Page 116 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Image 99

practitioners of each faith. A great deal of recent scholarship in religious
visual culture on these three religions, especially Protestant Christianity
and Shi’ite Islam, has demonstrated an extensive and varied use of images
and visual practices. So pervasive are images in religions, and so common
is their denial by purists, that art historian David Freedberg has referred to
the “myth of aniconism” (Freedberg 1989: 54). Many religionists insist that
their faith is free of images but may do so only by turning a blind eye to the
plethora of pictures crowding their altars or homes (Morgan 1998).
Why the denial? To begin with Socrates, the problem with images and
any form of artistic representation—poetry, drama, music, or the visual
arts—is that they project themselves deeply into the soul. This is a problem
because the wrong sort of representations readily take seat there and exert
a powerful influence over the person. “Imitations practiced from youth
become part of nature and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and thought,”
Socrates asserted, and argued that the training of the Greek elite should
be strictly controlled in their imitation of dramatic roles. Those who were
“self-controlled, pious, and free,” Socrates reasoned—that is, the Athenian
upper crust—“mustn’t be clever at doing or imitating slavish or shameful
actions, lest from enjoying the imitation, they come to enjoy the reality”
(Plato 1992: 71–2).
It may seem puritanical at first glance, but parents, religious organizations,
and Congress members commonly make the same point about the effect of
portrayals of violence and sex in television programming, films, and video
games. For example, in a policy statement of 1993, the National Council of
Churches flatly asserted that film and television

increase an appetite and tolerance for entertainment with a violent
content, since the more violence an audience sees, the more violence it
will want. This appetite for violence entails an increased callousness to
people who may be hurting or in need.
(NCC 1993: 10)

A 1999 Senate Committee report on “Children, Violence, and the Media,”
prepared “for parents and policy makers,” echoed the belief, claiming that
it “identifies and begins to redress one of the principal causes of youth
violence: media violence” (Senate 1999: 1). The report attributed violence in
media as “a principal cause” of youth violence, citing studies which showed
that eighty-seven percent of American households included more than one
television set, that almost half of American children have televisions in their
bedrooms, and that more than eighty-eight percent of homes with children
“have home video game equipment, a personal computer, or both” (Senate
1999: 2). Socrates would have agreed with the report’s lament that media