Page 200 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Modes of Binding, Moments of Bonding 185

leave room for flexible or porous boundaries, multiple membership, and
instability, on an empirical level the model of a church congregation as a
bounded, closed, and stable community of members does drive many reli-
gious organizations and their ideologies and practices. It is thus to be taken
seriously as such. With religious groups making use of mass media, this
congregational model has come to exist next to or in tension with social
formations and forms of bonding of a much more elusive and momentary
nature.
To analyze religious leaders’ struggles for binding people, I propose to
distinguish between membership, audience, public, and clientele and to
examine how these different groups of people relate to, overlap with, or
merge into each other. A membership is the body of members of an orga-
nization. As we shall see, for both the ICGC and Afrikania this notion is
less self-evident than it seems. An audience comprises the persons within
hearing, be they the spectators or listeners assembled at a performance or
those attracted by a radio or television program. The notion of audience
thus refers to a real group of people watching or listening at a particular
moment, independent of whether these people can be known individually
or know one another. A public, by contrast, is an abstract collective group,
regarded as sharing a particular interest and addressed, but not necessarily
reached, on the basis of this interest. Finally, a clientele is the body of cli-
ents, followers or dependants of a (religious) leader. In contrast to a com-
munity, which presupposes a certain level of communality between
members of the group, the main (if not only) feature shared by the indi-
vidual clients is their connection to the religious leader. The idea of a
religious clientele, important in both traditional African religions and
Pentecostalism, acquires new dimensions with religious leaders’ employ-
ment of commercial mass media. The question that confronts media-
active religious leaders, then, is how to turn publics into audiences and
audiences into congregations or clienteles.
This chapter discusses the generation of such different modes of bind-
ing and moments of bonding by the two religious organizations’ use of
media. I have found it fruitful to see “media” not as something new and
external to religion, but as intrinsic to religion as a practice of mediation

(De Vries 2001; De Witte 2008; Meyer 2006a; Stolow 2005). Just as
“media” as commonly understood to bridge a distance in space and/or time
and call into presence an absent or distant person, religious practices and
objects connect to a realm beyond sensory perception and enable religious
subjects to experience the presence of “divine” power (see also Meyer in
1
this volume). As a practice of both imagining and engaging with “the
metaphysical,” religion, in other words, connects people and spirits, or,
from a more social-scientific perspective, produces in people a sense of