Page 136 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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media form, the media form itself, and what the person who receives the
communication does with it. This new individual “reading” generated by the
individual then becomes a new text itself (Lewis 2005).
Looking at media and religion in this way significantly challenges the
idea of religious authority that is assumed in the instrumentalist approach,
where media texts are seen as powerful tools that enhance the power of
those who have the resources to produce them. In the textual approach,
media still have power, and those who have control over their production
and distribution have their power enhanced, but that power is not absolute.
Power arises from a complex cultural interaction and negotiation between
producers of messages, the texts of the messages, and those who receive and
use the messages. The power of communication and of religious leadership
is not as an absolute power to impose one’s meanings on others. Religious
authority arises from effective interaction and negotiation of ideas and
meaning between producers and users of texts.
The metaphor of media as text has been an influential one within
Christianity. Christianity is a text-based religion with a strong sense that
its defining beliefs and values are to be found in historically mediated texts.
There are, however, diverse and conflicting opinions about what those “texts”
are and how the correct ideas and meanings are to be derived from those
texts. The opinions range across a continuum, from a narrow fundamentalist
textual objectivity, which sees particular written scriptural documents (now
printed) as culturally unconditioned writings dictated by God and true in
all areas of knowledge for all time. In some views, religious texts such as
the Bible are seen as having power within themselves to effect changes on
people, either through the content of the text or even the material object
itself and to mistreat the text is tantamount to abusing God. Against this
view is an extreme poststructuralist approach, which sees written Christian
texts as de-authored, ideology-saturated, historical documents that need
radical critical deconstruction and creative reconstruction.
The rise of the empirical sciences in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries created an impetus among some thinkers within
Christian churches to apply scientific methods to establish objectively the
historical reliability of Christianity’s founding texts, particularly the texts
of scripture. This concern with text, however, was limited to particular
concerns. As Gamble noted in the early 1990s, the huge research effort
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Biblical studies was largely
directed to establishing “the contents of documents, their chronological and
theological matrices, and similar questions” (Gamble 1995: ix, 42). Broader
issues of text from a media perspective, such as questions of production,
sponsorship, circulation, ownership, and use of books, he suggests, have
been significantly neglected.