Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age

Elisabeth Arweck, Christopher Deacy, Elisabeth Arweck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754665274
• eBook ISBN: 9781351937573
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In recent years, there has been growing awareness across a range of academic disciplines of the value of exploring issues of religion and the sacred in relation to cultures of everyday life. Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age offers inter-disciplinary perspectives drawing from theology, religious studies, media studies, cultural studies, film studies, sociology and anthropology. Combining theoretical frameworks for the analysis of religion, media and popular culture, with focused international case studies of particular texts, practices, communities and audiences, the authors examine topics such as media rituals, marketing strategies, empirical investigations of audience testimony, and the influence of religion on music, reality television and the internet. Both academically rigorous and of interest to a wider readership, this book offers a wide range of fascinating explorations at the cutting edge of many contemporary debates in sociology, religion and media, including chapters on the way evangelical groups in America have made use of The Da Vinci Code and on the influences of religion on British club culture and electronic dance music.

Chapter 1
The Ethics of Research in Faith and Culture: Scholarship as Fandom?

Tom Beaudoin

Introduction

The serious attention given to ‘popular culture’ in the study of religion and theology in the last two decades has generated a rich range of research—from studies of the lived faith of non-élites, to erudite theological exegeses of media productions, to sophisticated sociological deconstructions of religious practices. It also represents, at its best, diverse examples of the worthiest that an academic life concerned with religion can be: an intellectually serious engagement with everyday life, a deep curiosity and respect for the strangeness of sacrality as lived, an awareness of the necessarily political position of the scholar or the creativity to test religious claims in the domains of the quotidian, the lay, the invisible or—in the case of media—the often too simplistically visible.

However, as I have argued elsewhere, scholars who research faith and culture and those whose lives feel the impact of our scholarship could benefit from paying more attention to learning what is going on when scholars write about popular culture and religion (Beaudoin 2007).¹ Do we read our readings of the works of others in this field as having to do with our own subjectivity? How indeed have we learned to read our scholarly productions? Why do we so often only read them as scholarly interventions vis-à-vis a particular school, debate or person, instead of also reading them as they relate to our own weirdness, the strangeness that we are made to be by our cultural and personal unconsciousnesses and the different strangeness that we might be by attempting to let through and re-place our histories, socially and individually? What politics of scholarly production prevent us from reading our writings as fictions, fantasies, daydreams, reports of desire and conflict or rapports à l’ésprit yet unimagined?

Such questions turn us to the problem of the ‘government’ of the ethical placement of the scholar as cultural interpreter. Can we answer to what is ‘really going on’ when scholars make religious or theological sense of the cultural practice of faith?

When Scholars Study Others’ Faith: Soul Searching

A case will serve to develop why a turn to the ethics of studies of faith and culture might be important. The recent volume Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers is a major sociological report about the faith lives of American adolescents (Smith & Denton 2005). In this book, the authors, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, present the results of the most comprehensive study of teenage faith ever attempted. Over 3,300 teens were surveyed by phone and 267 were subjects of personal follow-up interviews.

Through summary charts, brief biographical narratives and rich quotations, the authors argue that a clear picture of contemporary teenage faith emerges. Far from being ‘spiritual but not religious’ seekers, teens are surprisingly conventional in their faith. Indeed, they frequently profess to enjoy being religious or at least lacking suspicion about it. Mostly they end up believing what their parents believe. They affirm spiritual ‘seeking’ in theory, but almost never do it in practice, and they do not bother to talk to each other in depth about faith. Nor are they generally concerned about what their professed traditions actually teach about faith and practice. Often treading cautiously among peers, they do not want to publicly offend anyone else's faith (or lack thereof). Rather, they seek to believe what ‘works’ for them. And teens, the researchers discovered, want religion to provide them, above all, with individual health and wealth: an American-styled happiness.

Smith & Denton coin a phrase for this everyday teen faith: ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ (2005: 118–71). By this they mean that teens like to make value judgements, but are highly inarticulate at defending them. They use their faith to further their own sense of individual entitlement and they imagine God as indifferent to, or unable to be involved in, worldly affairs in general or their own moral decisions in particular. The teen credo that cuts across denominations is: believe what you need to believe in order to fulfil yourself. This is the contemporary teenage faith in the United States. Far from inventing this new religion, however, teenagers learned it from their culture, particularly through their moralistic, therapy-positive, functionally deist parents.

