Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred

Representation and Change

Kim Knott, Elizabeth Poole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317098799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Is it true that Christianity is being marginalised by the secular media, at the expense of Islam? Are the mass media Islamophobic? Is atheism on the rise in media coverage? Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred explores such questions and argues that television and newspapers remain key sources of popular information about religion. They are particularly significant at a time when religious participation in Europe is declining yet the public visibility and influence of religions seems to be increasing. Based on analysis of mainstream media, the book is set in the context of wider debates about the sociology of religion and media representation. The authors draw on research conducted in the 1980s and 2008-10 to examine British media coverage and representation of religion and contemporary secular values, and to consider what has changed in the last 25 years. Exploring the portrayal of Christianity and public life, Islam and religious diversity, atheism and secularism, and popular beliefs and practices, several media events are also examined in detail: the Papal visit to the UK in 2010 and the ban of the controversial Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, in 2009. Religion is shown to be deeply embedded in the language and images of the press and television, and present in all types of coverage from news and documentaries to entertainment, sports reporting and advertising. A final chapter engages with global debates about religion and media.

Chapter 1
Media, Religion and Society: Terrain and Debates

In April 2008, Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the BBC, gave a lecture to a Catholic audience on ‘Faith and the Media’ in which he looked back over his career in television and forward to the future of religious broadcasting.1 On joining the BBC in 1979, he had become part of the team working on the religious documentary, Everyman.2 He had enjoyed its creativity and energy, but ‘at the same time I couldn’t help noticing that one thing that Everyman didn’t seem to do very often was actually to make programmes about religion’.3 Apart from a handful made each year on conventional religious subjects ‘most editions of Everyman were only “religious” in the broadest possible sense’, dealing with ‘science and spirituality’, ‘New Age cults’ or religion as a way into social and political issues.4 Furthermore, religion was ‘marginal at best’ in mainstream drama, documentaries, comedy and news.5

Thompson accounted for this by referring to the acceptance in media circles of post-Enlightenment assumptions that rationalism would lead to the long-term decline of organized religion, and that religion as a collective force would give way to individualized belief and practice.6 This was how the media thought about religion in the eighties and it helped to explain the nature of its coverage. But this ‘easy consensus’ had later been undermined, he suggested, by global and local events (in Tehran and Bradford, for example), by troubling questions about tolerance, rights and freedom, the renewed centrality of religion to political and ethical issues, the churches’ own internal struggles, and indeed by the failure of the prediction of religion’s wholesale decline. He concluded his lecture by talking about the ‘remarkable creative revival and a new spirit of experimentation in religious programming’, and his hope for the future of religion in the delivery of public service broadcasting.7

Thompson’s description of an increasingly positive climate for religion in the media by 2008 and an increase in its coverage may have been greeted with raised eyebrows by some in his predominantly Catholic audience. For them, as for many religious critics of the media, a more plausible narrative might have been one of an ever-declining number of hours dedicated to religious broadcasting, a failure to cover religion and faith issues in peak-time schedules, and of bias against Christianity in a context of raised secularist and atheist voices.8

Thompson’s twin points of reference – the early 1980s and late 2000s – accord with the periods of our research. His account will be tested in the following chapters when we examine and compare the extent and nature of coverage of religion in television and newspaper output in those periods, and look at how it has changed. Later in this chapter, however, we will see that the opposing perspectives he mentions – of a halt to secularization and a revitalization of religious broadcasting, and the counter thesis of unremitting religious decline and media neglect – reflect broader debates about the changing nature of religion and its public visibility. They also reveal the diversity of views about media attitudes and knowledge of religion, and the effect they have on its treatment on TV and in the press.

The purpose of this chapter is to establish the social, historical and theoretical context for the analysis that follows. We consider the state of religion, the media and society in Britain and their changing relationships over the last thirty years, and examine previous empirical and theoretical studies for what they tell us (or neglect to tell us) about the place of religion in public life and how it has been portrayed in the media. In the final section we introduce a series of propositions about the nexus of the media/religion/society that emerge from our discussion. These statements will be considered in the discussions that follow and, in the concluding chapter, we will assess their salience.

The Changing Religious and Secular Context

By the time we began our research in 2008 the news was that religion was back on the agenda. ‘Almost everywhere you look, from the suburbs of Dallas to the slums of São Paulo to the back streets of Bradford, you can see religion returning to public life’, wrote Micklethwait and Wooldridge as they introduced their argument about the global rise of faith, its compatibility with modernity, and how we might learn to live with it.9 Irrespective of the apparent universality of this state of affairs, however, they recognized that different continents, nations and communities approached it from differing starting points, noting in particular the ‘European way’, of the loss of religion, and the ‘American way’, of religion ingrained in the national consciousness.10 We will discuss theoretical perspectives on secularization, re-sacralization and the public visibility of religion later in the chapter, but first we must establish some basic information about religion and its public face in the last thirty years. For this study, of course, the key information concerns Britain. However, as this chapter will show, even though the facts and figures about Britain may suggest a certain narrative about religious change and the place of religion in society, how that information is interpreted and represented in the media or elsewhere is not straightforward; neither is it isolated from global events and processes.

The most reliable religious statistics at the time of our research in 2008–2010 were from the population census of 2001 when a question on religious identity was included for the first time.11 The results surprised people because they showed that the vast majority continued to see themselves as religious (77.1 per cent), the largest group identifying as Christian (over 41 million or 71.8 per cent).12 About two-thirds of these were Anglican, most of the rest Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, and other Christian denominations accounting for just a tenth of the Christian total. Muslims formed the second largest group (2.8 per cent, 1.6 million), with small percentages of Hindus (1 per cent), Sikhs (0.6 per cent), Jews (0.5 per cent) and Buddhists (0.3 per cent). The category ‘Any other religion’ (0.3 per cent) included different neo-Pagan groups (Wiccans, Druids and Asatrus), Jains, Bahá’ís and Zoroastrians. Although the figures had changed a decade later – in England and Wales, Christians down to 59.3 per cent, Jews remaining at 0.5 per cent, with Muslims up to 4.8, Hindus to 1.5, Sikhs to 0.8, Buddhists to 0.4, and other religions to 0.4 per cent respectively – it was clear that a substantial, though decreasing, majority of people continued to identify as religious (67.7 per cent).13

Figures for religious identity don’t tell the full story, however. Another source of information showed that only about 7 per cent of people in England regularly attended Christian churches.14 With so little formal engagement, why did so many identify as Christian in the population census? Interviews with people on why they ticked the ‘Christian’ box revealed a multitude of reasons including family background, class, history, values, ethnicity and national identity.15

Even though the majority of people identified with Christianity or another religious tradition in 2001, 15 per cent said they had no religion; the remainder, 7.8 per cent, gave no response (‘religion not stated’).16 In 2001, then, there were at least 8.5 million ‘non-religious’ people in England, Wales and Scotland, and possibly as many as 13 million (by 2011, as many as 18 million). These are significant numbers when compared to the total number of religious people who were non-Christian (slightly over 3 million in 2001, rising to 4.7 million by 2011). Other surveys and polls have given rather different percentages for non-religion. According to the European Values Survey for 2001, for example, 5 per cent of people claimed to be ‘a convinced atheist’, while over 53 per cent stated they were ‘not a religious person’.17

The close relationship between religious and ethnic profile was important.18 Most people who identified as Asian were affiliated to a religious tradition.19 Three religious traditions accounted for nearly 90 per cent of all Asians: 40 per cent were Hindu or Sikh, and half were Muslim. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of Muslims (nearly 9 out of 10) were from other eth...