Page 76 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Media and religion in transition 65

By the 2003 season, the PAX network was arguably an economic, if not a
cultural, success, having found a place in markets beyond its core through
cable television, and continuing to carry Paxon’s target mix of program-
ming genres.
Beyond ITV, there exist a number of cable television channels that verge
toward similar kinds of programming. The Hallmark Channel, for
example, evolved through a relationship with the more mainline Christian-
oriented Odyssey network, and the Oxygen and Lifetime networks now
carry a good deal of programming that resembles what Heather
Hendershot has identified as the ideal programming for “crossing over”
between the Christian and secular markets as well as a good representa-
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tion of therapeutic and even generically “spiritual” programming.
At the same time, the secular or commercial media world also continues
to provide material that is much more self-evidently “religious.” There has
been a consistent output from Hollywood for years, dating to the
“bathrobe drama” days of the Ten Commandments and The Robe, and
stretching through significant and critically acclaimed films as disparate as
Robert Duvall’s 1997 Apostle, Kevin Smith’s 1999 effort Dogma, and
Brian Dannely’s 2004 film Saved. No film in recent history, though, has
achieved the profile of the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, produced
and directed by Mel Gibson. The Passion unleashed a storm of public,
religious, and scholarly commentary. As a marker in the long-term nego-
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tiation of relationships between “religion” and “the media,” this film
stands out. It was produced by a mainstream “star,” with a Hollywood
blockbuster-sized budget and promotion effort, and with the promise of
mainstream production values and star power. At the same time, Gibson
saw to it that the film also represented an incursion of “religion” onto the
turf of “secular film.” He devoted extensive efforts to mobilize millions of
Evangelical and Catholic viewers for the film’s opening week, ensuring a
buzz that carried it into the top-ten initial grossing films of all time. As a
film that was self-consciously rooted in conservative, even medieval,
conceptions of Catholic piety, it also created important fissures within
Catholicism and beyond Catholicism, and was the justifiable target of
questions about its position on the age-old question of Jewish guilt for the
crucifixion.
There is much more that could be said about the film, but I’ll confine
myself to two points, leaving the rest to other efforts and projects. First,
the film is an example of a very particular “effect” of media (in this case,
film) on religion. Much as the Ten Commandments’ florid visualizations of
the Exodus story came to be the visual memory of those events for genera-
tions of Christians and Jews, so will The Passion’s representation of the
passion become the standard visual memory for generations from here on
out. Second, this first effect illustrates the extent to which artifacts in the
media sphere such as this film have largely become definitive of religious