Page 209 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

194 Marleen de Witte

viewers thus participate in sharing and following up on the church’s mes-
sage, this media audience can be considered as somehow part of the church
community. Yet, the church is in no way able to control the persons who
make up this fluid and not confined community. As the reception of the
ICGC message lacks close supervision and physical interaction, the “inner
transformation” that the message is aimed at cannot be monitored as
attempted with the community of registered members. The question is
whether without this discipline, the media format indeed changes religious
experience and sustains bonding.
But also with the registered church members the formation of com-
munity is problematic. Not only because of the mass character of church,
but also because of its clientele-like character: people are attracted and
bound more to Otabil’s personality and charisma than to the church as
a community. Mass media only reinforce this. But such a “clientelistic”
relationship also resonates with the modes of religious bonding between
traditional religious specialists and their clients. Despite charismatic
churches’ doctrinal emphasis on the born-again Christian’s direct,
unmediated access to the power of the Holy Spirit, in practice a charis-
matic “Man of God,” much like an African shrine priest, functions as a
medium through which his followers can, through specific rituals of
interaction, get access to the power of the Holy Spirit in order to gain
material wealth, physical health, and status (Asamoah-Gyadu 2005;
Gifford 2004). In competition with each other, such religious specialists
seek to convince people of their powers in order to attract a clientele and
make a living. For modern “Men of God” like Otabil, the attraction of
clients thrives to a large extent on marketing strategies and personality
creation. In the religious marketplace numerous new churches offer a
similar “product”—salvation and success—and compete with other
churches by trying to appear as more genuine, more powerful, or in one
or the other way better than others. They thus try to attract and bind
people to the church, or better, to the pastor, as a clientele, despite the
presence of so many other churches offering basically the same thing.
This fusion of the traditional religious specialist with the figure of the
global super star conflicts with the model of the church congregation

that the missionaries tried to introduce. This model nevertheless informs
church membership procedures, designed to constantly reproduce the
Christ Temple “community.” Pastors like Otabil criticize people’s shal-
low identification with charismatic Christianity as a style and their cli-
entelistic adherence to the charismatic personalities of pastors rather
than to Christ. Yet at the same time this is exactly what they stimulate
by the ways they showcase their churches and themselves in the mass
mediated religious marketplace.