Religion and media: A critical review of recent developments

Abstract

This article considers recent changes in the definition of religion and of media as the basis for framing the study of their relation to one another and recent research in the intersection they have come to form over the last two decades or so. The history, materiality, and reception of each have colored scholarly work, and made ethnography, practice, material culture, and embodiment key aspects of scholarship. A new paradigm for some scholars for studying mediation is aesthetics—no longer understood as the “philosophy of the beautiful,” but as the study of perception in the mediated practices that make up lived religion.

Keywords

aesthetics materiality mediation

Definitions of religion and of media have undergone broad changes among scholars over the last generation. Religion has come to be widely understood as embodied practices that cultivate relations among people, places, and non-human forces—nature, spirits, ancestors, saints, gods—resulting in communities and sensibilities that shape those who participate. This departs from an older framework in which religions were defined as systems of ideas to which believers assented (Hoover, 2006: 45−83; Lopez, 1998; Lynch, 2007, 2012; Orsi, 2005; Zito, 2008).

By the same token, media have come to be understood as technologies of sensation, as embodied forms of participation in extended communities joined in imagination, feeling, taste, affinity, and affect (De Vries and Weber, 2001; Hoover, 2006; Hoover and Lundby, 1997; Meyer, 2012; Stolow, 2005, 2013). This approach clearly departs from an older definition of media as channels for targeting receivers with the delivery of messages in order to shape opinion or achieve certain effects. The reasons for the shift in each province of inquiry are noteworthy and important, but I should like to begin by observing that their striking analogy to one another has meant a synthesis of religion and media as a subfield in each domain. I want to make the observation, but also to consider the topography produced by the work occupying this intersection of two older fields of study.

Religious studies and media studies as academic fields are not themselves so very old, of course, but each rests on identifiable cultural artifacts as an empirical basis for identifying the sort of thing they do. One studies religions, comparing them, tracing their histories, analyzing their ideologies, politics, and rites, with a strong legacy of attending to theologies or the rationale of beliefs. The other studies media, focusing on histories punctuated by technological domination and change, political control, and commercial exploitation, with a strong traditional emphasis on the content and effect of individual mediums. Once again, the analogy of the two discourses is striking, and yet the two have spent much of their history ignoring one another.

This is especially ironic in the case of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, where sacred texts dominate the intelligentsia of each tradition, and philology has often been its obsession. One might think that theologians and scholars preoccupied with words, steeped in manuscripts and books, would have spent more time thinking about the mediation of the religions they study. But in every case, for believers and unbelievers alike, it was the ideas that mattered, the immaterial substance hovering above pages and ink, which was taken to exist really only in minds and souls, having originated as ideas in the deity’s mind or spirit. Mind, like soul, is not a very material conception. Add to this a strong relegation of technology, media production, and in the ancient world, even the act of writing to lower echelons, to the work of artisans, mechanics, craftsman, and slaves, and the result is a long tradition of spiritualizing ideas. This way of thinking has endorsed a dualism of material medium and spiritual ideas that replicates the prevailing ontologies of the three so-called religions of the book.

This should not be surprising in religions whose divinities speak in particular languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic—which practitioners assume have passed seamlessly into written words that are regarded by adherents as the definitive, authoritative medium of the deity’s self-revelation. In fact, we might wish for a recovery of the uttering god, the aspirating, reverberating, articulating deity whose breath moves through sounds and the sharp diction of idiomatic utterances. If we did, we would take one important step toward materializing and embodying traditions that at certain points in their respective histories found it compelling to shift from the performative aspect of divine speech to the textuality of script, when the scribal word replaced the ritual word and the definition of religion shifted from rite and hierarchy and the local culture of authority to the scholastic rigors of learning, editing, canonizing, and polemicizing. This is a cultural turn when Paul edged out Peter, when the epistle trumped circumcision in the definition of Christianity, and in Judaism when the Temple’s ruin was followed by the rise of Rabbinic Midrash and the Talmud. The turn from orality to textuality shaped the study of religion for a very long time—and, indeed, was the very origin of the modern academy. Only in the last several decades have scholars insisted on discerning—even in the most textual practices—the traces of embodiment, of breath, of hand, of posture, of somatic registration. Reading and writing are body practices with spiritual and other consequences (Griffiths, 1999; Horsfield, 2013; Kittler, 2010: 54−88; Ong, 1982: 78−138; Peters, 1999). Recent work on various aspects of the language and textualities of the three religions has focused critical attention on oral and inscribed aspects of mediation (Coleman, 2000; Hofmeyr, 2004; Horsfield, 2013; Moosa, 2006; Stolow, 2010; Stordalen, 2013).

