Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia

Of Dominance and Diversity

Enqi Weng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429574740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume explores the contradiction between the news coverage given to issues of religion, particularly since 2001 in relation to issues such as terrorism, politics, security and gender, and the fact of its apparent decline according to Census data. Based on media research in Australia, and offering comparisons with the UK, the author demonstrates that media discussions overlook the diversity that exists within religions, particularly the country's main religion, Christianity, and presents religion according to specific interpretations shaped by race, class and gender, which in turn result in very limited understandings of religion itself. Drawing on understandings of the sacred as a non-negotiable value present in religious and secular form, Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia calls for a broader sociological perspective on religion and will appeal to scholars of sociology and media studies with interests in religion and public life.

1 Problematising ‘religion’

The Australian context

Religion has gained new prominence in local and global news media since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States (US) (also referred to as ‘9/11’) and has become enveloped within sociopolitical discussions related to issues such as terrorism, security and policies. With a renewed interest across academic disciplines because of this new visibility and presence of religion, its contemporary emergence has reinvigorated scholarly examination of beliefs, practices and the terms associated with it. This book is situated on the premise that religion, and how it is understood, is polysemic and in a state of flux. A tension that belies understandings about religion in Australia, which is the context of this research, has inspired this perspective.

Up until 9/11, before religion was thrust more violently into the public gaze, little attention had been given to religion, publicly or academically, as informed by a particular view of secularisation that posited that religion was decreasing in social relevance. Since then, religion has gained a higher public profile and caused anxieties around the world through, for example, the public visibility of religious garments and symbols (Hunter-Henin, 2012) and Muslim immigration in Western Europe (Casanova, 2006). Concurrently, Australia was experiencing contextually situated religious discourses within its media repertoires. In the past decades, some of these have included the rise of the religious right through John Howard’s government (1996–2007) (Maddox, 2005; Warhurst, 2007) and the representations of Muslim communities and related ethnocultural issues (Dunn et al., 2007; Islam, 2010; Poynting and Perry, 2007: 167). More recently, religion has gained notoriety through child sex abuse cases within churches, domestic violence and the same-sex marriage debate (ABC News, 2017; Australian Electoral Commission, 2017). Sociocultural issues related to religions continue to emerge within public discourses. In early 2019, Australian Catholic Cardinal George Pell was the most senior in his office to be convicted of child sex abuse. Because of his role in the Vatican and the proximity of his role to the Pope, his conviction would sustain local and global repercussions for the Catholic Church for a time to come (ABC News, 2019).

In contrast, Census data seem to strongly and consistently indicate a trend of secularisation in which religion appears to be becoming less significant in private lives. This is mainly inferred by religious diversification away from the nation’s main religion, Christianity, and a declining involvement in religious institutional activities (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2017; Evans and Kelley, 2004). At the same time, affiliations to Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and ‘no religion’ have grown. Despite these changes, qualitative research on religion in Australia continues to report mixed findings when it comes to Australian beliefs and public sentiments towards religion (Ipsos, 2017; Pepper and Powell, 2016). In considering these social and cultural phenomena together, a ripe context and opportunity is presented to deepen understandings about religion in Australia.

Key concepts

This research set out to examine how and when religion emerges and is applied within public discussions of social, cultural and political consequence in Australian media. Its trajectory is informed by the emergence of an alternative approach to the sociological study of the interaction of media and religion, which perceives a strong, symbiotic and mutually influential relationship between religion and media. This research is underpinned by two main theories about this relationship. Mediation theory holds the view that religion, in its beliefs, practices, meanings and symbols, is always conveyed or transmitted through a medium (Hoover and Lundby, 1997; Horsfield, 2013; Meyer, 2013; Morgan, 2011). This approach takes a liberal view of what constitutes a medium, and can involve any material media that include newspapers, brochures, architecture and the immaterial such as digital spaces. It is suggested through this approach that the medium matters in the transmission of the message, and that message would always contain some aspects of the medium (McLuhan, 1994). Mediatisation of religion theory argues that the media and its processes strongly determine and shape how religion and its symbols and messages are depicted (Hjarvard, 2011, 2013; Lövheim, 2014; Lundby, 2013: 197). This theoretical approach places particular emphasis on a more restricted understanding of ‘technology’ to its contemporary, digital version, and it is likened to complex meta processes with extensive influences such as ‘globalization, individualization, and commercialization’ (Krotz, 2009: 25).

As this book engages with theoretical concepts of ‘religion’, and its place in society within a context of religious changes, it argues that a broadened approach is required to understand ‘religion’ and its applications. It first considers the perspectives that have contributed towards current understandings about ‘religion’, and the influence of these perspectives of the secularisation thesis, understood broadly as institutional religion’s functional separation from the state. Challenges to the dominance of this thesis were explored (Berger, 1999: 2; Stark and Finke, 2000: 63). Scholarly definitions of ‘religion’ were then considered, especially in light of the secularisation thesis, which posits that religion will fade in social importance in due time. This book then considers the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, viewed as a contemporary space used for participatory discussions (Habermas, 1989). The public sphere can be viewed as a medium through which the media–religion interface occurs, and that it is a site where sociocultural values and meanings are deliberated. As religion’s place in the public sphere has come to be reconsidered, it became critical to consider the power dynamics of the combined participation of citizens of diverse perspectives, religious or otherwise, in the public sphere (Dillon, 2012: 271; Habermas, 2006: 10; Lafont, 2009: 130; Taylor, 2011: 49).

