Page 30 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

What this book could be about 19

giously based ideologies would become less and less important, the Iranian
revolution showed that resurgent religion could, indeed, become a force in
modernity. 78
Religiously modulated social and political movements seem to have
become more and more obvious in the years since 1979. Resurgent reli-
giously based political parties have drawn increasing attention. Even in the
industrialized world, religion has become more obvious. Conservative
Christian groups have become a more important feature of American poli-
tics over the last two decades (culminating, as we will discuss in Chapter 9,
in the November 2004, US General Election). A series of scandals have
rocked the Catholic Church, both in North America and in Europe. World
Anglicanism has undergone public struggles over gay ordination. The
question of religion surfaced in debates over the European constitution.
The term “Japanese Doomsday Cult” has become almost a cliché. And, in
the most obvious and compelling case, the attacks by Islamicist terror
groups around the world, including, of course, those of September 11,
2001 (which we will also consider in more detail in Chapter 9), have put
religion on the political and news agendas.
These events in the news have been accompanied by developments in
popular culture. Religion and spirituality seem ever more obvious in
popular music, television, film, and in books. Media figures have become
publicly identified with religious and spiritual ideas of various kinds. 79
Religion seems increasingly “on the agenda” in public culture, though it is
often in varieties and forms that seem to defy the label, an issue we will get
to in more detail in later chapters.
To better understand the purpose of this book, we should reflect a bit
on the challenge of studying the intersection of media and religion in such
a historical, social, and scholarly context. The phenomenon of religion,
and the institutions of the media, are voluble and dynamic. They do not
“stand still” for analysis in the way we might wish them to. Both are
complex systems, with a variety of structural, historical, and cultural char-
acteristics that help define and typify them.
It is my argument that audience reception research within the culturalist
tradition shows great promise to further our understandings at this point
in time. I’ll make this argument at this juncture on two grounds. First, as I
have said, a more qualitative direction that looks at practices of media
consumption within the context of everyday life is particularly well suited
to the specific questions around the relationship between religion and
media. Much more will be said about this as we move through later chap-
ters devoted specifically to those things.
A second compelling reason for a culturalist look at the context of
media and religion practices in daily life lies behind what I see to be the
limitations of the other three “paradigms” I discussed earlier. 80 On a
fundamental level, if we are to know anything about the ideological or