Page 44 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 33

from the very earliest days. Historian Joel Carpenter, in a study of funda-
mentalist radio broadcasting in the 1920s, found evidence that some of
these broadcasters had a different objective in mind than a direct effect in
the salvation of sinners via the airwaves. He quotes one promoter of
fundamentalist radio as noting that the most important effect of radio
broadcasting was not in projecting or promoting the Christian message to
believers and non-believers, but to aid in the cultural ascendancy of
Fundamentalism and later Evangelicalism. Radio, he said, would project
them into “the show windows of modern publicity.” 32
Thus, there was a self-consciousness that the media might function in a
way beyond the mere direct transmission of a message. There was a
cultural-symbolic project as well: that, in the era of the Scopes trial and the
general marginalization of Fundamentalism as a social movement in the US,
radio could serve to recover some lost ground for the movement by posi-
tioning it within a specific cultural realm of emerging and growing
significance, that of the modern mass media, entertainment, and marketing.
The landmark 1954 Parker, Barry, and Smythe study of religious broad-
casting 33 included evidence beyond “effects” as well. While interested in
the success of various religious broadcasts, an effects-oriented task, Parker
and his colleagues also noted the many ways in which the meaning and
significance of given broadcasts needed to be seen in social, class, and
sectarian contexts. Media were significant to the extent that they
connected with these other things. The significant issue at the time of the
Parker et al. study, for instance, was the emergence of Bishop Fulton Sheen
as a major figure on national television. As a Roman Catholic, Sheen’s
prominence had significant implications in two directions. There was the
rather straightforward question of the force and effect of his message.
More interesting and significant, perhaps, was what his presence repre-
sented for American Catholicism: its emergence from marginality to
cultural centrality. As Parker, Barry, and Smythe themselves noted, it was
increasingly clear it was more important to understand the various ways
such broadcasts were interpreted and used than to assume some sort of
unitary “effect” of them on audience beliefs or behaviors. 34
Similar perspectives emerged in the great wave of research that followed
the emergence of televangelism in the 1970s. In the first scholarly article
about the phenomenon to appear in a major media studies journal,
Quentin Schultze explored the notion that these ministries should be
understood in terms of the mythology of media power that lay behind
them rather than just in relation to their claimed or assumed effects on
audiences. In the first scholarly book on the subject to be published, Peter
35
Horsfield analyzed these new religious broadcasts in historical and denom-
inational context, demonstrating that the only way to assess their
significance was in the interaction between their claims and symbols and
the larger religious culture at that moment in time. 36