Page 20 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of representation geared to grandiosity and spectacle, the Church strives to or-
ganize mass-scale media events such as ¤lling the Maracanã, the world’s largest
football stadium, or assembling huge crowds in its “Cathedrals of Faith” in
Israel or Africa. In doing so, it creates not only a distinct, new style of self-
representation but also pinpoints new forms of religious experience that cast
believers as spectators, spectacles as miracles, and God’s blessing as prosperity.
Turning spectators into, albeit mimetic, participants in broadcasted mass rituals
that encompass people in different nations through the power of tele-vision, the
Universal Church endorses a global orientation. But it not only presents itself as
spreading throughout the world (and especially to Africa, the cradle of Afro-
Brazilian, allegedly “demonic,” cults) but also as being able to master the world
and lead people out of poverty. Accepting the marketing and branding methods
of corporate business, which shows in the dress style and comportment of its
pastors, and emphasizing its links with politics, the Universal Church, like simi-
lar Pentecostal-charismatic churches throughout Africa and Asia (Freston 1998;
Martin 2002; Meyer 2004b), purports an understanding of religion as being well
connected with the world of capital and power.
The adoption of the mass media, although suitable for the spread of religious
ideas, raises important questions concerning the maintenance of religious au-
thority. Addressing religious practitioners as audiences may entail cracks in the
maintenance of religious regimes, and hence give rise to ambivalent attitudes
vis-à-vis new media (Little 1995; Spyer 2001; Meyer, in press; van de Port, 2004).
Jeremy Stolow, in chapter 3, discusses the implications of the commodi¤cation
of Jewish mass-produced literature for the maintenance of ultra-orthodox, re-
ligious authority. Judaism is appropriately characterized as a “religion of the
book,” in that texts play a key role in the production of knowledge, the consoli-
dation of authority, and the social organization of the Jewish community across
the diaspora for centuries. Yet changes in the mode of circulation and consump-
tion of these texts impact on the relations between leaders and followers, and
raise a vital question: “What has happened to religious authority in the informa-
tion age?” By analyzing the exchange networks and circuits through which texts
published by ArtScroll Publishers circulate, the frictions between ArtScroll’s
and readers’ intentions become evident. ArtScroll, one of the leading Judaica
publishers in the English-speaking world with close ties to the haredi movement
Agudat Israel, serves as a vehicle to transmit the voice of ultra-orthodox au-
thorities.
Yet the wish to reach out to “lost Jews” requires the commodi¤cation of
mass-produced texts, to be circulated in arenas out of ArtScroll’s immediate
audience and milieu. Its texts are also quite popular among non-haredi Jews,
such as in the Saatchi synagogue, the “coolest” in London, because of rhetorical
strategies employed to claim authenticity. Marketing its texts as markers of Jew-
ish authenticity enables ArtScroll to establish a dominant position in the market
for prayer books and religious texts. At the same time, however, it inserts Art-
Scroll into the logic of commodity exchange. This makes it ultimately impos-
sible to control processes of consumption and to retain religious authority for

Introduction 9