For its part, media studies has happily presumed that religion expired somewhere between the French Revolution and Marxism’s dismissal of religion as the opiate of the masses, a largely inert pacifier that was no match for more interesting distractions such as entertainment media. Secularization was supposed to mean that the nasty incursion of religion into public life would be no more and that the secular state, safely insulated from ecclesiastical control, would arise. Disestablishment happened, to be sure, but religion did not go away. There are far fewer practicing Christians in Europe today, but growing numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists in London, Birmingham, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg. Indebted to Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, media studies still by and large embraces the secularization thesis. You will not find many religion scholars housed in media studies departments. You will need to walk across campus to find them, and they may very likely give you an odd look when you knock on their doors and ask to be admitted to their seminars on Augustine or Paul or the Caliphate or the Babylonian Talmud. However, if you look carefully, you can find a growing number of seminars on “Religion and Media,” “Religion in the Public Sphere,” “Digital Religion,” and the “Material Culture of Religions,” where inherently interdisciplinary studies of what Jeremy Stolow (2005: 125) has aptly termed “religion as media” are quietly charting out an encounter of two neighbors who are only just meeting.

The turn toward recognizing the intimate and longstanding, even immemorial, interconnectedness of religion and media under the broad heading of “mediation” has been stressed by anthropologist Birgit Meyer, who has championed the recovery of the senses in the study of religion, especially in regard to media. In what she calls “sensational forms,” Meyer argues that religious images, dress, characteristic spaces, routines, and practices tend to “structure experiences of the transcendental” (2006: 20). The “condensation of practices, attitudes, and ideas” shapes what people feel, sense, and imagine, but it is not a rigid determination because the structure or form of sensation is open to change and historical development. The idea recalls Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus as the production of second natures. A habitus is not a Platonic archetype, but “history turned into practice” (Bourdieu, 1977: 78)—“dispositions” that “function as structuring structures… without in any way being the product of obedience to rules” (1977: 72). However, rather than engaging in structuralist analysis, Meyer relies on ethnography. Nor does she ground her study in the scrutiny of properties inherent to one medium or another, nor to the aims of producers or the effects of media on consumers. It is the actions of those experiencing media that intrigue Meyer. The form in question is embedded in the bodies of practitioners, the condensation of long experience, best understood as a disposition or sensibility—a shared form of practice that allows people to collectively and individually perform their identity.

Among scholars principally interested in new media and audience and effects studies, attention to the history of media has often suffered, leading to a kind of infectious cult of the new. But a steady stream of research over the last two decades demonstrates the interest, range, and availability of historical work (Burke Smith, 2010; Hangen, 2002; Hofmeyr, 2004; Lundby, 2013; Morgan, 2007, 2008: 1−19; Nord, 2004; Peters, 1999; Rosenthal, 2007; Sloan, 2000; Stolow, 2013; Sweet, 1993). Ethnographically informed accounts enliven our sense of lived religion and mediated practices, and helpfully shift from the traditional emphases on media production to reception (Coleman, 2000; Hoover, 2006; Morgan, 1998; Schofield Clark, 2003). However, a fulsome understanding of mediation will insist on the temporality of habitus and the formation of sensory dispositions over time. New media always happen within existing ecologies, relying for their effect and appeal on the patterns they change and the attitudes and interests they challenge. The agony of learning a new software, the congregation’s unease with liturgical reform, the threat of radio, television, and cell phones to certain traditional authorities, the annoyance of teenage texting—all of these are somatic disturbances, disruptions to the inherited aesthetic of foregoing mediations. The historicity of mediation could not be more embodied and salient, and the dense interweaving, even virtual identity, of religion and mediation should not be missed. Take away a Lutheran’s hymnal, an Orthodox Jew’s tefellin, an Evangelical’s dog-eared bible, a Catholic’s rosary, a Hindu’s inscription of a yantra and you numb the sensation of their religions.

