Page 18 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Introduction

Religion, media, culture: the shape of
the field

David Morgan

In recent years, mediation has come to be studied as a range of religious
practices in different cultural settings and historical periods around the
world. The assumption at work in social and cultural criticism, theology, and
mass communication studies before the 1990s was often either that the study
of mass media need not include any attention to religion or that mass media
compromised, diluted, or eviscerated religious belief. In the United States,
the realization that religion is indeed a mass-mediated phenomenon whose
social agency and historical significance need to be scrutinized emerged
during the 1970s and 1980s under two broad rubrics: the history of the
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book and print culture and the study of popular culture and religion. There
were several noteworthy exceptions to this, especially in the study of visual
mass media and religion (Lange 1974; Milspaw 1986; Goethals 1990). But
more generally, interest in popular religious media in the United States was
bolstered by the rise of the religious Right as a political force that made
aggressive use of media in the political sphere. Though work before that time
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had certainly considered the meaning and effect of media among religious
audiences, much of it was theological reflection or investigation conducted
by religious researchers for use by clergy and religious organizations (Parker
et al. 1955; Marty 1961; Kuhns 1969; Horsfield 1984; Fore 1987).
In Europe, scholars such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes,
Guy Debord, and Jean Baudrillard advanced the study of popular media
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by developing sophisticated cultural theories that were widely influential.
But in large part because of the prevailing secularist sensibility of cultural
studies, the study of religion and media in Europe was intermittent during
the 1980s, not gathering great attention until the next decade. There were,
however, studies of great relevance, such as Benedict Anderson’s epochal
discussion of nationalism (1983; rev. ed., 1991), which framed print and
popular culture as the means of imagining national community; and Colin
Campbell’s grounding of consumerism in Romantic yearning (1987), which