Page 82 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Media and religion in transition 71

of monopolistic media against which religion must struggle. More impor-
tantly, trends in religion now have us questioning whether there is such a
struggle, anyway.
A good deal of what we’ve been considering about religious change
results from a change in the way religion is studied as much as the ways it
is thought about. This “paradigm shift” in religion scholarship shares
much in common with the paradigm shifts in media scholarship we’ve
considered. What we know about these two fields begins to lay out some
expectations about what we might find as we delve into meaning-making
in the media age in the following chapters. Before we move on, we should
look at this new religion scholarship and some of its implications in more
detail. In short, there is much in the field of religious studies that can be
seen to predict an intriguing, if not substantive, role for the media in the
contemporary religious landscape and a similarly provocative role for reli-
gion in the media landscape.
Our explorations here are provoked by religious change that has
become increasingly obvious to religion scholarship, which is itself under-
going great change. Over recent years, a range of studies of contemporary
religion have begun to raise serious questions about the whole way schol-
arly and lay discourse has thought about religion and spirituality. A
leading scholar, Catherine Albanese, has described this change in terms of
a shift in understanding religion as a totalizing, or universalizing, reality to
an understanding of religion in its multiple forms and locations – from
“religion,” to “religions.” 96
The paradigm shift here has been most systematically described by R.
Stephen Warner in an article that has come to be considered paradigmatic
97
in itself. Warner describes the new religion scholarship as influenced by
changes in the nature of religious practice, recognizing a fundamental
change in the way we think about religion.

The conventional social science wisdom is rooted in a paradigm that
conceived religion, like politics, to be a property of the whole society,
such that the institutionalized separation of state and church in
modern society offered religion only two alternatives: either religious
values would become increasingly generalized so that they could
remain the property of the whole, increasingly pluralistic, society, or, if
they remained resolutely particularistic, they would devolve to an
inconsequential private sphere. The former alternative was theorized
by Talcott Parsons; the latter by Peter Berger. We shall see below that
religion in the United States has typically expressed not the culture of
the society as a whole but the subcultures of its many constituents;
therefore, that it should not be thought of as either the Parsonian
conscience of the whole or the Bergerian refuge of the periphery, but
as the vital expression of groups. 98