Page 60 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Audiences 43

they accept and recognize that media culture is a common culture, intended
for a heterogeneous audience.
As we saw earlier, this “common media culture” serves as a place wherein
contemporary religious and spiritual sensibilities can find resources fitted
to their quests. This tends not to work in a categorical way, where strict
boundaries can be seen between cultural interests such as religion, spirituality,
gender, or politics. The contrasting prospects of the Left Behind films and
The Passion of the Christ provide examples of this complexity. As we noted,
the Left Behind franchise was immediately coded as “religious” and, in spite
of its production values, did not achieve the “crossover” effects predicted.
The Passion of the Christ, by contrast, did achieve greater crossover success,
attracting Catholic and other non-evangelical audiences in large numbers.
Among Passion’s effects was an apparent renewed interest in religion on
the part of Hollywood. More religious products were predicted for the film
mainstream. However, media culture operates according to its own logics
with a certain elasticity. In the years after its release, The Passion has faded
in effect, subsumed into a media marketplace where a number of trajectories
streaming out of it illustrate the complexity that audiences encounter there:
The “Mel Gibson” trajectory led toward Apocalypto, and the “religious
spectacle” trajectory toward What the Bleep Do We Know? and then to
James Cameron’s pop archaeology. The politics trajectory flowed to Michael
Moore’s Farenheit 9/11. An effect of the mediated public sphere, then, is the
destabilization of the category of “the religious” in media audience terms.
People are attracted to common culture media of various kinds, and at the
same time the media marketplace provides media products in trajectories that
direct interest and combine interests and values according to “Are audiences
for religion or spirituality unique?” As we have seen, there is reason to believe
that they are not that different from the audience in general. The difference
is a matter of interest and practice. Though we find within the audience
those who we can typify according to religiosity, spirituality, or religious
interest, these do not turn out to be definitive of action. This is owing in part
to the imperfection of our understandings of how identity and action should
be related in these regards. It is also owing to the changing nature of the
religion and spirituality and of the media marketplace. At this point in time,
it seems, there is good reason to continue to focus on audiences in terms
of their identities and motivations. Otherwise, we will find ourselves once
again missing an important dimension—the media dimension—of emerging
patterns of religion, spirituality, and the range of sensibilities and practices
that bear a family resemblance to religion and spirituality, but are at the same
time bursting out of our formalized and essentialized categories.