Page 301 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

14 Impossible Representations:

Pentecostalism, Vision, and

Video Technology in Ghana

Birgit Meyer

This chapter seeks to unravel the nexus of religion and media by taking as a
point of departure an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation (e.g.,
de Vries 2001; Plate 2003), creating and maintaining links between religious
practitioners as well as between them and the spiritual, divine, or transcenden-
tal realm that forms the center of religious attention. This realm is constructed
by mediation, yet—and here lies the power of religion—assumes a reality of its
own. The question of how (if at all) sacred texts, images, or other representa-
tions are able to embody and make present the divine is at the heart of religious
traditions. This question may give rise to vehement disagreements, as, for in-
stance, in the iconoclasm of Catholic images by Protestants, who claimed to re-
place the worship of idols by thorough Bible study. That the accessibility of
print media transformed Christian practices of mediation suggests that the in-
troduction of new media, in particular, raises questions concerning their suit-
ability and limitations in linking religious practitioners with one another and
with God. If ideas are necessarily reworked through the particular technologies
of transmission intrinsic to books, images, spirit mediums, ¤lm, radio, TV,
video, or the computer, the question arises as to how the accessibility of a new
medium transforms existing practices of religious mediation.
While a crude separation of medium and message, which makes it seem as
if the message is an essence existing irrespective of a particular medium, is
untenable, it is equally problematic to attribute a deterministic and message-
overruling capacity to media, as implied in Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum
“the medium is the message.” What both options have in common is that, with
their narrow focus on either message or medium, they remain stuck in partial
aspects of practices of mediation without being able to fully grasp these prac-
tices themselves. There is need to move forward and assess how the accessibility
of new media gives rise to new practices of mediation, and how these practices
stem from and impinge on changing power relations, between followers and
leaders, as well as between politics and religion. Hence the need to investigate
religious change, and the changing place and role of religion in society, in rela-