Page 19 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

8 What this book could be about

cultural realm prior to printing, afterwards it had to account for an alter-
native context of cultural autonomy in the form of the publishing
3
industry. This became inevitable because publishing was at the same time
an economic activity that gradually integrated itself into the emerging
mercantile and market economies as early modernity moved through to
industrialization. The fact that publishing (and its successor – “the
media”) was commercial and produced commodities is fundamental to its
implications for religion. Its gradual centrality in social, civic, and state
affairs is something we accept as a given today, but that has origins going
back five centuries.
Our analysis needs to stress that the centrality of the media is rooted
and expressed both in their political economy and in their relationship to
culture. Their economic basis in capitalism gives them a powerful
autonomy and a permanence not enjoyed by all human endeavors. Their
cultural location is derived from their capacity – described in a range of
ways – to be both shapers of culture and products of that same culture.
This “double articulation” of the media makes their role and impact
particularly difficult to pin down, and is one of the reasons that, today, we
are still unsure of the nature and extent of their significance.
Some commentators have gone beyond these structural considerations
to see the historic relationship between media and religion in more funda-
mental terms. Marshall McLuhan, for example, famously suggested that
the media have radically reoriented the way we perceive and know things. 4
Walter Ong has articulated a more complex and nuanced argument along
these same lines, suggesting that successive changes in the dominant mode
of communication has shifted human sensorial capacities from the domi-
5
nance of the eye to the dominance of the ear. Ong and others base their
theories very much in realms central to religion, looking at changes in the
way social contexts and practices we think of as fundamental to “tradi-
tional” religion, such as oral culture, folklore, and storytelling, have been
changed and altered, performatively as well as perceptively in an era domi-
nated by modern mass communication. 6
These two tendencies – to see the relationship between religion and
media in institutional-structural terms on the one hand or in more funda-
mental, almost organic terms on the other – share in common an implicit
7
dualism. They conceive of religion in particular, but also “the media” as
coherent, transhistorical, unchanging forms that can be thought of as inde-
pendent and potentially acting independently upon one another. This
dualism holds sway in much of the scholarship that has been devoted to
media and religion. From the earliest studies in the 1950s through a flurry
8
of research that followed the emergence of the phenomenon of televange-
lism in the 1970s, to more recent work on religion and the press, the
10
9
assumption has been that we can and should look at religion and media as
separate realms. 11 This fact has been one of the major reasons that this