The Media, Culture, and Religion Perspective: discovering a theory and methodology for studying media and religion.

White, Robert A.

1. Introduction

The cultural studies analysis of the media has now become a dominant paradigm of communication research, and the "Media, Religion, and Culture" focus is a central paradigm in research on religious media. For example, the biannual international conference on "Media, Religion, and Culture" usually draws from 300 to 600 people from around the world, virtually all carrying on research on media and religion from a cultural studies perspective. The cultural studies approach recognizes the importance of so-called "administrative research" used by broadcasters to measure the reach and effectiveness of programming, but argues that quantitative effects research really does not answer the central questions of religious media.

Religion is a personal response, seeking meaning in life and in one's universe. Religious expression is generally found within institutional religion, but the formal creed, rituals, devotions, and moral codes do not exhaust the personal experience of religion. The central question of the cultural studies approach is concerned with how individuals in groups use media to construct religious meaning in life and how this religious meaning relates to many other aspects of human life. This approach typically draws its theories and methodologies, not from psychology, functionalist sociology, or quantitative analysis, but from cultural anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, drama, and history. The methods of research are no less rigorous, but these are much closer to a tradition of humanities than to behavioral sciences

Until the 1970s virtually all research on media and religion was attempting to answer the questions of religious broadcasters as to what effects they were having. Most religious programs claimed to be having large audiences-impressed with what one can do with the media compared to the Sunday sermon-and they generally claimed to be "converting " many people. Others were skeptical, and the research was brought in to settle this kind of dispute. Gradually, however, researchers moved away from these "effects" questions to how people are creating meaning from media ... and many other sources. How and why did this move to a new set of questions in research on religious media come about? The present essay will explore this question.

A. Effects studies-background

From the time the 1920s-era Payne Studies concluded that the "impact" of film depended very much on family background, the subjective cultural background, and other factors influencing the subjective interpretation of the meaning of the film (in Rowland, 1983, pp. 92-99), media researchers felt that they had to use quantitative, objective methods to show the positive or negative effects of media in order to get action by governments or other public institutions. One of the typical examples was the attempt to devise an "objective" measuring scale of violent content which rated violence from the low point on the scale of a heated discussion to the high point of a bloody murder. The researchers then attempted to show a direct correlation between the level of violent content and aggressive behavior of audiences. Coders were instructed to mark exactly what they heard or saw whether it was a Bugs Bunny cartoon for children or a portrayal of the life of Christ. Not surprisingly, humorous children's cartoons, where rabbits, pigs, and ducks were continually getting smashed about came out as horribly violent. If the quantitative interpretation of violence that some social scientists proposed were applied to the media, there obviously would be no further presentation of great works of art such as Shakespeare and even the presentation of the Bible would be questionable.

What soon became evident is that the meaning construction placed on a scene or particular action can vary a great deal (Newcomb, 1978). The portrayal of the crucifixion of Jesus can be seen as sickeningly offensive or as a beautiful sign of enormous love depending on the meaning that the beholder places on this. There might be wide agreement that the portrayal of explicit sexual relations is repugnant and morally offensive for many different reasons based on many different meanings. But in every case it is important to know the meaning not just for different audiences but for the writer, the producer, the actors, and a host of others who are involved in some way with producing something that does have meaning (Newcomb, 1978, pp. 279-280).

It also became apparent that although the official practices of a religious tradition might define a devotion or action as religious, adherents of the religious tradition might have their own unique interpretations of the official practices and might have experiences which are generally consonant with the theological norms of the tradition but are completely unique for a given person.

B. Trying to find the "definitive" proof of effects of religious broadcasts

With the advent of television in the 1950s, religious television stars in the U.S., such as the evangelist Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen, began to gain top audience ratings. The mainline Protestant churches felt that they were losing out and wondered if they could not find a Bishop Sheen in the Anglican or Methodist Church. There began to be considerable discussion of whether religious television personalities were really having a significant lasting impact, whether this was drawing people away from worship in the local churches, whether it appealed to young people, and other similar questions. In 1951 the National Council of Churches in the United States funded a major study of the "effectiveness of television" as a tool of evangelization. The director of the study was one of the great personalities of U.S. religious broadcasting, Everett Parker, and the team included Dallas Smythe, who later became one of the leaders in the critical cultural studies school.

