Page 74 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Media and religion in transition 63

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a project that may face serious obstacles. It serves as an example, though,
of the development of a broader religious media market, one that in areas
such as cross-promotion resembles the more secular media world.
Perhaps the most significant sector of religious publishing is the reli-
gious magazine market. Like book publishing, magazine publishing has
diverged from an earlier era where most such journals were directly related
to religious groups or denominations, to a situation today where a large
and vibrant field of hundreds of independent religious and spiritual publi-
cations are available both through religious and secular outlets. The
largest-circulation of these, Christianity Today, boasts a readership of
330,000. Founded originally as an alternative to the dominant religious
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publications of the mid-twentieth century, Christian Century and Christianity
and Crisis, by the end of the century this journal had come to prominence
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as the most widely read such publication, paralleling the growth in inde-
pendent Evangelicalism, to which it directs itself. 65
Magazine publishing provides, however, a range of materials across a
wide range of interests. Alongside such journals as Christianity Today exist
a large number of magazines published by, or oriented toward, new reli-
gious movements, existing marginal movements, New Age practices of
various kinds, and everything in between.

Entertainment media

We’ve already seen how the media marketplace can be said to have
become more religious or spiritual in recent years. A large number of
programs both on the major network schedules and within the cable and
direct-broadcast satellite industries now regularly deal with religious and
spiritual themes and values. It is not my purpose here to establish a set of
norms or definitions whereby such material might or might not be authen-
tically religious or spiritual, even though that might be a project of some
interest. My reluctance is rooted in one of the goals of this project – to lay
the groundwork for hearing directly from audiences for this material. To
begin with inductive categories of what is or is not religious or spiritual
would defeat part of that purpose.
At the same time, though, questions of the definition of what is or is not
religious or spiritual in media are important ones, but not because they
help us somehow understand the legitimacy or significance of the symbols
and values we see there. Rather, they become important ways of defining
the cultural landscape in the media, helping us map the cultural environ-
ment and our place in it. In the televangelism era, for example, it became
clear that a good deal of what was important or salient for supporters of
those programs was not discrete elements of the content and what they
might learn or be inspired by there, but that the programs represented a
kind of cultural space in the media environment with which those