Some helpful work on aspects of mediated embodiment stands out (Connerton, 1989: 72−104; De Witte, 2013; Lövheim, 2013; Sobchack, 2004), but more is needed. One feature of embodiment that has begun to receive attention is affect and emotion, and for good reason (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Scheer, 2012). The human brain codes memory formation as well as all forms of sensation with feelings or emotions. Look at the world and you will not see only beings, things, and places, but all of these rendered in the stark and subtle colors of fear, anger, tenderness, resentment, hope, desire, and esteem. We file and retrieve memory traces with emotion; and we forget with emotions, repressing the unpleasant, overlooking the bothersome, ignoring the unclean, deviant, or impure. We magnify the tiny and conceal the colossal with feelings of disdain and dread. These processes are so fundamental to the economies of perception and memory that religion without emotion is not religion. Mediation is how feelings are packaged and deposited, remembered and rehearsed, shared and broadcast, transmitted and ritualized. Feeling is a complex array of coding, characterizing, classifying, clouding, and obliterating in the affective technologies of mediation.

Everything I have said so far has underscored the major thematic of mediation. This has become an important idea over the last decades because of the greater attention given to the understanding of the related terms media and medium since McLuhan (Eisenlohr, 2009; Engelke, 2010; Meyrowitz, 1985; Stolow, 2005). In some sense, “media” has been a problematic term since it came during the first half of the twentieth century to refer to the mass-media of broadcast entertainment and journalism, fueled by the industry of commercial media production, its government regulation, and the left wing’s disdain for it as a tool of social control or aesthetic and moral impoverishment (Ewen, 1988; Hendershot, 2011; Rosenthal, 2007). Of course, broadcast and print journalism and entertainment remain important and active domains of research (Buddenbaum, 1998; Lundby, 2009; Silk, 1995; Sumiala-Seppänen et al., 2006; Winston, 2009, 2012), and not only because media production and regulation as well as journalism are big business. They are also powerful ideological formations that have shaped modernity at a fundamental level. The study of film and religion (Dwyer, 2006; Lindvall and Quicke, 2011; Mitchell and Plate, 2007) and even more recently of religion and digital media has built importantly on the longstanding interest in mass-mediated forms of religiosity (Campbell, 2010; Helland, 2005; Howard, 2011). Interest in mass-mediated communication inevitably raises the important issue of consumption and commerce, which have received able attention from several authors (Einstein, 2008; Hendershot, 2004; Schofield Clark, 2007).

If “media” has tended to refer to the production and regulation of commercial instruments, “mediation” has taken up a different discursive focus, largely through the impact of anthropology, ethnography, religious studies, and cultural studies. This is not hard to understand. It has come to seem impossible to study religion as culture without studying its mediations—textualities, spaces, gender, foods, dress, movements, sounds, and forms of embodiment. As a result, some scholars have looked for help to a re-conception of aesthetics. Several have suggested this in recent years, but the project remains incomplete (Coleman, 2000: 143−165; Meyer, 2006; Meyer and Verrips, 2008; Morgan, 1998: 26−34; Pinney and Thomas, 2001). Traditionally understood as the “philosophy of the beautiful,” aesthetics might be pushed in a different direction, one closer to the term’s original meaning in the eighteenth century: the study of artistic perception as a form of cognition. A great deal of work on embodiment, film, and art has relied on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962), and to good effect. Recent studies of mobility and media are making further use of phenomenology (Büscher et al., 2011), and work on sensory ethnography has made important use of phenomenology (Pink, 2009), but the productive application of phenomenology to religion and media aesthetics remains for future work.

