Page 29 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

12 Introduction

by various instruments at believers and nonbelievers and was deeply invested
in certain traditional notions of culture as the treasure of tradition, as a
sectarian version of Mathew Arnold’s characterization of culture as the “best
that has been thought and said.” In fact, modernity has not been consistently
nonreligious. It is more accurate to say that scholars have preferred to ignore
it because the theory of secularization told them that it was not there. In the
meantime, religion has changed beneath the feet of scholars and institutional
establishments alike.
The rise of the religious Right in places as diverse as the United States, the
Middle East and India during the closing decades of the twentieth century,
the new availability of media to emergent churches and charismatic religious
leaders in postcolonial states and in post-Soviet nationalisms, and the global
movement of immigrants from the developing to Western states made religion
visible in new and unpredicted ways. Religious minorities of one sort and
another made aggressive use of media to promote their interests, resulting
in “electronic churches,” that is, noninstitutional parachurch organizations
whose public face was radio and television programs, bill boards, and print.
The Internet and desktop publishing vastly expanded the possibility of
media access and production, leading scholars to realize that media could
no longer be understood only as instruments for message delivery but were
inseparable from religious identity and practice. The inquiry into media,
religion, and culture, as Jeremy Stolow has rightly pointed out, has shifted to
understanding “religion as media” (Stolow 2005). The culturalist approach
has raised the importance of the study of practice and reception, which has
led many scholars to question the instrumentalist understanding of media
and, instead, to look for the constructive operation of mediations. Moreover,
“religion” no longer means only Christianity and Judaism but, as Sarah Pike’s
essay in this volume clearly shows, everything from Neopaganism, New Age,
and Hinduism to self-help therapies, personal spirituality, and fandom. 17
Much of the work in this book represents a broader tendency among
scholars of media and religion nowadays to recognize in mass-mediated
artifacts such as religious pictures and objects another sense of the word
media. More than radio, newspapers, and televised news broadcasts,
media also means Internet fan sites and blogs, circulating videos or cassette
tapes, lithographic prints, billboard advertisements, bumper stickers, mass-
produced commodities such as plastic statuary or music CDs, or symbols
such as crosses, menorahs, and tapestries picturing the Ka’bah. However,
neither is there any need to limit media analysis to mass-produced items.
Any medium, even the hand-made and utterly unique, should be included
in the definition of religious media. This registers a new interest among
some media scholars to look beyond the canonical and taste-bound views of
art history, musicology, and traditional aesthetics to the formation of lived