Page 249 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

238 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

Holocaust has changed the way witnessing is seen and done in modernity. 7
Visual records play an ever more significant role in our collective experi-
ence of our common humanity, and in our personal and political relation
to suffering. It has been widely observed that those events that are pictured
achieve a place in public consciousness not shared by events that are
merely reported upon by other means. For example, the Boxing Day
Tsunami of 2004 galvanized world attention to the plight of hundreds of
thousands of casualties and millions of survivors while unpictured events
going on at the same time, such as the massacres in the Darfour province
of Sudan, received less attention.
I contend that, in addition to the visuality of 9/11, there was also its
instantaneity. We all knew that these things we were watching were
happening at that very moment. I do not want to ignore a more troubling
aspect of these matters that has also been widely observed as a reason for
the relative prominence of the 9/11 events. That is that, while disasters and
catastrophes have come to be coded as commonplace in the developing
world – something that happens to “those” unfortunate people “over
there” – events such as 9/11 (where the total number of victims was in fact
only around one one-hundredth the number who died in the Boxing Day
Tsunami) become news because they are happening to white people in the
developed world. On one level, it can be said that in the global media land-
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scape not all human lives are of equal worth. On another level, we should
also remember that in the conventional journalistic calculus, things are news
because they are unusual or unprecedented, and a major terrorist attack,
within the borders of the United States, was unusual and unprecedented.
The instantaneity of the 9/11 depictions and reception did serve to draw
viewers into a common experience in a new and galvanic way. It became
an event and an experience that was widely shared on a moral and
emotional level, as evidenced by the global outpouring of sympathy and
support. It thus had the makings, at least, of a binding experience that
transcended its immediate surroundings. Many communities and contexts
and interests have tried to “claim” it, leaving aside the unquestioned
claims of the victims and their families. Did it “belong” to New York
(hundreds also died at the Pentagon and in a field in western
Pennsylvania)? To the firefighters and police on the scene? To America and
patriotic American ideas about justice and right? To the West? To the
Christian world? The right to define its moral, political, and religious
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meaning continues to be an issue of great debate to this day, and will no
doubt be so for decades to come. The point of interest to our discussion
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here, though, is the nature of the event and the experience. The attacks of
9/11 were a turning point in history that was experienced in a deep and
profound way because they were mediated in real time. Their relationship
to religion is perhaps less obvious, but, as we proceed to reflect on them,
religion will become a more and more important dimension of the story.