Media and Religion

Foundations of an Emerging Field

Daniel Stout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136512346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This text examines the history, theory, cultural context, and professional aspects of media and religion. While religion has been explored more fully in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the humanities, there is no clear bridge of understanding to the communication discipline. Daniel A. Stout tackles this issue by providing a roadmap for examining this understudied area so that discussions about media and religion can more easily proceed.

Offering great breadth, this text covers key concepts and historical highlights; world religions, denominations, and cultural religion; and religion and specific media genres. The text also includes key terms and questions to ponder for every chapter, and concludes with an in-class learning activity that can be used to encourage students to explore the media–religion interface and review the essential ideas presented in the book.

Media and Religion is an ideal introduction for undergraduate students in need of a foundation for this emerging field.

CHAPTER

1

Introduction

Few subjects in the last two decades have attracted more attention than the media–religion interface. Examples include: cyberchurches, virtual pilgrimages, online missionaries, megachurches, emergent churches, cybertemples, e-prayer, religious blogs, televangelism, and religious radio. Increasingly popular are media genres such as spiritual rock music, contemporary religious novels, and faith-based video games. Houses of worship have become multimedia environments with big screen projection technology and sophisticated lighting and sound systems. Congregations are no longer confined to physical locales; interactive media create virtual or online churches. These developments beg for closer examination.

How religions are depicted in the media is of vital concern because the media are the source of much of what people know about them. This fact may ultimately determine how groups are perceived and treated. Hence, public relations professionals are often hired by faith groups to prevent misperceptions.

Twenty years ago, the relationship between the media and religion was a topic of growing interest; today it is a developing field of study,¹ a promising area of research that not only provides a fresh perspective on both elements, but contributes to theory-building in the general discipline of mass communication.

In this book, I explore the relationship between the media and religion both inside and outside institutions. Within groups, the media instruct and build community, but organized religion doesn't fully account for the ways that individuals worship today. Religious “questers” seek truth in many places, including the media of popular culture (Roof, 1993, 1999). Consequently, this book is as much about the Oprah Winfrey phenomenon as it is about Radio Islam or the National Catholic Reporter.

Two key developments characterize this new age of media and religion: (1) Organized religion is increasingly to be found in a number of different media (i.e., spiritual Web sites, radio sermons, church magazines, etc.), and (2) the elements of religion (i.e., ritual, deep feeling, belief, and community) are experienced through the media of popular culture. In fact, the assumption that any medium is entirely secular is being questioned. In other words, religiosity, broadly defined, helps us better understand the overall media landscape.

It is problematic to assume that the media and religion are distinct phenomena (Carey, 2002; Hoover, 2001); it is more advantageous to understand how they interface in a cultural context of expanding forms of worship.² Speaking of contemporary society, Carey (2002) notes that: “Religion has unexpectedly returned to center stage…” (p. 3). In his history of the term communication, Peters (1999) points out that religious history teaches us many things about the evolution of the term's meaning. Interest in such subjects is encouraging for media studies. It is time to discuss the contours of the new field and elucidate its importance.

Purpose of the Book

The present work has been conceived as a foundation for the study of the media and religion; it organizes and presents concepts in a way that enables future study and in the process recognizes a major cultural trend in contemporary society. At a basic level, it discusses theory, history, and content. At another level, it presents religion as a useful analytic concept, one that aids our understanding of a full range of media-related experiences, not just those pertaining to denominations. Both traditional and nontraditional religions are examined because people define religion broadly and find it throughout society.

Religion as Broad Analytical Concept

Religion, which has been controversial and not well understood by media researchers in the past, is becoming a useful analytical concept. This approach places religion, previously viewed as a fringe area, in a more central position in media studies by analyzing the media according to their rituals, beliefs, community, and feeling dimensions rather than in terms of validating theology or advocating spiritual worldviews. Only recently have media scholars come to embrace the idea, shared by anthropologists of religion, that these four elements are key ordering concepts of everyday life. According to Sylvan (2005), it is “the notion that religion, in a broader and more fundamental sense, is the underlying substratum for all cultural activity and serves as the foundation for culture in general” (p. 13). A comprehensive approach to a study of the religious aspects of the media is recognized by scholars:

Anthropological studies of comparative religion and shamanism demonstrate that all cultures possess rites, myths, divine forms, sacred and venerated objects, symbols, consecrated men [sic] and sacred places. Each category is attached to a distinctive morphology that organizes experience and bestows sacred or extraordinary meaning on certain types of conduct and experience. (Rojek, 2007, p. 172)

Such phenomena are ubiquitous in everyday life. As historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1959) notes, religion “may manifest itself no matter how or where in the profane world…” (p. 30). In the same way that culture encompasses ritual, community, and belief, so do media-related behaviors.

Overcoming Barriers to the Study of Media and Religion

If religion is an important analytical concept, why isn't it applied more often in media studies? Why has the subject been approached cautiously in communication programs at secular universities? Carey (2002) attributes this resistance to the Enlightenment when science and empiricism came to dominate educational institutions, which had previously been dominated by the religious groups that founded them. While the separation of the theological and the secular is important, the examination of religion from a cultural perspective became less emphasized in media studies. The sociology of religion, psychology of religion, and anthropology of religion are emerging fields, but for a variety of reasons, a comparable area in media studies is only beginning to take root.

