Page 190 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

ence” (232). In this regard he underscores the need to incorporate those on the
“fringe of formal religions” and advises against excessive normative limita-
40
tions being placed on religious programs. While such constraints (such as on
proselytizing and discrimination) obtain in other locations, he considers the
South African religious scene to be too diverse to enforce such restraints and
41
the resultant “bland uniform programming” to be undesirable (245). Instead,
he favors the democratic “right to reply” system, while acknowledging that such
responsibility may con®ict with the racist and sexist teachings still propounded
by some religious groups (246). This concurs with efforts by the Africa Region
of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) to encourage
churches to work toward more “democratic communication” and to treat their
constituencies as “active participants in articulating social/spiritual problems”
(Esaya 1992, 82–83).
Because of the intimate relationship between the country’s political and eco-
nomic history and the ongoing divisions and differences of the South African
religious landscape, Baker argues that SABC’s religion department should pro-
actively target economically disadvantaged groups, such as the African indepen-
dent churches, previously marginalized by the mainstream media (Baker 2000,
241). This problematic heritage of religious conservatism and exclusion came
up at a series of seminars on “Religion, Liberation and Transformation through
the South African Experience” held at the Parliament of the World’s Religions,
42
Cape Town, in December 1999. Under discussion was research conducted at
the University of Stellenbosch in 1990 and 1996–97 which has shown that
people with religious af¤liations (except for Jews) were more likely to be politi-
cally intolerant (in terms of according civil rights to groups they did not sup-
port or agree with) than those who did not profess to be religious. So seminar
participants called for religious leaders and communities to develop new atti-
tudes of tolerance, given their power to socialize communities. They were en-
joined to promote the African concept of community or ubuntu (one can only
be human through relationships) and rediscover the emancipatory ecumenism
that brought down the apartheid regime. 43
The South African case demonstrates that the ¤elds of identity and action
for religious groups are increasingly located in, and de¤ned by, the interface
of modern media, both local and global. It also further con¤rms Bourdieu’s ob-
servation that the “journalistic ¤eld,” most notably television, profoundly modi-
¤es power relations in other ¤elds of cultural production (Bourdieu 1996, 68).
There have been, and continue to be, great hopes for the modern media to help
realize the African Renaissance, in whatever modality that is imagined—cultural
pride, academic recognition, spiritual rediscovery, moral renewal, informational
accuracy, political freedom, economic growth, or social harmony (Boateng 1999;
44
Chinweizu 1999; Teffo 1999; Tomaselli and Shepperson 1999). In that regard,
the particular focus in this essay on religious broadcasting demonstrates the
strategic role that the state can, and should, play in transitional democracies
such as South Africa, in promoting religious tolerance. It has further provided
a revealing, yet salutary, window onto the entanglements of religion, democracy,

Mediated Religion in South Africa 179