Page 53 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

36 Stewart M. Hoover

The “decentered” character of religious production is significant because
from the earliest days of the so-called media age, their commercial basis
has given the media industries an autonomy that established their threat
to other cultural and institutional authorities, including religion. This
spreading economy cultivated and aggregated audiences across its new range
of offerings, altering the basis on which earlier arrangements had rested. And
these emerging audience centers have continued to develop and flourish,
constituting a profound challenge to interests—such as religious authority—
committed to the power and prerogatives that accrue to a single “center.”
These changes coincided with rising “seeker” religiosity. Though it is not
the case that the alternative religious content (evangelical broadcasting, the
growing and vigorously commercialized Christian publishing industry, etc.)
has competed in a real sense with the secular mainstream in ways that its
proponents claim, it has expanded the range of offerings and demonstrated
that a “market” for religion exists.

“Religious” and “secular” media

One of the consequences of these developments has been a subtle emergence
of religious and spiritual content within “secular” media. Even though
deregulation has undermined the former relationship between dominant
religious and media institutions, they have not faded away. They remain
the dominant players in the global “screen” marketplace in production and
distribution. What has changed is their self-understanding. Mainline religious
bodies, government agencies, and the media industries have gradually
retreated from their presumptive position of centrality in cultural discourse,
gradually integrating themselves into the broader economic marketplace
and letting the logics of that marketplace determine practice and policy.
Increasingly freed from the cumbersome and expensive burden of providing
time to religion, broadcasters have also been relieved of the expectation
that their policies represent determinations of the relative symbolic values
of competing religious claims. As a freer marketplace of media choice has
emerged, audiences and broadcasters alike have become comfortable with
the notion that the marketplace might well determine the nature and extent
of the religious mediascape.
Audiences have been empowered in the American religious landscape
longer than in the media landscape. The commodification of religion was
not new at the time of the video revolution in the 1970s and neither was
the notion of a symbolic marketplace of choice in religion and spirituality.
Developments in what has come to be called the “multi-channel era” have
deepened and extended these trends. The convergence and concentration
of media, leading to greater interaction between channels and developing