This book will have concrete effects in religious and academic environments. Those involved in the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) have made numerous academic presentations of the findings and multiple academic productions are planned: another 6 books, 17 articles or chapters, and 8 Master's or doctoral theses presenting and interpreting the data.² Smith & Denton's authoritative interpretation has already been cause for hand-wringing in popular Christian periodicals and their conclusions, along with presentations of the larger NSYR data, have been the stuff of dozens, perhaps now hundreds, of presentations to ministry professionals and church leaders.³ Such use of this research also matters because of the resources being invested in ‘effective’ youth and young adult ministries in the United States. The first new Catholic Catechism for the United States in over a century has recently been produced (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 2006); it was ostensibly written with reference to sociological data on young adult Catholic faith in America, signalling an interest in official Catholicism about studies of everyday faith.⁴ Such a mobilization of scholars and presenters in academic and religious life reinforces and reflects the presumption, in most theological and ecclesial circles, that, when sociologists present data on faith and culture, they are telling the more or less objective truth. Some questions and objections can be raised, however, about this research that will set us within the theme for this chapter.

Soul Searching should be credited with many serious achievements in the study of American youth and religion.⁵ My purpose here, however, is to underscore the problematic theological assumptions that seem to implicitly and explicitly guide the generation, classification and reportage of these sociological data. Such assumptions prevent this study from comprehending everyday faith in its specificity, that is, the ways in which everyday faith is amalgamated from multiple ways of operating in everyday life (see Bender 2003); is practised as ‘fragments’, ‘side plots’ and ‘tangents’, more than theorized (Ammerman 2007: 226);⁶ is irreducible to a ‘logical syllogism’ (Davidman 2007: 65) and is speakable only after something like ‘therapy’⁷—none of these dimensions of faith as practised are allowed in Soul Searching, except as deformations of a supposed ideal form of faith.

This misreading of everyday faith stems from Soul Searching's conception of personal religious identity as derivative of official conceptions of identity. Institutions and their representatives get to define what counts as authentic faith and it is these contemporary declarations against which teens’ own declarations (narrowly understood, as will become evident) are measured. This misreading operates through four strategies in the analysis, which I shall delimit.

Firstly, teen faith is framed as a problem for the power of religious leaders. Smith & Denton define institutional representatives as the ‘agents of religious socialization’ and describe their ineffectiveness in contemporary American culture (2005: 27). The authors presume, but do not defend, any theological ground for evangelical exhortations such as ‘there may be more than a few Catholic and Mormon leaders who may be justifiably concerned that roughly one in every seven of their teenagers are not even convinced that God exists’ (ibid.: 42).⁸ They write elsewhere that ‘all religious groups seem at risk of losing teens to nonreligious identities …’ (ibid.: 88), betokening a suspect theological assumption—that of an easy distinction between a religious and non-religious identity. Such ‘top-down’ analysis also lacks psychological–sociological curiosity regarding the ways in which ‘religious’ identities may be necessarily related to ‘non-religious’ identities in a life or a social circle.

The authors imagine religious beliefs as starting from pure official teaching, stewarded by contemporary religious leaders, well or poorly, through official channels, such as programmes of religious education. Beliefs that begin as given at the ‘top’ are corrupted by American culture, sometimes with the assistance of weak delivery systems for education in faith. Thus, on one page, the study states three different times that teen faith has suffered significant ‘slippage’ from the official doctrines of religious tradition and religious education (Smith & Denton 2005: 44). The authors report with evident surprise that ‘a number of religious teenagers propounded theological views that are, according to the standards of their own religious traditions, simply not orthodox’ (ibid.: 136).

The preoccupation with what ‘slippage’ might actually reveal seems, as transpires over the course of the book, to be an anxiety regarding the maintenance of religious power. Typical evidence can be found in the survey question presented to teenagers whether it is legitimate to pick and choose beliefs without having to accept the teachings of the faith as a whole (ibid.: 74). Such a strange question boxes teenagers in unnecessarily, adopting a ‘with us or against us’ tone that lacks sophistication. No one, of course, can possibly know all the teachings or even all the ‘important’ or ‘foundational’ teachings of a religious tradition. Moreover, as theology itself is discovering with ever greater complexity, the particular beliefs that are ‘sanctioned’ by religious leadership, at any particular time and place, are deeply implicated in ‘non-theological’ or ‘non-religious’ political, social, cultural and economic factors. The very opposition between ‘picking and choosing’ and ‘accepting the whole’ is itself a recent way of imagining, often for the sake of an intended control, what the ‘options’ for belief are today—much like the opposition between fundamentalism and enlightenment or relativism and moral foundationalism. (Or, for the authors of Soul Searching, the dualism between inhabiting ‘morally significant’ and ‘morally insignificant’ worldviews [Smith & Denton 2005: 156–8].)

