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66 Media and religion in transition

symbolization and representation for the whole culture. In the ongoing
negotiation of “turf” between material that is “religiously originated” and
that which is “secular,” The Passion demonstrates that the power is all on
the latter side of the ledger. This is particularly and logically so, when we
remember that the issue is the definition of terms for the whole culture,
and the role that religions may or may not be able to play in the culture.
In sum, then, the media landscape is one that carries within it a wide
range of symbolic material relevant to issues of religion and spirituality.
This landscape is further defined by history, by aesthetic and religious
tradition, and by evolving taste cultures and audience interests. As they
encounter the media in their lives, they do not look at a horizontal inven-
tory of symbols so much as they engage in an ongoing conversation with
themselves, and with their culture, over the sources, aspirations, and
claims of cultural resources, including the media. It is against this complex
landscape that evolving religious and spiritual sensibilities today must
define themselves and find cultural purchase.

Ways of looking at religion and media
In Chapter 1, we reviewed some key works dealing with religion and
media with an eye to understanding where the scholarly study of religion
and media is rooted and where it may be going. A set of “lay” or
“received” ideas about the relationship between religion and media under-
lies these scholarly approaches as well as the broader range of more public
and less scholarly theories. I will review some of the most prominent of
these briefly here, so as to make clear how the approach we will take in
the next chapters differs from them. The point is not to discount these
wholesale. Some of them are, in fact, very helpful ways of understanding
things. Instead, the point is to differentiate the culturalist/ethnographic
approach we will take on from these others.
Archetypes. Theories based on archetypes exist in a number of disci-
plines from art history to psychology. The underlying idea here is that there
exist in the social, cultural, and psychological spheres a set of forms or
“archetypes” on which other forms are based. In media studies, struc-
turalist and psychological theories such as those of Lacan and Jung have
been variously appropriated to the task of understanding cultural
symbolism and media texts. The project is one of uncovering within the
media artifacts we have available to us these more fundamental forms. 74
Gregor Goethals’s analyses of religious television follow a similar, formalist
direction, though less self-consciously rooted in archetypal theory per se. 75
A wider range of critiques of religion in the media also take the
approach of looking at underlying forms as a way of analyzing texts and
practices. Such formal approaches to cultural analysis make some sense
and have some value. It is important, at the same time, to understand that