Page 173 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

156 Joyce Smith

Once outside, Monica realizes that there is another FirstMate kitty-
corner to the one where she’s been all along. How was she to know? This
one looks just like the one where Hanif has been waiting for the past
hour, caught up in his Economist. She blushes and hurries home.

In a world of transnational retailers, a main street in Vancouver may have
more in common with a Manchester high street than with a small town in
northern British Columbia. However, the loss of locality is not the only
difficulty facing those dealing with the concept of publics.
What if religious publics are only fictional? Consider Melyvn Bragg’s
description of the British series Vicar of Dibley. Despite having its central
character portrayed by a female comic (Dawn French), Dibley is

somehow a believable C of E, deeply satisfying and relevant… This village
church in England is pastoral, fallible and warm at heart. It is still, for
many viewers, the epitome of the Church of England. It is hugely popular
and much loved. Perhaps it is craved for. It is also fiction.
(Bragg 2006: 62)

Mediated wish fulfillment may demarcate an otherwise impossible public.
Could a media organization or product itself become a religious public?
Al Jazeera English describes itself as

the English-language channel of reference for Middle Eastern events
balancing the current typical information flow by reporting from the
developing world back to the West and from the southern to the northern
hemisphere.
(Al Jazeera 2006)

It could be argued that particularly in its English form, Al Jazeera is the
face of the transnational Muslim public.
Are the basic units of a given public the consumer? The citizen? Or is
it the family? Rhys Williams writes that the American liberal assumption
that the social building block is the individual may not hold true: “What if
families, genders, or religious groups—and not autonomous individuals—are
considered the basic social formation?” (Williams 2007: 53). The intersection
of religious and media publics in this sense has been studied by Hoover et al.
in the home (Hoover et al. 2004). The desire among some Western Muslims
to have shari’a law govern family affairs has made this emphasis concrete.
More than one critic suggests that Habermas’s public sphere existed only
in Enlightenment Europe. Without taking care to evolve the concept, the
public sphere will remain particularly Christian, and the ensuing discussion