Part of the anxious defence of institutional religious authority happens through another dualism that runs through the study: between individualistic and communal faith. Individualism is cast as that which threatens the communal maintenance of traditional religious identity and convictions. But this bifurcation leaves important theological points in the study lacking nuance. For example, after discussing several examples of teenagers who say that they want to glorify God, live for God, have Christ in their heart or give up old behaviours by being saved, the authors write that these teenagers ‘illustrate something of a departure from the individualistic instrumentalism that dominates U.S. teen religion by making God and not individuals the center of religious faith’ (ibid.: 150).⁹ Or consider the contention that conservative Protestant and Mormon teenagers ‘tend to hold the most particularistic and exclusive views of religion and tend to be the least individualistic about faith and belief’ (ibid.: 76). To the contrary, it is not evident that those who say such things have transcended ‘individualism’ in their faith or whether the category of individualism allows a sufficiently rich screen through which to hear such statements. Such theological claims might well be heard in other ways: as self-serving affirmations, as testaments to surviving hardships, as ways of showing love or honour to the authorities from whom one learned such statements or as phrases that cover a theological terrain very different from that intended by an ‘official’ ‘theocentric’ understanding. It could indeed be argued that a ‘conservative’ theology can effectively be an individualist theology. The point is that an individualist/communal dichotomy fails to capture the richness and complexity of such statements to register the ‘rough ground’ (see Pilario 2005) of everyday life that makes American Christian faiths such interesting foci for study.

Secondly, the authors accept religious—effectively, Christian—leaders’ placing of the boundaries between religious traditions. The study therefore employs the discourse of ‘eclecticism’ or ‘syncretism’ and of course comes out strongly critical of it, even as the alleged phenomenon rarely shows up in their study.

Smith & Denton claim that the ‘absolute historical centrality of the Protestant conviction about salvation by God's grace alone …’ is ‘discarded’ by many teens (2005: 136). Such hyperbolic language as ‘absolute historical centrality’ is already a clue that an ahistorical theological claim is being advanced. No such historical–ahistorical ‘conviction’—held by all (authoritative?) clergy, all (authoritative?) theologians or even all ‘the faithful’—exists, as the turn to ‘historicism’ in theology would expect and as histories of Christianity, especially from ‘below’, increasingly show.¹⁰

Further, no attempt is made to distinguish ‘eclecticism’ from other attempts at plural faith inhabitations, including practices such as what theologians are presently naming ‘multiple religious belonging’ (see Cornille 2002). As it is, ‘eclecticism’ is labelled as the domain of ‘religiously promiscuous faith mixers’ (Smith & Denton 2005: 32)—a rhetorical dismissal of any potential case for a pluralistic holding by invocation of a sexually dangerized (‘promiscuous’) religious identification. According to the study, however, not many practise it anyway, since ‘almost all stick with one religious faith, if any’ (ibid.). The phrase ‘one religious faith’ is another problematic designation that the authors leave as a natural category. This seems especially worth questioning when the authors themselves find that 14–20 per cent of five of their religious sub-groups (black Protestant, Jewish, mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant and Roman Catholic) attend services at more than one congregation.

Moreover, they set an unrealistically high academic bar for someone to be considered a spiritual seeker: those who truly qualify must satisfy at least a half-dozen conditions. They must be ‘self-directing and self-authenticating individuals pursuing an experimental and eclectic quest for personal spiritual meaning outside of historical religious traditions’ (ibid.: 79). Not surprisingly, only 2–3 per cent of teens do this, they report. However, this description sounds like a critique of a romanticized view of the Baby Boomer searching of a generation ago. How many adults would even qualify as ‘seekers’ under that description? While it seems unhelpful as a way of gauging spiritual bric...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Exploring religion and the Sacred in a Media age
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why Study Religion and Popular Culture?
• 1 The Ethics of Research in Faith and Culture: Scholarship as Fandom?
• 2 Media Rituals: From Durkheim on Religion to Jade Goody on Religious Toleration
• 3 Deepening Relationships with Material Artefacts
• 4 Contesting Martyrdom
• 5 Religionless in Seattle
• 6 Marketing God and Hell: Strategies, Tactics and Textual Poaching
• 7 The Gospel of Tom (Hanks): American Churches and The Da Vinci Code
• 8 From Pulp Fiction to Revealed Text: A Study of the Role of the Text in the Otherkin Community
• 9 Seeing the Self as Other: Televising Religious Experience
• 10 Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the Community
• 11 Representation of Religion in Pretty Village, Pretty Flame
• 12 A Secular Gospel for the Marginal: Two Films of Stephen Chow as Hong Kong Cinematic Parables
• 13 What is ‘on’: An Exploration of Iconographical Representation of Traditional Religious Organizations on the Homepages of their Websites
• 14 Researching Theo(b)logy: Emerging Christian Communities and the Internet
• Index