Page 246 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

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be part of a larger dialogue or set of dialogues in the culture. They found
satisfaction and salience in being part of larger conversations. We’ll now
turn to an exploration of ways that those larger conversations can come to
be themed by historical events. What we have seen and learned here about
the way people read media religiously and spiritually can help us see the
extent to which these events that are, on their face, about religion are also
about media and about the interaction between religion and media. In fact,
as we will see, the kinds of explorations we have undertaken allow us to
address such large themes in new ways.

Change at the millennium

The new millennium has ushered in a new conversation both at the inter-
section between religion and media, and about religion and media. Religion
has seemingly re-entered public life and public (and thus media) discourse
at a whole new level in the years since the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks. As we will see, 9/11 was in large measure a media phenomenon. It
unleashed a set of global, cultural, and media trends that have yet to be
fully worked out. But we can already see that it changed the landscape by
altering the frameworks and contexts within which religion and religious
ideas seem to be active in history, culture, and media. In a way, the events
of 9/11 brushed aside ongoing debates about the place of religion in the
public square. Before that day, it was not uncommon to hear skepticism
from people in the news business about how and where religion should be
counted in overall coverage of domestic and international politics.
Afterwards, that issue was settled, and the only question was how best to
account for religion when looking at those “larger” questions.
Not unrelated to post-9/11 considerations and discourses, religion
began to play a larger and larger role in domestic politics in the US, culmi-
nating (in a sense) in the November 2, 2004 election, which in some ways
seemed to be all about religion. Before the election, opinion polling
pointed to an emerging “religion gap,” with frequent religious-service
attenders more likely to vote Republican by a wide margin. Exit polling at
the time of the election indicated that the key constituency group that
made the difference in electing George Bush was a group that came to be
called “values voters,” people who were motivated at the polls more by
religious and cultural values than by questions of foreign or domestic
policy. 1
Both the events of 9/11 and the US general election in 2004 call our
attention away from the private sphere of meaning-making that we’ve
concentrated on up to this point, and redirect it to the larger national and
international public sphere. What can the narratives of self and practices
of meaning-making we’ve been looking at here tell us about the signifi-
cance of these larger events for religion, society, and culture? More