Abstract
The central problem with religion and media is that neither works particularly well as an object of study. Both are terms that regularly break free of their tenuous disciplinary bounds and share the troubling tendency of interrupting the categories commonly used to analyze them. When taken together, religion and media do not tame each other but jump fields, blur, and demand a certain flexibility of vocabulary that can keep pace with the dynamic movement of these intertwined areas of inquiry. Our cultural landscapes repeatedly demonstrate the vitality of religious ways of thinking and living in a mediated world and the ways that media shape and inform religion. Some of the most productive recent scholarship insists, in fact, that religion is always mediated or even that religions are themselves media and, likewise, that religious logics cannot be extricated from the way media work (Stolow, 2005). It is the complex and diverse relationships of religion and media that this issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) examines, without any presumption that the terms in relationship will remain or ever were distinct.
Religion and media, when taken together, undermine longstanding academic narratives of a clear separation between public and private, the institutional and the personal, online and offline. The acts of communication that constitute these dichotomies find in the confluence of religion and media a kind of distortion, a kind of play. At times, this leads to scholarly attempts to re-discipline these categories, including attempts to affix the categories of religion and media themselves to firm ground. But approaches that celebrate their vertiginous interfolding, such as the articles in this issue, can offer critical insights into the particular work that religion and media do.
We live in a world in which memes of Rumi’s Sufi poetry circulate as expressions of Christianity, in which worshippers reflexively silence their phones as they bow their heads, in which GPS algorithms divert attention from the temple on the side of the road, and, thus, in which the idea of online and offline as discrete states of being no longer makes much sense. We no longer log in to get online but carry our portals to the Internet in our pockets, and our phones search out Wi-Fi without us, just as our computers ping while we sleep. In this context, the performances of everyday lived religion, while intimate in scale, are rarely personal or private. They are enacted at home while scanning a screen; they are situated in public traditions of race, authority, and resistance; they are shaped by genre conventions; and they are constructed of speech acts that are spoken to oneself and an unseen audience in the same breath.
Leading off the issue with a subject that has attracted considerable recent news coverage is Andrea Terry’s examination of online video confessionals from conservative, Evangelical Christians seeking to repair relations between the church and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community. Terry notes that these videos, hosted by the Marin Foundation and stemming from the “I’m Sorry” campaign, are at once novel forms of online ritual and examples of religious identity articulation and negotiation that refigure private and public. Her article opens new avenues for exploring the ways individual Christians from conservative denominations mediate their responses to conflicting information they receive from acquaintances, their churches, and popular media.
Alexandra Boutros also analyzes digital communication in her contribution to this issue. Linking the study of race and religion, Boutros examines the network of Black bloggers in the “Afrosphere” for the “ideas, images, and signs” that characterize discourses surrounding religious expression. She argues that these narratives form a digital counterculture, or counterpublic, that explores and contests identity categories at the juncture of race and religion. While acknowledging the expanded opportunities for discussion that digital technology affords, Boutros’s study also questions utopian notions of its cultural and political neutrality. Her study attends to important ways in which race and religion refuse a strict border between online and offline.
Like Boutros, Saif Shahin focuses on the intersection of race and religion. His study of two American Muslim periodicals and their respective racial audiences highlights the interplay of religion and race in news media. By “conceptualizing news organizations as reflexive actors with fluid identities and news frames,” he sheds needed light on the mediated process of negotiating a “Muslim” identity with diverse racial affiliations at stake. Importantly, and against “homogeneous, monolithic” representations, Shahin’s article also emphasizes the major differences that exist within Muslim communities in the United States.
Benjamin Burroughs and Gavin Feller focus their analysis on religious memes promoted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). They argue that the use of institutional memes by the LDS church works to maintain ecclesiastic authority while also offering a way for religious adherents to “preserve and build faith online.” Burroughs and Feller note that the fluid notion of online expression, however, provides church members the space to create competing memes that exist in complicated relationships with institutional expressions. The authors examine a variety of LDS memetic expressions ranging from the playfully irreverent to blatantly oppositional “anti-memes” in order to understand not only the role of memes in popular culture but also the “everydayness of religious faith and the increasing articulations of religion in digital contexts.”
Concluding this special issue is an analysis of several anti-Muslim “pseudo-documentaries” by authors Salime Zakia and Arlene Stein. They argue that these videos reflect Richard Hofstadter’s concept of the “paranoid style.” Zakia and Stein suggest that despite outward professions of neutrality and objectivity, a deeper analysis of the political organizations that back the production of these videos and the messages within them reveal a mission to galvanize support against a “global Jihad arrayed against western, liberal values” that poses “a threat to core American values.” The authors point to repeated themes in the films of a “war of survival” and “clash of civilizations” as evidence of an ideological effort to question the compatibility of Islam with democracy and to set Muslim citizens and the United States at odds.
These critical cultural treatments of religion and media are ideally suited for JCI, a journal that stresses the importance of interdisciplinary conversations that break free from traditional academic lines of division. In closing, thanks go out to the many unnamed but greatly appreciated people who work behind the scenes to ensure JCI’s success. These include the JCI advisory and editorial boards, executive editor Gigi Durham, reviewers, and SAGE production staff. This issue, and all the rest, would not be possible without their hard work and dedication.