Page 79 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

damental to the creation of this new religiosity, based on the transformation of
the image of the poor into individuals who possess the same social and sym-
bolic resources as any other citizen belonging to more favored social groups. The
image of the church as a rich and prosperous institution is built with the images
seen of its followers in the media, principally its pastors. The church has created
a space in the media enabling religious ways of connecting with secular space,
seen as a source of power and prestige. In this context, the media exploit religion
as a pragmatic means of elaborating plans for the future and insertion into the
world. Above all, the Pentecostals appear as being well connected in society and
politics, so that, by re®ection, the followers of this religion move up the social
ladder. 23
This accumulation of social capital is offered through the media as an asset
held by the followers of the UCKG. To be evangelical means to have the right
to join social life in a digni¤ed manner, to participate in a redistributive net-
work of miracles in the social and political spheres. To be an evangelical from
the UCKG therefore implies permanent witnessing of spectacular events and
testimonies. Finally, to be an evangelical in the Universal Church is also to be a
mediator who restores the social links between the poor and the global world
of power and business.

Notes

I am grateful to Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors for their invitation to take part in the
seminar “Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere,” which gave me the opportunity to
write this paper. Their questions were decisive for improving it. My thanks also to Marc
Piault, David Lehmann, and Martijd Maaden, whose combined efforts toward a better
translation were also enlightening and helpful.
1. The UCKG explores the possibilities enabled by electronic media in order to
achieve what Appadurai (1996) calls a “work of imagination,” involving the opening of
new possibilities and new ¤elds where the “self” and its imaginary worlds can be built.
2. There is a reason why Pierre Brechon (2000), analyzing the huge spectacles pro-
moted by the Vatican, such as the “World Youth Meeting,” or the “Pope’s Visit” to Russia,
Kazakhstan, Africa, and so on, refers to these as political-religious events. They cannot
be characterized as “religious” within a “secular” space; rather, they are both simultane-
ously. This double dimension makes it dif¤cult to conceive such events according to any
single interpretative key, whether as “religious” or “political,” or even as local or global,
public or private. And certainly the spectators employ various keys simultaneously to
classify these spectacular events. The multiplicity of feelings and the ®uidity of their
boundaries must be recognized in order to understand them.
3. Talal Asad (1999, 192) suggests: “The categories of politics and religion turn out
to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought, a discovery that has accom-
panied our growing understanding of the powers of the modern nation-state. The con-
cept of secular cannot do without the idea of religion. True, ‘the proper domain of reli-

68 Patricia Birman