Page 165 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

11

Public

Joyce Smith

It is a scene familiar to anyone living in an urban center. Imagine two friends
agreeing to meet at a local coffee shop:

As he waits for Monica, Hanif sips his FirstMate coffee, leafing through
The Economist he picked up from the next-door newsagent. On the cover
is a photo of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner.

Hanif is looking forward to discussing this with Monica. They’ve agreed
to meet here this week to continue their online chat on the nature of
religion and the public sphere.

It is no accident that this chapter begins here. Coffee houses are among
the settings for Jürgen Habermas’s nascent public sphere (Habermas 1991).
Basking in Enlightenment liberties, individuals could discuss issues of
common purpose and good, free from church and state fetters.
Habermas himself insisted that the specific context of eighteenth-century
Europe was important to understanding his theories about the public sphere.
My exploration of religious publics, their construction, production, and use
of media sources will also revolve around the coffee shop but in its twentieth-
century form.
Most communities have at least one physical public square and, if not,
people will gather at the coffee shop or the various wells in the global
village. The use of physical space to conceive of the public sphere spawns
universally appropriate metaphors. But it needs some definition to discuss
the way in which the idea of the public intersects with the nature of religion
in a mediated society.
The Habermasian coffee shop is not a government building, nor is it a
church. People are free to congregate here, regardless of their station in
life, and they will come not only for the coffee but also for the promise of
discussion with other customers. The coffee shop itself is not the public
sphere but rather the container for the space in which people meet and
discuss. It is the brick and mortar demarcation of the zone wherein certain
types of behavior are not only fair game but expected.