Page 307 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

at Olympia, Regal, and Opera, often without his parents’ consent, using his
lunch money to buy a ticket. He explained to me that this marked appropriation
of cinema space by churches and their noisy presence was quite recent and had
come about as part and parcel of Ghana’s recent turn to democracy. Although
in the course of the 1980s Pentecostal churches, in particular, had become in-
creasingly attractive, under the regime of J. J. Rawlings (1981–1992) they had
more or less existed in a niche in society, not audible and visible as was the case
now, but con¤ned only to their places of worship. On the other hand, as a re-
sult of the spread of TV and, more recently, video, the cinemas had gradually
lost their appeal to the audiences and were run-down and ill attended most of
the time.
The appeal and public impact of these churches is only partly revealed by the
last population census, which shows that 24.1 percent of the whole Ghanaian
population regards itself as Pentecostal-Charismatic, whereas the ¤gure is 37.7
percent in the Accra region (and, among all Christians in Greater Accra, the Pen-
tecostals form 45.8 percent [Ghana Statistical Service 2000]). However, even
the Orthodox churches have sought to accommodate Pentecostal views and
practices so as not to lose members (cf. Meyer 1999a). Since most Protestant
churches run prayer groups and the Catholic Church institutionalized the Char-
ismatic renewal, it may safely be stated that Pentecostalism has become the main
current in Ghanaian Christianity and at the same time has started to advertise
itself outside the narrow con¤nes of churches and congregations.
Signi¤cantly Pentecostal views, characterized by an uncompromising atti-
tude toward local religious and, to some extent, cultural traditions (Coe 2000;
van Dijk 2001), have become increasingly important in shaping the political
public sphere. In many ways, in the wake of turning to a democratic constitu-
tion, Pentecostal-Charismatic leaders started to assert the necessity for Ghana
to become a Christian nation (Gifford 1998, 85), and this entails the need to
discard traditional religious practices, such as the public pouring of libation, as
well as corruption. Dif¤cult as all this may be from the perspective of politi-
cians, clearly Pentecostalism is a power that cannot be ignored. In order to be
elected, individual politicians from all parties struggle to show their commit-
ment to Christianity and to their having been Born Again, and many do not
hesitate to appear in one of the big Charismatic churches to publicly profess
their faith, address the believers, and receive the blessings of the church leader.
Yet the presence of Pentecostalism reaches much further than political debate
in the narrow sense in that it speaks to, and articulates, new social horizons of
experience by linking up with popular culture as the prime arena for the work
of fantasy. The churches’ takeover of the cinema buildings is symptomatic of
this broader development, instigated by the gradual liberalization of the media
which implied the (albeit partial) commercialization of press, radio, TV, and
cinema, and thus the retreat of the state from these media and an increasing
fragmentation and privatization of the media scene. A case in point is the sale
of the formerly state-owned Ghana Films Industry Corporation (GFIC) to a
Malaysian television company in 1996 (Meyer 2001, 70). This sale was the result

296 Birgit Meyer