Page 23 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

12 What this book could be about

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suspicion. In a well-known turn of phrase, the French theorist Baudrillard
has claimed that today we live, interact, and communicate at a surface
level derived from commodified, mediated images, a level he calls the
“simulacrum.” Whether we accept the totalistic notion that we live in a
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postmodernity defined only by surfaces, or merely observe that such semi-
otic or linguistic superficiality does seem to be commonplace in our time,
the implications for religion are clear. Many religions are grounded in
doctrines and pieties that specify precisely the relationship between signs
and referents, between metaphors and concrete meanings, and between
words and ideas. If today such claims are increasingly undermined, that is
an important issue for those religions and particularly for their legitimacy
and authority.
Another claim about the media that is inflected with discourses of late
modernity and postmodernity is related to the issues of globalization, and
has to do with the capacity of media to blur the boundaries between
“private” and “public” spaces. Just as globalization is partly defined by an
increasing fungability between the “local,” the “national,” and the
“global,” rooted in the capacities of modern media to bring those three
contexts together, so too the media make the private sphere public and vice
versa. Leaving aside for the moment an important argument over whether
this is a valuable distinction in late modernity, it is still worth considering
what it means for religion that such a distinction would no longer be
viable. In the US and most of Western Europe, for example, the consensus
that has surrounded accommodation to religious difference in public
discourse through the crafting of a set of putative “common religious
values” has allowed for a significant degree of latitude to religion in
private. When the distinction between those two “spheres” is no longer
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recognized, what happens to that accommodation? The “culture wars”
that have raged on the US political landscape for the last two decades
could be described, for example, as a result of the blurring of that
boundary; of the resistance of once-private religion to staying “private” in
a media context where a range of “private” perspectives are relentlessly
made “public.” 37
This can all be put in a larger context, of course. To the extent that the
media are among the root conditions of either postmodernity or late
modernity, they are therefore fundamental to the historical context within
which religion today finds itself. They condition the way knowledge is
produced and shared, the way symbols, ideas, and values are encountered
in private life, and the senses we have of the nature of late modernity. A
large and complex project awaits, and this book can be seen as part of that
project.
The media today have evolved in economic terms to the point that they
are increasingly closely linked to global capital. Media corporations are
among the largest and most influential companies there are. They carry