Page 74 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Community 57

Community, media, and religious experience

Thus, religion, as I understand it in this chapter, should not be defined apart
from the relationship that exists between “transcendent realities” and the
human “communities” that embody them. The very expression community
recalls such relational concepts as “common,” “share,” “engage,” “interest,”
“identity,” “interaction,” and “encounter,” all having something to do
with a sense of “belonging” and “participation.” The sense of belonging
engendered by the community of living beings enables the definition and
construction of identities. A human community is a fellowship or association
of persons sharing common grounds on matters of mutual interest. Religion
means that this identity is inspired by shared religious experiences. In her
work on Religious Sensations, Birgit Meyer draws attention to the fact that
dichotomizing subjective and primary religious experiences on the one
hand and the religious life of the community on the other is problematic.
The disposition of the individual in search of God, she points out, is “part
and parcel of a discursive, and hence shared cultural construction” (Meyer
2006: 8). This is the thinking that will direct the thrust of this chapter on
“community.” Without the community that depends on what Meyer refers to
as “sensory regimes”—that is, the bodily techniques, doctrines, and practices
that make up a religion—the searching individual craving for experiences of
a transcendental nature would be nonexistent (Meyer 2006: 9). The media
play a central role in providing the “symbolic resources” through which we
make meaning out of our social worlds and “religion and spirituality are
important parts of that meaning-making” process (Hoover 2006: 56).
In traditional African philosophical thought with its religious orientation,
the individual exists because others do, too: “I am because we are and
because we are I am.” Sensational forms, Meyer rightly argues, are
“transmitted and shared,” and this is particularly evident in one of the key
themes of religion: worship. In Pentecostal worship, for example, where
the experiential presence of the Holy Spirit is coveted, a lot is made of
“feelings,” “sensations,” and “transformations” in the divine-human
encounter. However, these elements are not restricted by time and space.
In our hi-tech world, television and radio programs “address anonymous
viewers” and listeners, asking them to participate in televised and radio-
broadcast events. It is not uncommon to hear testimonies of “feeling God’s
presence” and being healed through those media. In one case from Ghana, a
viewer even spoke in tongues merely by listening to a television sermon on
that theme and, in another, a stomach ache was healed by touching a radio
at the request of the preacher. The two experiences formed the subjects of
testimonies in church on the following Sunday, validating the community’s
orientation toward those media as extensions of their ministry. Access to the