Page 177 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

8 Mediated Religion in South

Africa: Balancing Airtime and

Rights Claims

Rosalind I. J. Hackett

At one level this essay on religious broadcasting in South Africa addresses the
heightened relevance of the media sphere in today’s global network society for
the identity and survival of religious collectivities (see Castells 1996). But it is
perhaps more concerned with the growing signi¤cance of the local and global
media in shaping attitudes of religious tolerance or intolerance, and in manag-
1
ing religious diversity. Recent scholarship on religious discrimination and per-
secution more generally demonstrates the particular vulnerability of new reli-
gious movements and minority religious groups in this respect (Adams 2000;
2
Richardson 1995, 2000). In fact, British legal scholar Malcolm Evans (2000,
182) goes so far as to claim that “the origins of contemporary forms of human
rights protection ®ow from attempts to protect the religious freedoms of certain
identi¤ed and vulnerable religious communities.”
Hent de Vries (2001, 21) frames these interconnections well when he ar-
gues that “the relationship between religion and media sheds light on the ques-
tion of how cultural identity and difference are constituted, as well as on how
they relate to the aims of sociopolitical integration” (cf. Spitulnik 1993, 300).
Because of its paradoxical universalizing and particularizing tendencies, “reli-
gion . . . forms the condition of possibility and impossibility for the political.”
Rightly chiding Casanova for his neglect of the media sphere, he suggests that
“the mediatized return of the religious” illustrates “an increasingly complicated
negotiation between the private and public spheres” (de Vries 2001, 17). This
accounts for some of the new forms of regulation of expression of religious
communities being developed by both state and nonstate actors. 3
Studies of Africa’s rapidly expanding and diversifying media sector, notably
of the cultural and religious dimensions of media production, distribution, re-
ception, and consumption, are growing apace (see chapters 6 and 14, this vol-
ume). However, insuf¤cient attention has been paid to the ways in which media
institutions and representations may constitute an important site of con®ict be-
tween religions and the state, and between religious groups. So recognizing with
Debra Spitulnik (1993, 303) that “the mass media are extremely potent areas of