Page 12 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Introduction

Religion and the media seem to be ever more connected as we move
further into the twenty-first century. It is through the media that much of
contemporary religion and spirituality is known. Notable events and icons
seem to emerge with increasing frequency. In recent years alone we’ve seen
the mediated events of the September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005 terror
attacks, widely covered scandals in the US and European Catholic
Churches, public struggles within religious groups over social values such
as gay rights, US political campaigns dominated by mediated discourses of
religion, the re-emergence of religion in European political and social life,
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and William Arntz’s What the
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Bleep Do We Know?, Tom Cruise joining John Travolta as entertainment
industry icons of Scientology, Madonna playing the same role in relation
to Kabbalah, an increasing number of popular television and film
portrayals of gothic, horror, science fiction, magical, mysterious, and
conventional religion and spirituality, and controversies over the very pres-
ence of religion – of various kinds – in “the media.” The realms of
“religion” and “media” can no longer be easily separated, and it is the
purpose of this book to begin to chart the ways that media and religion
intermingle and collide in the cultural experience of media audiences.
It has been easy for us to think of relations between religion and the
media in institutional terms. We have thought of religion as a set of tradi-
tions, dogmas, practices, and institutions that exist in an autonomous
position vis-à-vis “the culture.” We have thought of culture as merely
making communication, interaction, memory, and history possible within
social relations by providing the languages and contexts of interaction. In
this “received” view, society is the more fixed and hard set of categories
within which human beings must learn to function. It provides the struc-
tures and boundaries within which things like “culture” and “religion” do
their work. And, individual identity is somehow a result of these other
factors, conditioned – even mostly determined – by them.
This social-theoretical syllogism is being undermined by trends in
contemporary social and political life, and by media evolution and change.
Media and entertainment figures rival traditional social institutions and