Page 17 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

employ new mass media in order to, as their self-understanding would have it,
“reach out to the world.”
Clearly it is inadequate to dismiss the public presence of religion—which is
certainly not con¤ned to so-called fundamentalist movements—as being out of
tune with the realities shaped by globalization (Marty and Appleby 1991–95; for
a well-argued critique, cf. de Vries 2001, 16ff). This dismissal reveals more about
scholars’ own ideological position than about the phenomenon they seek to ex-
plain. Hence it would be a mistake to simply conceptualize the public emergence
of religious forms as a “return of the repressed,” made possible by the incapacity
of the modern state to contain religion. Public religion, in this sense, is not a
relic of a premodern past that should ideally be con¤ned to the private sphere.
Instead, it is crucial to acknowledge that—religious claims of “returning to the
source” notwithstanding—religions tend to be rearticulated with globalization.
The role played by the mass media in this rearticulation of Hinduism, Judaism,
Islam, and Christianity is a key concern of this volume (cf. chapters 2, 4, 10, 12,
and 14).
While Eickelman and Anderson’s point that Muslim religious practice trans-
forms through the encounter with new media is well taken, their rather norma-
tive understanding of the public sphere as a harbinger of emancipation and
rational debate, and of the role of religion therein, is problematic. In the intro-
duction to their edited volume, Public Islam and the Common Good, Salvatore
and Eickelman (2004, xii) also recognize that the trend toward the fragmenta-
tion of religious authority is in fact “uneven and often contradictory.” The con-
tributors to this volume are wary to adopt an overtly celebratory tone toward
the public sphere out of the realization, noted above, that the public sphere
should not be viewed as a universal notion that readily emerges on a global scale
once certain basic conditions are ful¤lled (see chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9). Rather,
this volume suggests that the marked articulation of religion in the public realm
destabilizes the narrative of modernity as de¤ned by the decline of the public
role of religion, and thus urges us to critically rethink the nexus of religion and
media in regard to (trans)national politics and the modern nation-state on the
basis of detailed empirical study (cf. chapters 1 and 7). Hence the contributors
adopt a rather loose understanding of the public sphere as the space or arena
evolving in a host of postcolonial societies in conjunction with some measure
of political liberalization and commercialization. These processes run parallel
to the decline of the state’s power to dominate the media, to assign a place for
religion in the sphere of the private, and to govern the production of identity.

Mediated Religion and Its New Publics
Processes of mass mediation impinge on religious organizations as well
as on individual experiences, and have major implications for the place and role
of religion in society. One may be tempted to think that people’s (and “their”
anthropologists’) turn to the mass media is an intrinsically new phenomenon,
triggered by globalization and implying a loss of “authenticity,” understood as

6 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors