Page 111 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

94 David Chidester

colonial administrators told indigenous people of the islands to work for
wealth, they worked but did not get it. Second, when Christian missionaries
told the people to pray for wealth, they prayed and did not get it. Though
people sometimes found new ways to combine work and prayer by building
piers, docks, and flagpoles and integrating indigenous and Christian ritual,
the failure of work and prayer to produce the cargo left a third option: steal
it (Chidester 2000: 515–16).
This truth of theft is a recurring theme in the history of religion and
economy, from Prometheus stealing fire from the gods to the butter thief
Krishna, even if it has not necessarily been underwritten by the Marxist
generalization that all private ownership of property is theft. Electronic
media, however, with their immediacy, availability, and propensity for
personal engagements, place the ownership of sacred surplus in question and
at stake. A popular guidebook for screenwriters and filmmakers, Stealing
Fire from the Gods, explicitly invokes the truth of sacred theft in its title
(Bonnet 1999). However, the problem of theft is more widespread and more
profound in the economy of religion, media, and culture: who owns the
sacred surplus?
Third, electronic media are engaged in mediating conflicts over the
legitimate ownership of the sacred. As we saw in Destination Earth, this
question of legitimacy was easily, quickly resolved in favor of private
ownership in a competitive environment. However, this principle of
legitimate ownership could be certified only by eliminating the central
symbol of opposition, Ogg the Magnificent. An undercurrent of violence,
therefore, runs through these mediated negotiations of legitimacy.
However, the question of violence can also be easily, quickly resolved by
distinguishing between us and them, by highlighting their illegitimate acts
of violence, such as Ogg’s tyrannical rule, coercive manipulation of public
opinion, and exploitation of his people as slave labor, to draw a stark
contrast between their violence and our judicious exercise of legitimate
force in killing the tyrant, liberating the oil, and freeing the people to
participate in a competitive economy based on private ownership.
Modern media, from news media to entertainment media, are actively
engaged in these contestations over the legitimate ownership of sacred
symbols. Drawing on the insight of literary theorist Kenneth Burke into the
cultural process of stealing back and forth of symbols (Burke 1961: 328),
we can enter into the economy of religion, media, and culture as an ongoing
contest over the stealing back and forth of sacred symbols. Not only made
meaningful through interpretation, sacred symbols are made powerful by
ongoing acts of appropriation. However, no appropriation goes uncontested.
Therefore, the field of religion, media, and culture is contested terrain, a
conflictual arena in which competing claims on the ownership of sacred