Page 26 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

What this book could be about 15

conveying the fundamental ideas of the culture, the media can now be seen
40
to be in that role. A concern with ideological or definitive power can be
said to underlie critiques such as Malcolm Muggeridge’s classic Christ and
the Media. The idea that media and religion exist in a state of ideological
41
struggle is implicit in more recent works of the same vein, including, for
example, Ken Meyers’s All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, 42
Dancing in the Dark by Quentin Schultze and his associates, Schultze’s
43
more recent Habits of the High-Tech Heart, 44 Neil Postman’s Amusing
Ourselves to Death, 45 William Fore’s Television and Religion, 46 and less
scholarly but noteworthy efforts such as Michael Medved’s Hollywood vs.
America and William Bennett’s Book of Virtues. All of these share in
47
48
common the idea that we know, inductively, what religion is, and that
fundamental questions surround a conflict between that ideal of religion
and the reality of contemporary media of various forms. And, most of
them lament that “the media” seem to be “winning.”
Gerbner was involved in a second, more focused scholarly direction,
one that looks at the effects of media on religion and vice versa rooted in
the dominant “effects” paradigm of US mass-media research. The emer-
gence of televangelism occasioned a significant amount of debate and
research when it emerged in the 1970s. Gerbner’s “cultural indicators”
project at the University of Pennsylvania, in co-operation with researchers
from the Gallup Organization and the distinguished religion sociologist
Robert Wuthnow, conducted what was to have been the definitive study of
the phenomenon. Other significant effects-oriented work includes a series
49
of studies by Judith Buddenbaum on religion journalism and the journal-
ists who cover religion, and other studies of religion and the press. 51
50
A third significant school of thought related to religion and media has
emerged within media scholarship, that which looks at the media in terms of
the religious or quasi-religious functions around rituals of identity and social
solidarity. The most important of these is the very influential project by
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz published as Media Events: The Live
52
Broadcasting of History. A more comprehensive review of the solidarity
and ritual literature, based in a Durkheimian framework, is Eric
Rothenbuhler’s Ritual Communication. 53 Also from the field of mass
communication and media studies are Carolyn Marvin’s Blood Sacrifice and
the Nation and Nick Couldry’s critical review of this literature in Media
54
55
Rituals. Implicit in these and other works is the notion fundamental to the
work of social theorist Emile Durkheim, that religion is integral to the form
and shape of society. Further, according to Durkheim, society and religion
meet and diverge around questions of identity and social solidarity, with
social rituals being the context where these issues are worked out. 56
A fourth area of research and theory-building in media scholarship
related to religion traces its roots to a now classic essay by James Carey,
titled “A cultural approach to communication.” In it, Carey describes a
57