Page 28 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Introduction 11

research to understand how preferences are nestled in narratives and
communities. 14
For all the interest in qualitative audience research, none of the scholars
represented in this book would deny that media are used instrumentally,
and to considerable effect. Advertising, political propaganda, and public
relations all work to one degree or another. The challenge is to integrate
the study of production, circulation, and reception where possible and to
regard reception as potentially creative and resistant forms of response to
the preferred reading that producers encode in their media products. That
said, popular response may be anything but creative. Sometimes consumers
behave exactly as producers and advertisers hope they will. And that may
be something to welcome, depending on the cause and one’s politics. In
any case, recent scholarship has avoided a determinist view of media effects
without ignoring the fact that media do work to shape response, even if
consumers are not captive to intended influences.
If some cultural critics and media scholars were once inclined to dismiss
as “kitsch” the mass-produced items of popular religious belief, that is
clearly no longer the case. As formations of religious consciousness that are
not to be understood in prescriptive terms, popular media attract enormous
interest from historians, sociologists, and anthropologists working on
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media and religion today. Popular culture is no longer defined in terms of
non-elite culture but often as common culture, the everyday practices and
artifacts that invest the ideas and feelings that are the cognitive medium of
identity and social life. Much of the study of media and religion today trains
attention on these ideas and feelings as they are worked out in diverse forms
of sensation, as what one might call the social body, the extension of the
senses to the imagined corpus of groups. This is evident in the way that age,
gender, and ethnic and sexual cohorts dress, eat, play sports, dance, listen to
music, and consume everything that enables them to behave as a member of
a somatic collective.
The study of the religious significance of media was slow in coming to
the fore for two important reasons. Cultural studies, as has been noted,
was formulated within a neo-Marxist tradition in Britain and therefore had
no interest in religion. Moreover, the secularization thesis, long in place
among social scientists and cultural critics, considered religion vestigial and
reactionary, something that modernity and the media as part of the modern
project had jettisoned. Since the early 1990s, however, secularization has
been called into question by a burgeoning body of work. Second, the
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definition of religion that prevailed among many scholars in Europe, North
and South America, and Australia was deeply shaped by Christianity. The
sacred was associated with authoritative institutions and the creeds they
disseminated and endorsed. Religion, in other words, was a message directed