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Media and religion in transition 69

deVries concentrates almost entirely on an issue that also seems to concern
many of the others in the collection: the idea that media can, through the
manipulations of things like “special effects,” radically alter the meaning
of religious revelation or insight, specifically in relation to the meaning of
“miracles.” Weber’s essay focuses on the structuration of media experi-
ence, on notions of ritual and the relationship of repetition to
understandings of truth and the possibility that the media may, in some
implicit, yet fundamental, way, be involved in the “return of the
religious.” 88
In all of these cases, there is a tendency to invest entirely too much in
implicit and assumed characteristics of the media and too little in the
wider social and economic contexts within which the media function. 89
Technological determinism has long been discouraged in academic theory-
building, and many of those criticisms are relevant when looking at how
media technology might be affecting “religion” as well.
Dualism. In contrast to the “transformationist” school, there has also
been a tendency for some commentary on religion and media to have
within it an implicit dualism dividing the “sacred” from the “secular,”
and, by implication, dividing “religion” from “the (secular) media” at the
same stroke. This has been one of the easy assumptions underlying the
secular press’s approach to religion, discussed earlier. It has also been at
the root of the criticism leveled at the media from critics in the religious
world. A good deal of the angst that flows from religious institutions when
they are under press scrutiny is based on a sense that the world represented
by religion and that represented by the media are – or should be – kept
distinct. It has deeper roots, though, going back to Durkheim, who origi-
nally theorized a sacred/profane divide, and later social theorists who too
quickly connected the sacred with authentic or traditional culture and the
profane with the instrumental world of commerce, economy, politics, and
social life. 90
Within mass communication and media studies, there has been a consis-
tent tendency to hold to a separation between those messages and practices
of reception that might be construed as “religious” and those which are
more “secular” or material in orientation. Recent works on media ritual,
for example, have been at pains to keep this distinction in mind. In his
91
influential book, Television Culture, John Fiske drew the definition rather
starkly, saying that the whole of his analysis on media culture and its audi-
ences should be understood as fundamentally secular. 92
Formalism. There has also been an implicit formalism in some work at
the boundary between religion and the media. Daniel Dayan and Elihu
93
Katz’s work on “media events,” which we will consider in more detail in
Chapter 9, exhibits a tendency to treat religion’s presence in public rituals
of social meaning by its absence. Religion contributes certain forms to the
ceremonies, and in keeping with some approaches to the study of “civil