Page 199 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

184 Marleen de Witte

present age of mass media distraction and about the kinds of religious
“communities” that ensue?
Since the deregulation of the media in the 1990s, religious movements
in Ghana have increasingly adopted broadcast media to manifest them-
selves in public, to spread their messages and to attract followers.
Charismatic-Pentecostal “media ministries” in particular have become
very successful and shape a charismatic-Pentecostal popular culture on
Ghana’s airwaves and TV screens, in church halls and beyond. This new,
mass mediated form of religion is not confined to the particular churches
that produce it and their members, but spills over into various forms of
popular culture and resonates with a broad audience. One of the most pop-
ular charismatic-Pentecostal celebrities operating in the public sphere is
pastor Mensa Otabil, whose multichannel “media ministry” made him
known as “the teacher of the nation.” Confronted with charismatic
churches’ public influence, other religious groups increasingly feel the need
to also enter the media and compete for public presence and for followers.
One of them is the neotraditionalist Afrikania Mission, that aims at
reforming and rehabilitating Afrikan Traditional Religion (ATR) as a via-
ble alternative to Christianity and a respectable and modern “world reli-
gion” in its own right. Mass media and public representation are crucial to
this project.
While mass media offer religious leaders new opportunities for reach-
ing and attracting people, they also pose challenges with regard to binding
them as followers and congregations. Indeed, the eagerness with which
religious leaders employ mass media to reach out comes with a new anxiety
about not binding people. Media pastors like Otabil fear that the televisu-
alisation of the gospel “only attracts” people to an “outward religious style”
without turning them to Christ. At stake is an insecurity over the new
modes of religious attachment that come with reaching new audiences
through the airwaves. This chapter examines and compares the ways in
which Otabil’s International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) and the
Afrikania Mission seek to mobilize new forms of religious bonding in
Ghana’s public sphere.
The entanglement of mass media and religion organizes people into

new social formations and modes of attachment that ask for a dynamic
approach to “religious community.” To capture the dynamics of the imag-
ination and mobilization of bonds between people, and between people
and the spiritual, in an age of mass media religion, we need to take into
account processes of community making (and unmaking), and possible
tensions between techniques of binding and moments of bonding.
Although the notion of a religious community as bounded, coherent, and
exclusive has long been superseded by more sophisticated approaches that