Page 18 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 1

What this book could be about

A book with the title “Religion in the Media Age” seems ambitious. It also
might seem pretty clear and straightforward what it is about. But it could
actually be about a number of different things. It could be about the
history and future prospects of religions in an era dominated – in the way
ours is – by the institutions of the mass media. It could be about the prac-
tice of religion, the way that religion is done in the context of media
culture. It could even be a “how to” book of some kind. It is likely,
though, that the title also evokes a more particular kind of idea: that the
project here is to uncover the relationship between religion and the media.
If so, it might be assumed that the idea is to look at the kind of effect that
the media have on religion or vice versa.
There is good reason to suspect such a direction. Much of what we
know about the worlds of media and religion seems to predict frisson
between them. It can be said that they occupy the same “turf,” and it is
even easy to think of ways that their interests might conflict. Much of our
“received” story of the origins of the media in the West – beginning with
the development of movable-type printing in Europe in the fifteenth
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century – carries with it the implication of conflict with religion. Printing,
it is thought, ushered in an entirely new era for the established religions of
the time because it made it possible for a more “democratic” situation
where a reading public could have access to sacred texts and teachings
outside the control of clerical authority or the institution of the Church. In
fact, the history is much more complex than that. Both Catholic and
Protestant churches eventually came to an accommodation with the
emerging media realm.
Accommodation was, indeed, inevitable because “the media” were not
going away once they came into being. As historian Elizabeth Eisenstein
has shown printing was significant not only for the spread of printed
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works and later the spread of literacy, but also because of a structural
realignment that it brought about in the economic and market sphere: the
emergence of a new center of social and cultural authority – the publisher.
Whereas the Church of Rome (itself already an established institutional,
economic, and social power) had enjoyed a good deal of autonomy in the