Page 109 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

92 David Chidester

In these mediations of the gift and the sacrifice, we find traces of
religious economies that cannot be contained within rational economic
calculations of self-interest and market-exchange. The gift and the sacrifice
evoke powerful and pervasive religious practices of receiving and giving.
However, these religious resources, with their deep histories, are not
immune from commodification. Like art, poetry, music and other creative
human enterprises, religion operates within a productive economy. Official
spokespersons for religion and other cultural productions might insist on
their autonomy from market relations but, in a mediated world, religion has
no such pure place in which to stand.
Under the conditions of a capitalist economy, religion intersects with
electronic media in producing the multiple mediations of a political economy
of the sacred. Intending to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, I point to
some of the basic features of three mediations in this political economy—the
mediations between economic and sacred values; the mediations between
economic scarcity and sacred surplus; and the mediations among competing
claims on the legitimate ownership of the sacred.
First, electronic media are engaged in symbolic labor by mediating between
economic values and sacred values. As we have seen in Destination Earth,
an animated film can celebrate an economic system as if it were a religious
system of sacred or spiritual values for human flourishing and ultimately
for human liberation. Clearly, many American films and television shows,
even when they are not so blatantly designed as propaganda, can be read as
reinforcing free-market capitalism as a sacred orientation.
Money, at the heart of this mediation between economic and sacred
values, is itself a medium, a medium of exchange. Though it is also a store
of value and a unit of accounting, money is a meaning-generating medium
invested with a sacred aura, a symbolic system, following anthropologist
Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion, which generates powerful moods
and motivations and clothes those dispositions in an aura of factuality
that makes them seem ultimately real (Geertz 1973). As a medium for
religion and electronic media, money has been a nexus for transactions
between economic and sacred values. Enthusiastically, the popular
television evangelist Reverend Ike proclaimed a gospel of money based on
the principle that “the lack of money is the root of all evil.” Cynically, the
Internet Church of the Profit$ has claimed to be the only honest religious
group in America because it openly admits that it is only in it for the money
(Chidester 2005: 112).
In between these extreme cases, electronic media are inevitably involved in a
cycle of symbolic labor mediating between contingent and changing economic
relations and enduring values that must appear to be stable, unchanging, and
perhaps even eternal. Assessing the production and consumption of values,