Page 319 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

on certain techniques to mediate the invisibility of Christianity so as to make
others believe, there is strictly no difference between miracles and camera-
produced effects, between revelations in church services and those in ¤lms, be-
tween believers and spectators. That believers at times lament the blurring of
the boundaries between the two further testi¤es to the extent to which the
spheres of religion and entertainment are intertwined. In this sense video ¤lms
lay bare the operation of Pentecostal mediation, with its emphasis on vision and
spectacle (see chapter 2 in this volume). Moreover, that video technology is ex-
tremely suitable in bringing out the techniques that constitute the act of look-
ing in Pentecostal circles suggests that Pentecostalism thrives on a cinemato-
graphic mode of representation. The linkage, therefore, between Pentecostal
vision and video ¤lms is by no means coincidental but is implied and even, I
dare say, pre¤gured in Pentecostal practices of mediation.

In this essay I have tried to show how, by understanding religion as a prac-
tice of mediation, Pentecostalism has increasingly “taken place” in the public
sphere as a result of Ghana’s turn to democracy, and the liberalization and
commercialization of the media. Relatively undisturbed by the state, but all the
more indebted to the emerging image economy, Pentecostalism has spread into
the public sphere, disseminating signs and adopting formats not entirely of its
own making and, in the process, has been taken up by popular culture. In the
entanglement of religion and entertainment, new horizons of social experience
have emerged, thriving on fantasy and vision and popularizing a certain mood
oriented toward Pentecostalism. This movement of spatial extension, as I have
tried to show, is criticized at times from within, as pastors and believers fear
losing control.
Yet, that distraction and devotion are to be kept apart on the experiential level
cannot be used in defense of a strict difference between cinema and church,
entertainment and religion. At the same time it would be too simplistic just to
write off, as mere entertainment, the public appearance of images derived from
Pentecostalism, as if the entertainment format could completely absorb the re-
ligious and, in a sense, put an end to religion. The point is that, in Ghana, Pen-
tecostalism is alive and kicking precisely because it casts religion in a new (post-
modern?) form (cf. Martin 2002), a form geared to mass spectatorship and one
intrinsic to distraction in the sense of Zerstreuung. Zerstreuung refers here to
“the dispersed, centrifugal structure of mass phenomena” (Weber 1996, 94)
which, as Benjamin (1978) showed, is condensed in the technology of ¤lm as it
blows apart the prison of metropolitan space by “the dynamite of the tenth of
a second” (236) and offers adventurous traveling among the ruins, putting to-
gether its images under new laws, laws that require novel ways of reception that
parallel the process of recording (indeed, in German, both processes are de-
scribed as Aufnahme).
The lament that devotion is opposed to distraction pinpoints the sense of
loss evoked by the alleged impossibility of truthful representation, which is part
and parcel of religious mediation, whether in a church or in the cinema. This

308 Birgit Meyer