Page 22 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

fully addresses not only the impoverished middle classes but also a more frag-
mented public including the privileged groups (Bayat 2002); and the Ghanaian
Pentecostal-charismatic pastor Mensah Otabil, whose church runs its own me-
dia studio and who fashions himself the teacher of the nation (De Witte 2003).
The new technological possibilities of cassettes, radio, television, and the
Internet may be understood by religious leaders or followers as linking up
smoothly with existing religious concerns, such as the wish to spread religion
to the outside world or to offer a prosthetic device for particular religious prac-
tices. Yet, as the examples in part 1 of this volume show, the adoption of new
media signi¤cantly transforms existing practices of religious mediation. This is
not simply a matter of new media allowing for the increased public visibility
and audibility of religions. Equally important, the media imply particular for-
mats and styles often taken for granted, and operate in new infrastructures.
These factors shape the speci¤c modes by which religions go public, modes that
are dif¤cult to control by religious establishments. New media thus have both a
destabilizing and an enabling potential for established practices of religious me-
diation. In this sense, new media may resemble a Trojan horse.

Religion in the Public Sphere and the
Politics of Difference

The presence of mediated religion in the public sphere is both constitu-
tive of and constituted by political activism, especially identity politics or the
politics of difference. Modern religion refuses to be bound to a distinct religious
sphere—as is imagined in modern notions of society as differentiated into sepa-
rate domains—and appears to be intermingled with politics and sometimes
violent political action. Nation-states worldwide are faced with signi¤cant prob-
lems in attempting to control religion and its inclusion in state-driven imagi-
nations of the nation. Especially pertinent is the link between religions and new
electronic forms of mediation in the context of the rise of network society, a
connection that evokes important questions regarding the politics of identity.
Whereas Castells (1996, 1997, 1998) extensively discussed how the new me-
dia technologies have shaped the ways in which identities are generated and
anchored—once the privilege of the nation-state but now driven by global
processes—he paid little attention to the role of mediated religion (apart from
“fundamentalism,” as noted above).
This neglect of the potential contributions of mediated religion to the devel-
opment of a modern public sphere is also evident in the work of Habermas. For
him, the distinctive feature of the modern public sphere is that individuals are
to appear as equals, formally not hindered by an attachment to particular inter-
ests or identities, with only the power of rational arguments acknowledged. Fol-
lowing this line of thought, as pointed out above, there is no space for religiously
grounded positions in the modern public sphere. Yet, as Habermas’s critics have
stressed, group identities and interests are always at play in the public sphere.

Introduction 11