Abstract
There are two possible ways of presenting this themed issue: the media … and religion, or religion … and the media. We have ‘naturally’ preferred to privilege media as the first term with which to frame the topic, and we start from a socio-cultural perspective on the question of religion. Mediatization theory is a hot topic at the moment and has been much debated in recent issues of this journal. It serves as a useful entry-point into the relationship between the media and religion. In one influential account of this contested term, mediatization is a phenomenon of late 20th-century modernity and is primarily concerned with the impact and effect of the media system (the daily press and broadcasting services) as a central social institution on other key contemporary social institutions (e.g. politics and sport). Stig Hjarvard, the leading proponent of this approach, has examined religion from this perspective and provides a framework for its discussion by the other participants in the panel on the mediatization of religion which opens up this special themed issue. 1 The context of this discussion is particular: all contributors are from northern Europe where Lutheranism is the dominant national religious church. The issues addressed, however, go well beyond this region and its particular institutionalized forms of religion.
The conventional wisdom that religion is in decline, in Europe at least, undermined by a long historic trend toward the secularization of modern societies, is increasingly debatable, as Hjarvard acknowledges. But it is for sure, he argues, that the media are themselves modern, worldly, secular institutions whose overall impact has played a part in that decline. What percolates through the media is a diffuse representation of what, with a nod to Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism, Hjarvard calls banal religion. Not meant as a pejorative term, banal religiosity shows up in countless narratives about angels, demons, the supernatural, and the afterlife which circulate in TV dramas, movies, and best-seller popular novels of which The Da Vinci Code is exemplary. The leakage of the authority of the traditional churches stands in contrast with a diffuse spiritual sensibility in modern societies, the evidence for which is pervasively present in everyday popular culture.
Mia Lövheim’s discussion of media and religion from a gender perspective combines mediatization theory with Jurgen Habermas’ recent engagement with religion in the public sphere and with Joshua Meyrowitz’s classic examination of the impact of television on gender relations in traditional societies where men and women lead largely separate lives and women are confined to the private sphere. It is notoriously the case that woman have, at best, a secondary and at worst a thoroughly marginal role in public religious life in many parts of the world. The media, as Hjarvard neatly puts it, are simultaneously ‘out there’ in the everyday world of public life and affairs and ‘in here’, in the spaces of everyday private and domestic existence. As such, they straddle the spaces of public and private life and create a ‘middle (in-between) region’, Lövheim suggests, that may allow marginalized women to escape the rules and boundaries of traditional religious authority while providing alternative perspectives to that authority.
Knut Lundby and Günter Thomas both address the impact of mediatization on the protestant churches in their respective countries. Lundby’s doctoral thesis, back in 1972, explored the hypothesis that television (then so very new) and radio might be contributing to the increasing secularization of society in the countries of northern Europe. Looking back to then from now, Lundby reflects on the historical dimension of the mediatization thesis (to which he himself has made an important contribution). He notes the declining authority of the Lutheran Church of Norway over the last 40 or more years and concludes that mediatization and secularization are intertwined. The little story he starts and ends with, about the media kerfuffle in 2013 over a TV newsreader wearing a cross around her neck, neatly exemplifies the historical trend his essay traces.
Günter Thomas is a sociologist too, but also a Protestant pastor and theologian, and it is from that perspective that he considers the mediatization of religion in Germany. Mediation is a core concern of any religion that is necessarily concerned with communicating not only with the faithful but also with the Deity. But mediatization is quite distinct from mediation and much newer. It is an aspect of European modernity in which a new non-religious institution (the media system) is able in diverse ways to dispense its non-religious views and interpretations of religion to whole populations. It has usurped the erstwhile central role of organized, institutional religion as society’s ‘social glue’ and ‘sacred canopy’. The Protestant churches of Germany, in recent years, have felt compelled to combine together in order to re-mediatize themselves to fit in with the expectations of the media and win their attention. If all major social institutions have their own ‘logic’, mediatization theory suggests that other institutions (whether secular or religious) are compelled today to adapt theirs to the logic of the media. This, Thomas thinks, is the temptation, seduction, and illusion of the churches in Germany as they succumb to a logic not their own and not necessarily in their own best interest.
