Page 311 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Further, as Pentecostalism becomes available outside the con¤nes of churches,
believers are addressed as audiences and consumers, and this, to a degree, recasts
the religious experience (cf. De Witte 2003). This is not to say that there is no
such thing as being Born Again but rather to stress that Christianity itself is
being transformed by going public because it makes use of formats that are not
of its own making and that can never be fully contained (cf. De Witte 2003;
4
Van de Port 2005). The public articulation of Pentecostalism takes it beyond
the narrow sphere of religion (religion that is restricted to churches and target-
ing the inner person; cf. Asad 1993). By going public Pentecostalism recasts
Christianity as distraction, both in the sense of deliberately adopting an enter-
tainment format and dispersing the message without bounds. In doing so the
Pentecostal message is dismembered into mediated religious forms and ele-
ments displayed everywhere in public urban space. The dif¤culty to ensure that
those encountering these elements interpret them in line with Pentecostal un-
derstandings pinpoints that by spreading into the public sphere, religious au-
thority over practices of mediation is, to some extent, undermined (see chap-
ter 3 in this volume). Indeed, it seems that Pentecostalism cannot eschew the
fact that distraction or Zerstreuung, as Samuel Weber (1996, 92ff.) explained in
his re®ection on Benjamin’s use of the much more complex German term, is
intrinsic to mass culture in the age of reproducibility. Simply put, the spread of
Pentecostalism into the public sphere has a cost: it distracts from the genuine
religious experience.

The Camera, Pentecostalism, and
the Production of Vision

In the same way that Pentecostalism increasingly adopts entertainment
features, so, too, does the realm of entertainment thrive parasitically on religion
by representing itself through the format of talk shows on radio and TV and by
employing top musicians in churches. Yet, on an experiential level, devotion and
distraction—church and cinema—do not intermingle smoothly but instead rub
against each other as two separate, albeit ever more entangled spheres. The tran-
sition requires deliberate action: a cinema must always be cleansed both literally
and spiritually—by means of brooms and prayers—before being ¤t for use as a
5
church. This section examines the nexus of Pentecostalism, distraction, and
mass culture by focusing on video ¤lms that are oriented toward Pentecostalism.
The key concern is to show how video ¤lms con¤rm, lay bare, and to some ex-
tent destabilize Pentecostal practices of mediation, and for that matter Protes-
tant practices as well, especially with regard to vision.
In order to understand how the medium of video relates to existing practices
of mediation, it is important to brie®y consider the complicated attitude of
Protestantism toward images and its strong emphasis on the Word, both in the
sense of the written Bible and oral preaching. Of course, it would be a mistake
to take at face value Protestantism’s alleged disregard of the image and icono-

300 Birgit Meyer