Page 219 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

204 Marleen de Witte

images can transfer the power of the Holy Spirit to the viewer, are very
close to traditional African ideas about seeing and spiritual power (De
Witte 2005b; Gordon and Hancock 2005), much closer indeed than
Afrikania’s representational practices.
In taking on modern media, both charismatic Pentecostalism and
African traditional religion struggle with the problem of mediation, but
face different challenges. The paradoxical observation is that charismatic
Pentecostalism denies mediation, positing the direct access of every
born-again Christian to the power of the Holy Spirit, but enthusiasti-
cally takes on electronic media technologies, while African traditional
religions emphasize the need for mediation, channeling access to spirit
powers through various types of religious intermediaries, but find it very
difficult to accommodate new media. The difference is that in charis-
matic Pentecostalism every believer is able and expected to access the
power of the Holy Spirit personally, and thus its mass mediation is
encouraged, whereas in traditional religious cults, access to the powers of
particular divinities is restricted to initiated religious specialists, whose
authority (and income) depends on their exclusive access to these powers.
The problem for charismatic Pentecostalism, then, is that mass media
challenge the ideal of immediacy. This asks for self-concealing media
formats that mask mediation and suggest immediate presence. In tra-
ditional religion mass media challenge the authorized structures of medi-
ation. This limits media practice to formats that are representational and
preclude spirit presence.
In contemporary mass media societies of distraction, the idea of a reli-
gious community has come under ever more pressure. This is not to say
that community has become impossible, but that the realization of a reli-
gious community, or the establishment of bonds between people as believ-
ers/religious practitioners and the divine, requires constant work. Nor is it
to suggest that the idea or ideal of religious community was unproblematic
in the past and only became challenged by the advent of modern mass
media. As I have argued, media are intrinsic to religion understood as
bonding. Binding people to a religious leader, to each other, and to the
divine, always depends on mediating forms that must give people a sense

of being connected, but risk being experienced as “mere” forms, be they
performances or media formats. It is perhaps the durability of this sense of
being connected that is put under pressure by mass (media) religion. Just
like in a mass church like the ICGC’s Christ Temple religious bonding
needs to be constantly reproduced, the binding of media publics as reli-
gious audiences requires media formats that derive their power from a
combination of repetition and renewal.