Thomas, in his discussion, reverses the initial frame: not religion from the point of view of sociology, but sociology from the point of view of religion. The two articles that follow are also from the ordinary perspective of religiously observant persons and their relationship with media. The pious young Muslim women of Cairo, studied by Heba Elsayed, exhibit what she calls a ‘divine cosmopolitan imagination’. Cosmopolitanism is usually thought of in relation to secular modernity and today, perhaps, invokes a gendered image of a well-traveled man of the world. It is worth remembering that Immanuel Kant, who first proposed the ideal of world citizenship as a key to his great vision of perpetual peace, in the aftermath of two centuries of bloody religious and political conflict (Kant, 1983 [1795]), hardly traveled at all in his life. While it is a myth that he never left his birthplace, Königsberg in East Prussia, the greatest distance he is known to have traveled was no more than a hundred kilometers from home. His was an imagined cosmopolitanism that then, and to this day, remains a wondrous ideal that resonates in the imagination rather than as a political reality. Elsayed’s young women have not been out of Egypt and yet they show a strong reflexive awareness of the world beyond their own society and culture. On one hand, they evaluate American entertainment television from a pious religious perspective, yet, on the other hand, they can, on occasion, use it to critique aspects of their own religion and culture.
It should not be supposed that the Muslim faith lacks a cosmopolitan dimension, as Yasmin Moll makes clear in her response to Elsayed’s article. The faithful are also media users. The Qur’an, the TV set, and social media all provide information about the world. Preachers are popular on television in Egypt and they come in more than one style. The ‘new preachers’ on Arab television that Moll briefly discusses are very different to the conservative Salafists. They draw on Western entertainment genres (music videos, television drama) to present their interpretation of Islam on popular TV channels. Their message incorporates elements of Western cosmopolitan life-styles and their values. It is an open question whether this is, as the Salafists might claim and as Thomas argues in respect of the re-mediatization of the Protestant churches of Germany, a temptation, a seduction, and illusion. But that might be to misunderstand the very meaning of ‘divine cosmopolitanism’, as Tarik Sabry points out in his response to Elsayed’s study. The sacred is a transcendental category, the horizon of all experience (including the profane) for the faithful. It is this dual sacredness, Sabry claims, that the West and its media cannot fathom – this hybridized form of cosmopolitanism, where the holy and the profane are constitutive of a kind of ‘modernness’ in which God, the prophet, and globalized forms of neoliberal popular cultures are all meaningfully sacred. The secular is an element within a divine cosmopolitan imagination. It is not external to it. It is not its negation.
The use of media, more exactly the Internet, for religious purposes by true believers is the theme of Oren Golan and Nurit Stadler’s study of Chabad, a charedi (ultra-orthodox) sect within Judaism. The three great Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have a historic fault-line running through them, an unavoidable tension between the secular (what is Caesar’s) and the sacred (what is God’s). All three have been and remain challenged by the historic impact of world modernization. Orthodox Judaism has tended to regard modern technologies with deep suspicion. In Israel, half a century ago, there was strong resistance to the very idea of introducing television to the ‘people of the book’ on the grounds that it would, inter alia, undermine the observance of the Sabbath. Later, people wondered how the rabbi could be on television if television itself was not kosher. The Chabad movement’s embrace of new technologies of communication is quite distinctive and called for a theology of technology to legitimate it. Many Hasidic groups regard the media old and new as temptations to be avoided, but Chabad web-masters justify the Internet as a gift of God to be used for godly purposes and for the salvation of their own community and others. Their embrace of media is essential for their commitment to missionary outreach, the historic base of the movement going back to the 18th century, to unconverted Jews and indeed even to the Gentiles. Chabad enthusiastically embraced the Internet from the start. In the 1980s, it had a popular bulletin-board called ‘Ask the Rabbi’.
