Page 80 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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through radio but via sermons on video and audio cassette tapes, CDs, and
DVDs that members can even circulate as a way of selling the viability of
their own religious persuasions and communities.
Religious communities may have evangelical or political agendas or both,
and the media are used to pursue those aims. In this vein, Pradip Thomas
shows how the meticulous, systematic uses of the media by Hindu nationalist
forces in India, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party, by
the Taliban, backed by the technologies of marketing, have played key roles
in their visibility in the public domain. Further, Hindu fundamentalists in
India, he reports, have used video to great effect and more recently satellite
television. Their mass leaders such as Sadhvi Rithambara are what they are
today, Thomas notes, because of their cassette ministries (Thomas 2005: 7).
Christians belonging to the revivalist and evangelical streams still dominate
the new forms of media in terms of religious usage, but the examples here
demonstrate how competitive the field has become in the attempt not simply
to win souls but to enable people to belong to national and transnational
religious communities. Through television, radio, and the circulation of audio
and video cassette tapes and CD and DVD recordings, the media have been
employed to literally transform and revolutionize religious communities. In
some cases, the revolution has been literal as communities adopt militaristic
tactics to reinforce their beliefs and claim lost territories.

African religion, migration, and community
Compared to the kinds of private religious practices that North Americans
are familiar with, Rosalind Hackett has noted that religion in Africa is less
individualistic and more group-related (Hackett 2000: 103). Further to this,
whereas primal societies generally conceive of religion as a system of power
and of living religiously as being in touch with the sources and channels of
power in the universe, Christian theology in the West seems on the whole to
understand the Christian Gospel as a system of ideas (Bediako 1985: 106).
These distinctions are important because they have implications for the
way in which religion and community engage with each other in the two
contexts. Non-Western traditional cultures connect better with religious
systems that focus on rituals of intervention, so movements that focus too
much on personal reflection and meditation never enjoy mass followings
among people. One way to appreciate the interface between religion and
community in African life and the focus on power is to look at it from the
perspective of migrant communities from the continent in the Western
Diaspora. Their lives are full of uncertainties, but hope is kept alive through
the availability of sermons on Internet web sites and receipt of recorded
church services from pastors back in their home countries through whose