Page 29 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

18 What this book could be about

on media, religion, and culture began with a founding event in Uppsala,
Sweden, in 1993, followed by meetings in Boulder, Colorado, USA, in
1996, in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1999, in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, in
2004, again in Sweden in 2006, and planned meetings in Brazil in 2008 and
the Netherlands in 2010. The scholarly and professional associations have
also contributed, with regular panels and other fora at meetings including
the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the American Academy of
Religion, the International Association for Media and Communication
Research, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication, the International Communication Association, the
National Communication Association, and at conferences somewhat more
“remote” from the fields of religion studies and media studies.
It is also important to note that in the specific scholarly area of religion
and media, much of the progress that has been made has come from
younger scholars. Important works in this field such as Diane Winston’s
Red Hot and Righteous, 66 Lynn Schofield Clark’s From Angels to
Aliens, 67 Michele Rosenthal’s Satan and Savior, 68 Tona Hangen’s
Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America, 69
John Schmalzbaur’s People of Faith, 70 Sean McCloud’s Making the
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American Religious Fringe, Jolyon Mitchell’s Visually Speaking, Heather
Hendershot’s Shaking the World for Jesus, 73 and David Morgan’s edited
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volume Icons of American Protestantism, all emerged early in their careers,
and many were closely related to work they had done in their doctoral
studies. 75
Not all of the emerging interest in the connections between media and
religion can be credited to scholarship alone. Events have pushed these
questions nearer and nearer the center of discourse. At the mid-point of
the last century, a kind of easy consensus on questions of religion (and, by
extension, its public face in the media realm) seemed to have been reached.
In the context of North America, this was described in a classic work by
Will Herberg as a time where religion, in the form of the dominant tradi-
76
tions of Christianity and Judaism, was present, but neither too obvious nor
too controversial as an element of public culture. That public face of reli-
gion – its representation in its institutions – was the index by which
religion was known, and as those institutions began to decline in their
influence, it was easy to begin to assume that the predictions of some
classic versions of secularization theory were being fulfilled. In the same time
period a more deeply felt secularization was underway in Europe.
This situation has now changed, and in a very public way. A sea change
occurred with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. That event served to
undermine some tried-and-true assumptions in the political, social,
cultural, and media realms. Whereas before it had been easy to assume a
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particular theory of modernity, development, and secularization that saw
a relentless march of progress in which religious movements and reli-