In their commentary on Golan and Stadler’s article, Menahem Blondheim and Elihu Katz address the issues it raises in respect of Jewish communications and, more fundamentally, of the religion and communication nexus as such. They distinguish the fundamental theological question of communication between gods and mortals from the secondary question of the communication and dissemination of divine revelation by and between human beings. The first question concerns interaction between the deities and humanity, the mediation of the divine: how the gods reveal themselves in the first place, and how human beings respond to divine revelation through sacrifice, prayer, and other expressive and communicative actions. Preserving the truth of revelation through deep time and disseminating it through space is the second communicative concern of the mediation of religion. It had become doubly problematic for the historically dispersed Jewish people by the 18th century of the Common Era. Communities were widely scattered and religious observance had become sclerotic. The Hasidic movement, which came out of Eastern Europe, had a double impulse: to renew a direct and fervent connection with God, underpinned by a charismatic emphasis on personal experience, emotions, and spontaneity as well as prophecy and preaching. And, inseparable from this, there was the imperative need to communicate this renewal by all modern means to the scattered communities. The Chabad movement, from its beginnings and to this day, has placed a special emphasis on this second dimension of mediated religious communication.
Michael Naas’ essay 2 on Jacques Derrida’s late thoughts on religion and mediatization (not in the sense of current sociological debates about its meaning) provides an appropriate conclusion to this themed issue. Derrida (a Sephardic Jew born in Algeria) has audaciously suggested that of the three Abrahamic faiths, only Christianity properly deserves to be called a religion, a claim that hinges on his interpretation of the Genesis story of the sacrifice of Isaac that Yahweh (the God of Israel) demands of his father, Abraham. God says to Abraham, as Derrida puts it, ‘Above all, no journalists! This is a secret between us and must remain so’. That is to say, no publicity, no media, no mediatization. In this interpretation of the troublesome, enigmatic story of the sacrifice of Isaac, Derrida sees the essence of Judaism as a secret covenant between God and His chosen people. He admits to a personal preference, ‘a taste’, for the secret and uses it to pinpoint Judaism’s difference from Christianity with its commitment to spreading the gospel (the good news). Christianity is committed to the widest publicity, dissemination, and mediatization of ‘the Word’. Mediatization is distinctively Christian, Derrida thinks, and it has an intrinsic relationship with media and globalization, captured by his clunky coinage globalatinization. Only Christianity makes the claim of universal truth for its message and is thereby uniquely committed to its globalization and mediatization as the means to that end. Christianity, for Derrida, was ultimately made for television. The most fascinating thing about television is its power of fascination; ‘the power’, as Naas puts it, ‘of a simulacrum that appears to give access to the thing itself – to real presence – without technical intervention or mediation, a power that persists even when one is vigilant and able to submit the televisual image to critique’. Real presence underpins live television broadcasting. When the papal Easter blessing began to be broadcast on television in the 1970s, the question arose as to whether viewers were blessed like those present in Vatican square. The answer was ‘yes, if you watched it live and no, if you watched a recording (Rath, 1988).
Derrida’s reflections on television, modernity, and religion complicate European modernity’s own self-understanding. In the ideological wars of the 18th century between the old and the new, the modernist claim to enlightenment invoked a secular politics and scientific knowledge to sweep away the cobwebs of authoritarianism, irrationalism, and religious superstition. But in key respects, enlightenment thinking was a desacralized extension of the distinctive ‘whole-world’ view, underpinned by universalism and cosmopolitanism, of 2000 years of Christian thought and teaching as Alain Badiou (1997), for instance, has acknowledged from a resolutely laicized perspective. This world-view, succinctly expressed in Kant’s famous philosophical sketch, written in 1794, of the necessary pre-conditions for perpetual peace between nations, carries over to this day as part of the taken-for-granted common-sense of modern, secular thinking shorn of its theological and other-worldly elements. Maybe, as Tarik Sabry suggests, Bruno Latour is right and we have never been modern.