Page 30 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

tice of Christian mediation demonstrates a strong af¤nity between Pentecostal-
ism and video, cinema and church, miracles and special effects, devotion and
distraction (for a similar argument with regard to Catholic charismatics, see
D’Abreu 2002). In ways similar to Öztürk’s presence on Turkish television and
the entanglements of Hindutva and global media, in going public and “taking
place” in the era of electronic/digital reproducibility, Christianity is signi¤cantly
transformed as it spreads throughout the surface of social life, disseminating
signs yet having to accommodate to given formats. Its marked public appear-
ance thus occurs in conjunction with new Pentecostal practices of mediation,
which thrive on distraction in that they imply mass spectatorship and draw
Pentecostalism into the sphere of entertainment, notwithstanding attempts at
recasting distraction as devotion.
As Lawrence Moore (1994) has shown in his study of American Christianity,
an association with the forces of entertainment appears to be crucial for the
survival of religion in the marketplace of culture. At stake here is a change of
the shape and form of religious expression not only in relation to its internal
organization but also in the sense of diffusing religious forms and elements into
public culture. These forms and elements are increasingly dif¤cult to control for
the more or less established religious organizations from whose symbol bank
these remodeled forms originate and to whom they loosely refer. Instead, they
convey a religious ®air, a sort of aura, to media entertainment and commodities.

* * *
Focusing on religion, media, and the public sphere, as this volume shows, is
not only appropriate to understanding the public presence of religion in the in-
formation age but also pinpoints the limitations of overly narrow, discipline-
based approaches. The power and popularity of religion cannot be grasped from
a perspective of religious studies alone, nor can that which occurs in the public
sphere be assessed from the standpoint of narrow and normative political sci-
ence. New perspectives are needed that are able to surpass the limits of disci-
plinary approaches toward religion, media, and politics. Such a division of la-
bor among academic disciplines echoes a compartmentalized understanding of
modern society that increasingly proves to be out of tune with actual develop-
ments (and indeed probably never met realities on the ground). The purpose of
this volume is to contribute to the development of new intellectual spaces from
which the dynamics of current identity politics may be explored. While the es-
says in the volume show that the nation-state still matters in framing people’s
lives (and most probably will continue to do so), equally clear is that religions
have come to play an increasingly public role in offering alternative imagina-
tions of communities. At the same time, in the process of going public—by be-
coming enmeshed with identity politics, by being drawn close to forces of com-
mercialization, and by adopting new media technologies—religions have been
transformed. In this sense, public religion, while strong, loud, and visible in cer-
tain respects, faces new challenges by having to adjust to styles and formats not
necessarily of its own making. The outreach into the world, so advocated by

Introduction 19