In the manuscript on which he was working at the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty described the chiastic relation of the body as sensible and the body as sentient (1968: 137−138), and asserted that “the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication” (135). This suggests that consciousness itself is a form of mediation in which the body, or the flesh, as Merleau-Ponty put it, connects the invisible, the sensing body, to the visible, the felt object—and this intimacy is the way in which some have sought to define both media and technology. McLuhan has been criticized for confusing media and technology in just this way, but when we regard embodiment itself as both, the slippage is understandable. McLuhan defined media (or media technologies) as extensions of human being—human bodies, social bodies, and the various conceptions of what a human being is (McLuhan, 1964: 21, 70).

We need not share McLuhan’s sensational view of contemporary media or the view that all cultural change is driven by technological change to recognize that technologies mediate the body and the world around us, and that religions, like every other cultural activity, are and always have been mediated in some way. The pay-off of this recognition is that technologies of sensation structure the felt-life of a religion, telling us much about how people build and maintain their worlds, and what roles religions play in the ongoing work of cultural construction. This has been variously explored in a new volume edited by Stolow (2013), which shows that we are in a position now to dismantle the conceptual distinction between body and technology in order to develop the idea of mediation. Though variously defined (Hoover and Lundby, 1997: 298−309; Meyer, 2012: 23−31; Morgan, 2011: 138−140; Stout, 2012: 30), the term may be best described as any practice of communication that intermingles the body with the world around it such that modes of embodiment become the measure of what people claim to know or feel as true. The debt to phenomenology is obvious. A few examples will signal how broadly I intend this view of mediation: dressing in clothing specially suited to an occasion that would not be the same without appropriate dress; ritualized gesture in worship that is a fundamental ingredient in the efficacy of the ritual; eating food at holiday events that helps create the experience of the holiday; reciting scripture whose intonation infuses it with solemnity and power; and gazing at sacred images in ways that constitute a religious form of address and relation. Each of these instances means adapting one’s body (of which the mind is an integral part) to the circumstance of an experience in time and space, creating a form of presence that shapes one’s relation to self and other, past and future. Each of these actions grasps what we experience as real, both shaping us and shaping the world about us. By understanding how media do this, we move closer to understanding how religions work as complex forms of communication.

Describing how this happens, accounting for the role of the body in human interaction has been a major concern of social science over the past century and more. Durkheim classically described one dominant theory of the ritual construction of society, achieved, he argued, by the repeated staging of collective effervescence, which was invested in myth, totem, and symbol in order to preserve the rite and enable repeated access to its constructive energies. Media theorists have endorsed and argued with Durkheim on this. Dayan and Katz (1992) developed an influential account of the “media event” as an instance of Durkheimian functionalism’s quest for social solidarity. Figuring out how modern societies, especially democratic societies, continue to cohere without the coercive forces of monarchies, social castes, and strong ecclesiastical structures has occupied social and political theorists since the seventeenth century. Nationalism, the public sphere, racial ideology, economic self-interest, social contract theory, and accounts of the moral economy of sympathy have been among the many explanations offered to account for society’s resistance to entropy.

Where are media and religion in this? The power of media pervades most accounts of the maintenance of public and republic. Propaganda and instrumentalist media, for example, have been studied as sources of cohesion. Advertising, political communication, public schools, public relations, and journalism have been adduced as the occasions and media for making citizens who reproduce social order rather than tear it down. Religion has often been ignored by those who espouse the ideal of secularization. The intertwining legacies of the Enlightenment, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber certainly encouraged social analysts to regard modernity as disenchanted, devoid of religion, God, and the transcendent. Yet since the 1990s, scholars have increasingly recognized the persistence of all kinds of religions, including patriotic traditional religions like Christianity, but also the modern cult of nationalism and the collectivist rites of civil religion mediated in print, radio, and television as well as in parades, mass movements, flags, totemic personalities and culture heroes, and political organizing. The rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, eventuated by Roe v. Wade and the trajectory of Ronald Reagan in the United States, could not have commanded the career it did without television and radio (Hoover, 1988); and the production of books, music, videos, and films that followed expanded Evangelicalism’s national ambitions by appealing to consumers (Hendershot, 2004). The social and political careers of media elsewhere in the world have received important scrutiny for their religious significance. For instance, Pentecostalism and the so-called “prosperity gospel” in West Africa have made aggressive use of television, radio, billboards, and bumper stickers (Chiluwa, 2008; Ukah, 2008); Charles Hirschkind has studied the importance of cassette tapes in practices of listening in Egypt (2006); Arvind Rajagopal has considered the place of television in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India (2001); and Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley (1995) assembled a useful volume of essays on religion, media, and social change in India.