Problematising ‘religion’

The central argument of this book is that a limited public perspective on ‘religion’ has framed conceptual understandings, or misunderstandings, about it. This has hindered a more nuanced understanding of the place of religion in society and its public role in social life. Two considerations are proposed in considering ‘religion’ in this way. First, the term itself has to be recognised as a historically situated and politicised category borne out of Western modernity (Asad, 1993: 28). For instance, a recent question has been raised on whether ‘contemporary discourses on religion [are] also such a product of empire and colonial power’ (Nye, 2018: 2). After all, some ethnoreligious groups, such as the Chinese, have complexly amalgamated forms of beliefs and practices that are embedded in culture and continue to be a challenge to study when viewed through rigid sociological indices (Tao and Stapleton, 2018). Consequently, reconsiderations have to factor the development of the concept of religion within a globalising, multicultural and multireligious context such as Australia. Second, it has to be recognised that the term ‘religion’ and its definition are still the subject of scholarly debates (Smith, 1998). Traditionally, religion has been used as a general term to refer to a belief in a supernatural or transcendent reality, commonly realised through particular rituals, experiences, practices and beliefs either as individuals and/or within communities (Beckford, 2003: 19). These debates have shifted of late towards the translatability of religious qualities to secular objects, ideas, systems and people (Cheong, 2009; Cusack and Digance, 2009; Madsen, 2012: 29). In line with these changes, this book takes a broadened approach towards the definition of religion and sees religion as a spectrum, not as a specific or discreet entity. For the purpose of this book, this spectrum is seen as comprised of three principal elements: conventional religion, common religion and the secular sacred. When one of these elements is referred to, its specific name—conventional religion, common religion or the secular sacred—will be used. As such, when the term ‘religion’ is applied in this book, it will refer to the whole phenomenon of social religiosity. The term ‘the spectrum of religion’ or ‘the spectrum of religiosity’ can be used where it is more adequate to use such expressions.

In parallel with a broadened understanding of religion, there has been a sociological shift in the study of religion towards the Durkheimian use of the sacred in its ‘set apart and forbidden’ values (Durkheim, 2012: 47). Traditionally, the ‘sacred’ has been referred to as practices, phenomena or things that, because of their association with a supernatural being or special place or event, are perceived as having a distinctive quality that is inviolable or unquestionable. In a sociological reconsideration of the sacred, it has increasingly come to be used as a term to describe things—both religious and secular—that are viewed as having a distinctive quality of being inviolable or unquestionable because of their personal or historical associations, with or without a supernatural element. Scholars have agreed and provided evidence to support the notion that the sacred, because of its non-negotiability and inviolability, has come to be identified in people, things, systems and places that are viewed as religious or secular in nature (Anttonen, 2007: 281; Francis, 2015; Knott et al., 2013; Lynch, 2012). This sacred is nebulous, taking shape in forms as varied as the source that informs a group to act in violence (Francis, 2011) and the basis upon which a social collective view an attitude or behaviour as good or evil (Lynch, 2012). This conceptual understanding of the sacred, in its religious and secular natures, informed this research’s methodological approach.

Research methodology

To understand religion and its negotiated emergence within public discussions in the media, a methodological framework was adopted that conceptually broadens religion into the categories of conventional religion, common religion and the secular sacred (Knott et al., 2013). The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Q&A discussion program was selected as representative of an Australian public sphere and the focus of this media research. Since a study of this scale and depth has not been previously undertaken within the Australian context, 93 episodes were selected for combined quantitative and qualitative analyses. These translated into two full years of programming, in 2009 and 2012, and a selected group of special episodes that coincide with dates of religious and secular sacred significance in Australia in 2010 and 2013.

Two main questions guided this research. The first is: how does the spectrum of religion emerge in the Australian public sphere, and how are references to it treated differently through the methodological categories of conventional religion, common religion and the secular sacred? And the second is: how can this research’s findings contribute t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Problematising ‘religion’
• 2 Historical and current perspectives on Australian religion and spirituality
• 3 Changing perspectives on religion
• 4 Australian religion in the public sphere
• 5 Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A program: a case study
• 6 Changing nature of Australian religion
• 7 Mediation and mediatisation of religion
• 8 The sacred in evolution
• 9 Comparison with ‘media religion’ in Britain
• 10 The way forward
• Appendix 1: Coding categories
• Appendix 2: Coding: topic of discussions
• Appendix 3: Transcription convention
• Appendix 4: Program references
• Index