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76 Media and religion in transition

last century. At mid-century, as we’ve noted (and this situation was most
straightforward in the case of broadcasting), the established religions and
the established media existed in a convenient relationship whereby the
media accepted responsibility for providing access and coverage for reli-
gious programming of the religious establishment. 108
This programming was by definition of a certain kind. It fit with the
self-understanding of religion as a central, stable, and significant force on
the cultural landscape. The same went for the kind of journalistic treat-
ment of religion thought to be most appropriate, and the sorts of religious
material that would appear in the other media as well. Appropriate media,
it was thought, were that which supported the highest aspirations and
ideals of religion in late modernity. These ideals were consistent with more
general notions about cultural hierarchy among the educational and
cultural establishment. Just as educational leaders in Britain and the US
had long held to the view that “high art” could be uplifting, inspirational,
and positive, while “low,” or “popular,” art ran the risk of at least wasting
time if not actually misleading people morally, the religious establishment
at mid-century took the same view of the relationship of art (and culture
generally) to religion.
Art historian Sally Promey has shown a fundamental link between the
mass-culture debates of the academy familiar to media scholars and the
thought of influential leaders in the neo-orthodox establishment that
dominated the Protestant theological academy for much of the twentieth
century. The central figure was the theologian Paul Tillich who, according
to Promey, promoted ideas about elite culture and mass culture derived
from the influential “Frankfurt School” and its ideas about ideological
domination by the mass media. 109 In Tillich’s view, only “high art” should
be thought of as playing a normative role in religious or spiritual explo-
ration. The “low art” of the mass media was to be avoided. As with the
Frankfurt School, Tillich’s critique rested on two notions: that the profane
art of the masses – of which mass media were the embodiment – was at
least a distraction, if not actually misleading to true faith, and that the
mass media were at the center of a “mass culture” that always had the
capacity for ideological domination and would by its nature verge toward
fascism, as it had in Europe before the Second World War. 110 This kind of
thinking about media coincided with a general tendency in the academy
(theological as well as secular) to eschew, even denigrate, “popular” or
“low” culture as imperfect, immature, and trivial to true enlightenment.
It goes without saying that the kind of religious sensibility and religious
practice envisioned by Tillich and his colleagues is very different from the
emerging religious sensibility we’ve been discussing. The new religious
volunteerism (to use Warner’s term) sees itself as fully capable of sepa-
rating the religious wheat from the religious chaff, and further would want
to explore a wide range of cultural resources, hoping to find nuggets of