Page 46 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 35

of location serve to enculturate us and provide means of solidarity, binding
us to our place and time. These shared ideas mediate our experience of the
physical world, enabling us to interact, develop psychologically and
socially, learn, and achieve the kind of social autonomy that is at the base
of human-ness and freedom.
The idea of “mediation” when applied to the mass media suggests a
role for these devices and processes in social and cultural life and
consciousness that is more integral to, less distinct from, that social and
cultural life. They become a part of the fabric of social consciousness,
not just an influence on that consciousness.
Another kind of research and theory that contrasts with approaches
which focus on the medium has also come to importance in questions of
media and religion: a more humanistic orientation to seeing religion and
spirituality in terms of the cultural artifacts that support them and give
them meaning. Work such as Laurence Moore’s study of nineteenth-
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century religious commodities, Colleen McDannell’s influential work on
“Material Christianity,” David Morgan’s studies of the visual culture of
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nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Protestantism, Leigh Schmidt’s
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history of the process of gifting, Diane Winston’s history of the Salvation
Army as a public commodity, 44 and Heather Hendershot’s history of
Evangelical media are examples which illustrate that there is much to be
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learned by focusing attention on the practices which emerge around the
artifacts of religion. 46
From medium to meaning
In the last chapter I argued that, across a range of ideas about media and
society, there exists an important set of questions about what actually goes
on when people encounter and consume media. I presented this as radi-
cally alternative to the more “medium”-oriented approaches that have
dominated the field. At the core of the problem is recognition that there is
a fundamental interaction or interrrelationship between practices of medi-
ation and practices of religion. As Hent De Vries put it in the introduction
to his collection on religion and media,

We should no longer reflect exclusively on the meaning, historically
and in the present, of religion – of faith and belief and their supposed
opposites such as knowledge and technology – but concentrate on the
significance of the processes of mediation and mediatization without
and outside of which no religion would be able to manifest or reveal
itself in the first place. In contradistinction to Heidegger’s analysis,
mediatization and the technology it entails form the condition of possi-
bility for all revelation – for its revealability, so to speak. An element of
technicity belongs to the realm of the “transcendental” and vice versa. 47