Page 14 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Introduction 3

tradition’s gaze on itself, the argument might be that the fundamental
truths, claims, and quests of religion remain in the media age, but in new
forms and with a new emphasis.
Paik’s rendering thus centers the context and act of reception as the crit-
ical point of entry for analysis. To break into the potential circularity of
relations between religion and media, we must stand somewhere and take
account of ways by which mediated religion is realized in contemporary
life. What people do with religious and spiritual resources is the central
question, and a standpoint from which to look at the larger contexts of the
creation, circulation, and consumption of religious and spiritual resources
in an era where such “cultural” practices are fundamentally the province
of the media.
To engage in an account of these processes in a deliberate and system-
atic way involves a certain approach to a set of contexts and trends. These
include: the role of culture as an autonomous force, rooted in commodities
and markets; the recovery and invigoration of “popular culture” as a valu-
able context for religious meaning and exploration; the turn to the
individual and the individual quest for the self and identity as a central
religious project; the redefinition of religion in more anachronistic terms,
including “faith,” “meaning,” and “spirituality”; and the central momentum
of media reception becoming a quest for meaning and meaningful cultural
and narrative sources.
This view of course runs counter to what one might expect in an explo-
ration of religion in the media age. There is an extent to which “religion”
and “the media” exist as institutional forces in the public sphere. Religion
is increasingly on the losing side of any struggles that ensue, as the media
more and more determine the rules and procedures whereby institutions
such as religion find their way into public discourse. There is a long and
interesting history there. However, I will contend that looking at such
questions ignores the more fundamental social and cultural reality that, on
a quite different level, the level of practices of cultural consumption and
exchange, individuals and groups have long ago abandoned the larger
institutional map. Media and commodity culture are now integrated into
practices of meaning and identity in profound and irreversible ways. This
book will explore those ways, based on ongoing field research where
media households are engaged in discussions about meaning, religion,
values, and identity in the media age.
In so doing, we will be pursuing a research direction envisioned in 1988
in a reflection on “next steps” for research in religion and media in the
wake of that era’s focus on the then-new phenomenon of Televangelism:

I see the need for a “middle level” of analysis, one that understands
and builds on what can be known about the aggregate content of the
medium and that accepts the reality that the process is not instrumental,