Page 23 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture
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6 Introduction
and practice that permeated American society. The implications for the study
of religion and media have been enormous. By situating the parachurch,
noninstitutional phenomenon known as “the electronic church” within the
marketplace of religion and the self-styling traffic of practices and symbols,
Hoover’s work has encouraged other scholars to study contemporary non-
Christian religious groups in the United States and far beyond for their use of
media to gain market share, appeal to their followers, advertise themselves,
engage in polemic, and forge new practices of communication as religious
community.
Following a quotation of Clifford Geertz’s widely cited description
of religion as a “system of symbols,” Hoover defined the “new religious
consciousness” as he studied it in his examination of televangelism as “the
individual’s relationship to such systems, symbolic and real, and the moods
and motivations that evolve with that involvement” (Hoover 1988: 22).
He made use of Walter Ong’s seminal work in elaborating the definition of
religious consciousness as Ong, like McLuhan, stressed the constitutive role
of media in the transformation of culture as people experience it (McLuhan
1964; Ong 1982). However, whereas McLuhan and Ong dwelt on broad
social trends and cultural epochs to measure the cultural and social influence
of new media, Hoover could integrate the study of broadcasters, preachers,
and organizations with the much closer focus of qualitative research on
individual audience members of the electronic church. The “individual’s
relationship” to the symbolic system of religion signals the culturalist
approach, which relies on the careful study of qualitative analysis to assemble
compelling accounts of meaning construction. Accordingly, Hoover invoked
Carey’s distinction of “transmission” and “ritual” definitions of media,
relying on the latter to frame his approach to religious communication
(Hoover 1988: 26).
Jesús Martín-Barbero moved the cultural analysis of the religious
significance and experience of media ahead by formulating the idea of
“mediation.” Rather than training attention on the media as fixed genres,
rhetorical tropes or message bearers of religious content, Martín-Barbero
argued that media are much better understood as the site of religious
experience and meaning making. In contrast to a meaning of the term as
recorded by Raymond Williams (“where certain social agencies are seen
as deliberately interposed between reality and social consciousness, to
prevent an understanding of reality” [Williams 1985: 206]), one might
combine Hoover’s analysis with Martín-Barbero’s to define mediation as a
consciousness of community or cohort. Rather than positing a discrete media
product whose impact might be measured as this or that effect or gratification,
Martín-Barbero urges us to reckon mediation as a process of engagement that
includes struggle, resistance, and an ensuing transformation of consciousness