices, and behaviors. To the extent that religion is rooted in individual consciousness (and, for both commonsensical and more informed reasons, we tend to think that it is) this knowledge and reflexivity clearly has implications. Whether it merely leads to an increased skepticism about institutional authority, makes modern life that much more of a challenge for individuals, or greatly complicates social and structural processes, this media-generated reflexivity is an important issue for our understanding of contemporary religion.

Another claimed effect of the media in late modernity³³ is their role in undermining traditional linguistic truth claims. Postmodernity is supposedly partly rooted in the notion that the relationship between words, symbols, and images, and the things they represent, has been undermined. In an era dominated by the media and their playful deconstruction and reconstruction of traditional meanings, the solidity of the relationships between “signs” and the things they refer to (“referents”) comes under suspicion.³⁴ In a well-known turn of phrase, the French theorist Baudrillard has claimed that today we live, interact, and communicate at a surface level derived from commodified, mediated images, a level he calls the “simulacrum.”³⁵ Whether we accept the totalistic notion that we live in a postmodernity defined only by surfaces, or merely observe that such semiotic or linguistic superficiality does seem to be commonplace in our time, the implications for religion are clear. Many religions are grounded in doctrines and pieties that specify precisely the relationship between signs and referents, between metaphors and concrete meanings, and between words and ideas. If today such claims are increasingly undermined, that is an important issue for those religions and particularly for their legitimacy and authority.

Another claim about the media that is inflected with discourses of late modernity and postmodernity is related to the issues of globalization, and has to do with the capacity of media to blur the boundaries between “private” and “public” spaces. Just as globalization is partly defined by an increasing fungability between the “local,” the “national,” and the “global,” rooted in the capacities of modern media to bring those three contexts together, so too the media make the private sphere public an...