Page 217 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

202 Marleen de Witte

challenge of binding people—as audiences, followers, and/or congrega-
tions—as a question of how to mediate a sense of divine presence through
media representation. While the two “religions” in case seem at first sight
diametrically opposed, and also position themselves as such, they are
closely connected on a deeper level. Most significant for the present argu-
ment is the role of the body as a medium for engaging with the immediate
presence of the divine. In both religions, the formats of spiritual mediation
and modes of religious bonding center on the embodiment of spiritual
power, which can be achieved through specific bodily and sensual “for-
mats.” How does this relate to audiovisual mass mediation, that is, to
Otabil’s media ministry and Afrikania’s public representation of ATR
respectively?
In the first case the formats and modes of address of charismatic ritual
fit those of television. Charismatic churches mediate the experience of spir-
itual power and community through mass gatherings, serialized spectacle,
and theatrical performance. Their dominant mode of address is a mode of
addressing the masses, or more precisely, the individual as part of a mass of
worshippers. This fits the televisual logic of enchanting the masses with
public spectacle and visual attraction and addressing the spectator as being
part of a mass audience. Indeed, Pentecostalism’s evangelical logic of win-
ning as many souls as possible has shaped its authorized modes of trans-
mitting religious knowledge and spiritual power in ways that structurally
connect to television’s commercial logic of reaching an audience as wide as
possible. The medium of television thus offers formats and modes of
address that are familiar to those of charismatic events.
I have shown how charismatic media practices extend the role of the
body as a medium for spiritual power and religious bonding through film-
ing and editing techniques that visualize the flow of spirit power in church
and invite the TV audience to participate in this flow. While radically
breaking with Catholic body imagery featuring Christ, Mary and saints as
mediators of the divine, charismatic-Pentecostal imagery stars the bodies
of pastors and worshippers themselves. They become “living icons” medi-
ating the power of the Holy Spirit to the spectators by appealing to their
full sensory being. Charismatic television, then, attempts to connect its

viewers to this power and to one another as a religious audience in similar
ways as happens to the in-church audience during worship service.
By contrast, the Afrikania Mission’s media representations lack the spir-
itual power that occupies the religious practitioners they claim to repre-
sent. This has to do with Afrikania’s awkward position in between the
public and the shrine priests and the misfit between the formats of media-
tion of the public sphere and those of spirit cults. In traditional shrines
communication of spiritual power usually takes place in seclusion on a