Page 51 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

34 Stewart M. Hoover

and spiritual resources in ways that are unprecedented and, at the same time,
this context provides new and novel symbolic and other resources. There is
a homogenizing or “horizontalizing” effect of this situation, and audience
preferences and practices bring the historically legitimate symbols into a
context where their particular claims are understood to stand alongside
other interpretations and other symbols. The aggregation of these seeking
individuals into audiences also then supports the formation of the symbolic
marketplace itself (Hoover 2006).
These media changes occur against the backdrop of an earlier, more
stable, and centralized media context. The structure of television in the
United States, Europe, and those national television systems influenced
by the American and European models (which is by definition most of the
rest of the world) had assumed a certain relationship between religion and
broadcasting. Religious and cultural authorities believed that religion must
necessarily have a place in the television landscape, and television authorities,
eager to secure a role in social and cultural life, provided for it. At the
same time, the potential for religious conflict and controversy encouraged
arrangements that favored the established religious institutions as partners to
broadcasting in these endeavors.
This situation favored certain approaches to programming and certain
conceptions of the audience. Media and scholarship about the media for
most of the twentieth century commonly regarded audiences as more or
less passive recipients of television content whose religious mediascapes
were defined by the policies and practices of programming authorities at
the centers of culture and of media power. Furthermore, conceptions of
the audience were rooted in the notion that religion should be primarily a
“private” matter. The provision of religious materials by public authorities
was done on the assumption that these would be consumed privately by
audiences.
At the same time, both sets of authorities operated within a framework of
choice that limited the range of offerings in two ways. First, as was common
at mid-century, there was a widely shared sense that media producers
would be programming for a mass, heterogeneous audience and thus that
their productions were to be necessarily general in nature. Second, a kind
of paternalism that prevailed saw the broadcasting context as suited to
programming intended for the religious enlightenment or edification of
audiences more than to programming that might serve religious experience or
piety. Even though the broadcasting of religious services predominated, these
were more formal and less experiential, more general and less particularist,
and done with a broad, national audience in mind.
The prevailing framework suited religious authorities in that it symbolized
their centrality to the culture. It worked for broadcast authorities by