Page 60 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Media and religion in transition 49

In the network era, it was convenient to think of religion as something that
could be contained within a framework of the prerogatives of established
religious institutions. Religion has always been problematic for the media, a
matter we will get to later. It has been thought of as something that is at
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the same time inherently controversial and of fading importance and
interest (owing to the widespread acceptance of the notion of seculariza-
tion). Religion defies normal canons of journalistic objectivity, is hard to
“source,” and is expressed socially and culturally in a dizzying array of
forms, movements, interests, and publics. It made sense, then, for the media
in the middle of the last century to want to constrain it to defined and
limited locations on the TV dial, the magazine rack, and the bookshelf.
In television’s “golden era,” religion rarely appeared. In the later eras, it
remained nearly nonexistent. The major network news operations devoted
little attention to it, save for the occasional report from the Vatican. There
were, and are, no religion correspondents at any of these major broadcast
news outlets, and public broadcasting in the US has traditionally been even
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less interested in religion. The situation was the same in entertainment media,
with few if any characters identified as religious in any network prime-time
dramas, and no major series with themes or sub-themes devoted to the topic.
This all changed as the structure and diversity of channels and services
in the media began to change and as the world of religion also began to
change. The signal event was probably the première, in 1994, of the
weekly drama Touched by an Angel, on the CBS network. By the 1995
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season, Touched was in the top-ten programs in terms of ratings, a posi-
tion it held until shortly before it ended production in 2003. What was so
unprecedented about the program was that it was so self-evidently reli-
gious. While it avoided being identified as a Christian program, it was
clearly intended to, and did, speak to a Christian audience. At the same
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time, however, it straddled to a less devout audience as well, one more
attracted to its mysticism surrounding anthropomorphic angels than to its
earnest invocations of “God.” 17
Touched was not alone. Over the course of the 1990s, a number of
different US programs and series began to more directly explore the reli-
gious and spiritual side of life. The popular family drama 7th Heaven on
the WB network, about a Protestant minister’s family, outlasted Touched.
In the 1997 season there was a critically acclaimed, but ratings-deprived,
drama about an inner-city Catholic priest, Nothing Sacred, which was very
popular with Catholics who think of themselves as “lapsed,” or “ques-
tioning.” But the industry and the audience also began to see a good deal
of what sociologists would call “implicit” or even “new religion” in televi-
sion, as well. The hugely popular The Simpsons regularly dealt with
religion of both the traditional and emerging kinds, 18 as did the enfant
terrible series South Park, and two of the most popular adult dramas of
the 1990s, The X-Files and Northern Exposure, each contained much