Page 36 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 21

points out, the ICGC faces the difficulty of converting the broad public to
be reached out there into audiences, and to touch these audiences in such
a way that they are prepared to become part of the church community,
rather than merely attending church services as clients in search of health
and wealth. Clearly, also here outreach seriously challenges older Christian
models of organizing believers, such as that of the congregation. Maria
José de Abreu (Chapter 7) also stresses the particularity of charismatic
community making as an enduring performance that is never complete—a
breathing body—and hence impossible to fix and control within set
boundaries (causing much headache to the Catholic Church). This mode
of making community—truly in the sense of an aesthetic formation—
resonates with the styles of binding mobilized by the Raelian Movement,
which also works by calling on the body and the senses, and a strong aes-
thetic appeal (Machado in this volume). Notwithstanding the strict
Raelian leadership structure, the Raelian conventions generate modes and
moods in ways that have much in common with dance events such as
White Sensation and similar shows.
All these examples give insight into paradoxes and ambivalences
involved in the making of religious formations in our time. Many con-
tributors to this volume discern a continuous balancing act between reach-
ing out and staying apart, between embracing the world and staying aloof,
between addressing and appealing to the public and imposing some kind
of boundary through which believers are set apart. While this involves
complicated negotiations within religious groups, this balancing act can-
not, however, be simply reduced to the erosion of religion, let alone sec-
ularization. Instead the public realm itself is affected—or, to recall
Maffesoli’s terms: “polluted”—by religion. I understand the term pollu-
tion here as signaling, in the sense of Mary Douglas (2002[1966]), a “mat-
ter of out place,” in that religion is not supposed to be present in the ideal
image of the public sphere as it has been articulated famously by Jürgen
Habermas (1990[1962]). Indeed, the theoretical and political implications
of the spread of religious forms and elements into the public sphere, which
was long held to be a secular realm, and yet obviously entails a quite messy
mix of religion, entertainment and politics, thus questioning the possibil-

ity of drawing boundaries between religious and secular, are just begin-
ning to be addressed from a global (rather than merely Western) perspective
and need our attention (Salvatore 2007; Schulz 2006b; Willford and
George 2004). The fact that it is increasingly difficult to say where religion
stops, and begins, has serious implications for our understanding of the
relation between religion and “the world” in our time.
In this context, the striking importance of aesthetics and the body that
is emphasized not only in the practice of religion, but also in the sphere of