The Problem of Semantics and the Term Religion

Perhaps the biggest impediment to the study of this subject is the term religion itself, which is used so widely and loosely that confusion has arisen about what precisely it is we are talking about. If the definition is too restrictive, some quasi-religious media activities will be overlooked. Therefore, Johnstone's (2001) definition is optimal; it defines religion as “a system of beliefs and practices by which a group of people interprets and responds to what they feel is sacred and, usually supernatural as well” (p. 13). Similar to the definition of Cornwall, Albrecht, Cunningham, and Pitcher (1986), it argues that religion is multidimensional, comprised of belief, behavior, community, and feeling. Such a definition sets reasonable criteria for what qualifies as religious, but the definition is broad enough to include wide-ranging media experiences. Furthermore, it emphasizes that belief in the supernatural is usually, but not always present in human culture. This allows us to apply a religious analysis to a broader range of popular media.

Because the term religion is used in both theological and academic contexts, its meaning varies. The study of “religion” means something different in a mosque, for example, than it does in a secular college classroom. Unlike theologians who base their work on an assumed deity, academics approach the subject like any other, applying the same analytical methods that they use in the study of history, social science, and the humanities. The media and religion is an academic subject much like political communication or media ethics; its goal is not to advocate spirituality or any particular worldview.

To address the problem of semantics, this book uses the term religion as well as the term numinous because numinous experiences are similar to religious ones and may occur outside institutions, and such experiences do not necessarily involve the supernatural. For example, some may be more comfortable describing the experience of Elvis fandom as numinous rather than religious. Lohrey (2010) contends that there are religious as well as nonreligious perspectives on the numinous, the latter recently embraced by atheist scholars Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.

The concept is discussed in depth later in the chapter. The point is that alternative terms broaden the discussion, and move us beyond the restrictions of semantic boundaries.

Getting Beyond Dualism

A common assumption is that media and religion are distinct, impermeable phenomena often in perpetual conflict. This idea was particularly prevalent in the late 1980s and early 1990s culture wars (Hunter, 1992). Picketers gathered outside movie theaters to protest The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 2000) and Muslims denounced Salman Rushdie's (1988) novel Satanic Verses. Movie critic Michael Medved (1992) declared that Hollywood and religion embraced incompatible worldviews and James Dobson, host of the popular radio program Focus on the Family observed a wide gulf between family values and those depicted in the media. The boy-cott of Disney entertainment products by the Southern Baptist Convention is yet another example of the divide between religion and the media. Sociologists at that time observed considerable cultural conflict, or a condition where little agreement existed about which worldviews were most important in a democratic society.³ Hunter (1992) defined this culture war as a battle between orthodox and progressive impulses.

Today, researchers are expanding their analysis beyond this oppositional framework. The culture wars approach, while useful in some contexts, doesn't capture the myriad ways that media and religion interact; it has considerable limitations as an analytical concept.⁴ In today's information society, it is important that students and researchers have considerable latitude in exploring the topic. The fact is, members of denominations both use and criticize the media in diverse ways. Media that are scrutinized one day are used on another day to attract converts and solicit donations. Citizens pray in their houses of worship, but may also view a movie in a theater or online, which can also be religious experiences. This book, then, seeks a broader discussion of the ways religion interacts with the media.

The Lack of Interdisciplinary Study

Analysis is aided by interdisciplinary study.⁵ Scholars in other disciplines are making new discoveries about religion and society. Historians, for example, investigate the role of religion in the development of printing and other technologies. In the humanities, the influence of religion on writing and the critique of literature is of interest. Sociologists provide insights about the Internet and religious community. One goal of this book is to make interdisciplinary connections that have not been easy to make in the past.

The Need for Common Terminology

Prior to the 1990s, research on the media and religion was disparate and sporadic.⁶ Since the mid-1990s, however, there has been a considerable increase in writing on the subject. Subject areas include religion and cultural studies (Hoover, 2006; Hoover & Clark, 2002; Hoover & Lundby, 1997); religious audiences (Stout & Buddenbaum, 1996, 2001); religion and popular culture (Forbes & Mahan, 2005); critical studies (de Vries & Weber, 2001); and historical perspectives (Sloan, 2000) to name a few. Yet the field remains divergent: There is no common language of analysis, different terminology is being used to describe similar phenomena. The present volume responds to this situation in two ways: First, it identifies foundational concepts for more precise study. Second, it organizes and categorizes information so that it can be accessed with greater ease. Lastly, it discusses frameworks and theories that define the parameters of the new field.

Expanding the Discussion: Religion and the Numinous

Statues in a temple or video in a megachurch are easily categorized as religious media. But, what about the music in the Broadway musical Rent? Is there a concept that recognizes ritual, belief, community, and feeling in all of these examples? Is there a term that permits us to study media in both traditional and nontraditional religious settings? While there are many categories of religion (e.g., denominational religion, civil religion, popular religion, cultural religion, etc.), a broad concept is needed in order to examine the quasi-religious dimensions of a broad range of media. Such a concept is the numinous, an idea once confined to traditional religion, which is now finding application in sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, literary studies, museum studies, and other fields.⁷

The numinous is a broadly defined term whose application isn't restricted to the experiences of institutional religion or the supernatural. According to Casement and Tacey (2006), the numinous is not precisely the same thing as religion, “but rather the ‘religious attitude’ in a variety of disciplinary and experiential contexts” (p. xvi). For example, the numinous concept allows us to study both Catholic audiences of the Catholic Community Television Network as well as teenage players of video games. Members of both groups claim to have religious experiences.

The numinous requires the following elements: deep feeling (affect)...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Media and Religion
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Key Concepts
• Chapter 3 Physiology and Mental States
• Chapter 4 World Religions and Denominations
• Chapter 5 Cultural Religion
• Chapter 6 Media Criticism
• Chapter 7 The Internet
• Chapter 8 Entertainment Media
• Chapter 9 The News
• Chapter 10 Strategic Communication
• Chapter 11 In the Classroom: A Learning Activity
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index