Page 235 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

220 Carly Machado

always with immaculate makeup, and performs even the smallest move-
ment in sensual fashion.
Being visible and providing visibility to the movement in internal and
external interfaces enables people to rise within the Structure, which is
why “famous” people occupy high levels in the Raelian hierarchy. This
combination of fame and level provokes a range of effects, especially in
relation to the Guides: in their home cities, they are close and approach-
able; at the Seminar, they become difficult to access celebrities. Some
degrees of separation are intentionally produced in order to augment the
celebrity status of the movement’s key people. Without a certain distance,
fame becomes banal. Just as Raël walks about the Seminar surrounded by
security guards in order to maintain his status as “the biggest celebrity,”
the creation of a climate of being “difficult to approach” works to valorize
those who stand out from a mixture of their artistic talent and their level
in the structure. The difference between my experiences of meeting Robert
and Lysa in London and later in the Seminar provided me with a demon-
stration of the close-distant dialectic. The celebrity-audience relationship
is fundamental in this context. It is the hope of the audience to one day
become a celebrity who feeds this relationship. The media position of being
a fan blurs with the religious position of the disciple. In the Raelian reli-
gious experience, the audience glimpses models of selves that indicate the
direction to be taken by their own personal development. Celebrities
emerge as icons, “flesh and blood” representations of a religious ideology
and project.

Mass Media, Community, and
the Raelian Structure

The relationship between the mass media and religion is crucial to any
analysis of the Raelian Movement. As we have seen, Raelian performances
are modeled by mass media references that turns the stage into a signifi-
cant context for religious experiences and, furthermore, a scope for the
production and attribution of fame, conceived as a religious merit. To
conclude this chapter, I wish to address the idea of community in the
study of the Raelians, given its status as a new kind of religious movement
whose members are dissipated into small groups, or even act as isolated
individuals, all around the world. Two strategies work together to pro-
duce the sense of a Raelian community: regular meetings and mass media
mediation. It’s important to highlight that media are indispensable in
both levels of the Raelian experience: not only in the global circuit of mass