Religion, mediated religion, is everywhere, but critics of functionalism’s emphasis on social cohesion (Couldry, 2003; Sumiala, 2013: 27−30) have urged that media rituals are less responsible for that than are expanded incarceration, law enforcement, a mushrooming security apparatus, and militarization, and that cohesion itself is not all that evident in light of transnational flows, population migrations (forced or otherwise), ethnic cleansing, civil wars, and social unrest. The role of media in promoting this strife and violence has not been lost on some media scholars (Hackett, 2006; Mitchell, 2012). Nick Couldry has argued for recovering another reading of Durkheim, one that stresses the cognitive rather than emotive side of Durkheim’s study of ritual, urging that such scrutiny of “everyday practices of categorisation… captures the pervasiveness of the structural links between media rituals and social life” (Couldry, 2003: 8). In other words, we stand to learn more about how people actually map their worlds by means of media practices than we do from their emotional evocation of a mythic social center.

Yet one wonders if it is necessary to exclude one or the other approach because people use media to do both—to feel and think about the worlds which are both imagined and real, felt, and conceptually parsed. Certainly any map of social structure will have much to say simultaneously about borders and center, real or perceived. A full-bodied aesthetic analysis of religious mediation will direct its attention to both emotive and cognitive because perception and imagination are always already both affect and ratiocination. Scrutinizing the aesthetics of religious mediation will define cognition in broader terms in order to discern the social life of religions as a diversely mediated phenomenon.

Aesthetics has traditionally belonged to the domain of philosophers, art theorists, and literary critics. However, redeployed to study the role of embodiment in the mediation of thought and feeling associated with religions, aesthetics will need to become part of a much more interdisciplinary project. The study of religion and media over the last two decades has proved to be just that. To date, no single discipline has emerged as dominant, which goes far to account for the vitality of the discourse. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, critical theorists, and scholars in media studies, religious studies, and cultural studies mix freely at conferences and symposia dedicated to the topic of religion and media. Judging from the many events hosted by international centers of activity in Boulder, New York, São Paulo, Jyväskylä, Sigtuna, Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Utrecht, and Amsterdam, among others, the willingness to speak across the boundaries of academic fields and disciplines is generous and productive. Yet the welcome diversity of methods and conceptual frameworks can also discourage critical rigor and integrative study. Presentations at the conferences are often remarkably uneven. Much of the work is under-theorized and devoted to celebrating the novelty of the latest media technology, and there is little sense about what it might all add up to.

Yet a series of conferences has worked to create a forum for scholarly exchange, which has led to the formation of the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture, Inc., which seeks to professionalize the field as part of the landscape of formal academic associations. However, for the many scholars committed to their established disciplines and not interested in creating a new one, the more compelling strategy for making an intellectual difference may be to affect the dominant structures of academic teaching and research within their own disciplines by drawing on interdisciplinary research and collaboration with colleagues in other academic fields. If that is the case, we may be witnessing a gradual differentiation. On the one hand are those who operate under the broad canopy of “media and religion,” which they take to be the intersection of two otherwise distinct realms—for example, journalism and religion, ecclesiastical authority and popular culture, the mediatization of traditional religion (Lundby, 2009). On the other hand are those scholars whose focus is better served by the more pointed nomenclature of “religious mediation,” which they understand not as a discrete field of inquiry, but as a fundamental aspect of the religious worlds they study (Meyer, 2012).

Footnotes

Author biography

David Morgan is Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Duke University, NC. Author of The Embodied Eye (2012), The Lure of Images (2007), The Sacred Gaze (2005), Protestants and Pictures (1999), and Visual Piety (1998), Morgan has also edited Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture (2008) and Religious Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (2010). He is an editor of the journal Material Religion and co-editor of a book series at Routledge entitled ‘Religion, Media, Culture.’

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