Page 35 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

24 What this book could be about

probably less difficult to understand than that they are also media. As I
will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, one of the things that typi-
fies late modernity is the increasing array of social and cultural objects and
practices that have become commodified, and, almost by definition, part
of the mediated cultural environment. Thus, I want to maintain a defini-
tion of religion that is also quite open, and in a way parallels our
definition of religion. To the extent that a social context or practice is part
of public culture, involves technological or social intervention, and is made
accessible to the contexts where we will be looking, I will keep open the
option of thinking of it as an example of “media.”
What I will be attempting to argue in this study is the notion that many
of the approaches, ideas, and criticisms that have been leveled at the nexus
of religion and media in late modernity derive from unexamined and
untested assumptions about the fundamental interaction between the
media and the religiously or spiritually inflected experiences of individuals
and audiences. Much of what we think we know about the way media and
religion interact and relate is based on ideas about this interaction that
may or may not be relevant to the situation “on the ground.” It is as if
there is a piece of the chain of meanings and consequences missing until
we are able to take a closer, more careful look at actual experience.
By extension, then, I expect what we will be doing here is to provide
important resources, ideas, and tests to some of the received assumptions.
Once we know more about how people use media in religious and spiritual
ways, and about the kinds of things they find religiously and spiritually
significant there, we will be able to say more, with more confidence, about
the kinds of larger effects, implications, and possibilities. On the most
fundamental level, I see the project here as establishing what the capacities
are of the systematic relationship that exists between medium and recep-
tion to support what kinds of religious and spiritual meanings and
outcomes. It may make sense in some ways to describe “effects” that
emerge in those contexts. It may make sense in other ways to talk about
negotiations and representations. For now, though, there is much we don’t
know. And, as we will see, some of the most widely held received assump-
tions we will enter the field with will be the first to fall.
There is a limitation to the work we will do here that is rooted in the
timeliness of this project. I will argue in the coming chapters that this
study in many ways represents an interaction between emerging paradigms
in media studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. The conceptual
and theoretical resources available from those fields to our inquiries here
are invaluable in establishing the terms and outlines of what we will do.
But with those resources come a responsibility to also bring them to bear
in a concrete way in our analyses. As we will see, what we may find at
times is that these scholarly assumptions are also not supported or
supportable in the field. That, too, will be a finding, of course, but will be