Page 54 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 43

terms of relatively unequivocal and unitary characteristics of content, with
the interesting questions being where and for whom different kinds of
outcomes could be seen. There was little awareness, for example, that
different audiences, different communities of interpretation, and different
cosmologies might make the experience of these media radically different
in different contexts. The dominant assumption was that there was one
national media market, and that its needs, interests, and motivations were
more or less universal, and that the role of broadcasting, for example, as a
cultural authority, was more or less unquestioned.
In terms of religion, the centrality and seeming unity of the media of
that era (roughly the middle third of the twentieth century) coincided with
the self-understanding of an era described by Will Herberg 67 as one of
sectarian simplicity and unity in his famous aphorism, “to be Catholic,
Protestant, or Jew are simply various ways of being American.” The ques-
tion became one of access for these dominant religious institutions to a
public sphere determined by the media. Elaborate systems of access
emerged that in a way gave the major television networks in both the US
and the UK the authority to confirm the legitimacy of the institutions of
68
the religious establishment. The effect of this was in fact an early – and
profound – articulation of religion and the public media, a linkage that
was somewhat opaque at the time but today appears as only the beginning
of a growing integration between these two realms.
But certain voices in the world of religion began to realize that the times
had changed in important ways – that religion could no longer ignore the
media. This point was driven home more forcefully in the 1970s with the
69
emergence of televangelism. This development was important in several
ways. It constituted a seeming challenge to the cultural hegemony of the
established religions (in both the US and elsewhere), a challenge confirmed
by much of the discourse about it at the time. It was one of the first exam-
ples of the fracturing and multiplication of media channels that would
typify the last quarter of the century, as technologies such as satellite and
cable broadcasting broke the hold of the dominant networks over the
mediated public sphere. In the early days of satellite and cable television,
many – even in the media industries – could not quite envision the possibil-
ities for the multiplication of channels and services directed at discrete
taste cultures. The socialization of the dominant “network” era was very
strong. Televangelism and the hugely successful premium-cable service
Home Box Office both emerged around the same time, and served to illus-
trate what was possible. Televangelism further stimulated new directions
in research and reflection on religion and media (as discussed earlier) that
pointed to more culturalist and audience-centered ways of explaining its
implications.
By the end of the century, the media industries were becoming more and
more complex and multifaceted. Whereas, in the “network era” of US