Guided by August Hollingshead, one of the top sociologists in the U.S., the study employed the best current sociological tools and behaviorist social psychological models. It remains one of the classics of research on religious media, but, unfortunately, the authors themselves suggest that their methodology raised more questions than provided answers. The study confirmed what many other surveys had indicated and others would indicate: that the main users of religious broadcasting tended to be lower status, with less education, more likely to be women and more likely to be elderly. The major conclusion was couched in terms of the behaviorist psychology model, namely, that following religious broadcasts "reduced anxiety" (Parker, Barry, & Smythe, 1955, p. 405). The researchers admitted that they discovered that their methodology (behavioral psychology and effects models) was too limited to answer the real questions of the study, even in the simplest terms (Parker, Barry, & Smythe, 1955, p. 395). The study did not reveal whether users of these programs become more religious, more moral, closer to their local churches, or more inspired to be involved in work with needy people. The results could say little about the relation of the broadcasts to general belief systems. These are questions which deal with meaning.

One must recognize that the researchers were using the available tools at hand in 1950. This was before the development of the sociology and anthropology of religion, before the major empirical work of Stark and Glock (1968) in the U.S., before the great theoretical advances of sociologists of religion such as Peter Berger (1969) and Thomas Luckmann (1967) or of David Martin (1969; 1980) and Bryan Wilson (1982) in Britain and a host of other major theorists in Europe. It even predated the development of "parish sociology" (Fichter, 1954). The 1960s, however, brought a major shift in the focus of the human sciences and in the emerging field of mass communication research in particular.

C. The shift from a media effects paradigm to recognition of the importance of the cultural context of media use

In the late 1940s Joseph Klapper, for many years head of the research department at CBS and close associate of Paul Lazarsfeld, did a definitive analysis (his doctoral thesis) of just what kind of effects one could expect from broadcasting. The surprising result of this analysis of hundreds of studies of media effects was that not a single study proved that the media had the powerful direct effects that broadcasters expected. The landmark book revealed that the influence of media is always limited by the subjective social context, knowledge, attitudes, motivation, and interpretation of the receiver (Klapper, 1965). This suggested that broadcasters had to take into consideration the motivations, interests, enjoyments, cultural values, and the subculture of the particular audience that they sought.

Klapper and others suggested that a better approach to audience analysis was not effects research but what came to be known as uses and gratification studies (Dennis & Wartella, 1996, p. 24). The central question was not what media did to people but what people did with the media. Peter Horsfield, in his comprehensive survey of the research on audiences of religious media in the early 1980s, found many doctoral theses and other research on religious broadcasting in the 1960s and 1970s using the uses and gratifications approach to document the now well-known patterns of religious media use (Horsfield, 1984, pp. 118-124).

Another major influence was Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964) which argued that the most significant impact of media was not on individual psychology but on whole cultures and societies. McLuhan came to media studies from literary analysis which stressed the activity of the person in reading and interpreting a text. Different media touched different senses-the ear, the eyes, the whole consciousness-and the person responded by constructing the meaning of the text according to the major sense influence, thereby producing an "oral culture" or a "visual culture." The perspective of McLuhan and his student, Walter Ong, S.J., (1982), also helped to shift interest of religious communicators from broadcast effects to the interaction of a medium and religious cultural movements.

Berger and Luckmann, in their work on The Social Construction of Reality (1967) shifted the focus away from the systemic functionalism of Parsons which made the person the result of systemic forces at the intersection of the social system, the personality system, and the economic system. The new focus made the starting point culture, defined now more cognitively as a system of meanings produced by persons in interaction. All this was part of the great personalist movement in the late 1960s, inspired by thinkers such as Marcuse (1968) who emphasized the importance of responding to one's own identity and creativity, thereby rejecting conformity to powerful social controls. The counter-cultural movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s rejected the subjection of one's life to the mobilization of industrialization and mass consumption. All this called into question the use of media for religious persuasion and manipulation. There was awakened interest in the use of media as a context for discovering personal religious values, religious cultural identity, and an active faith expression.

D. The movements of "education for critical use of the media"

In the 1950s the dominant idea of the Church's use of the media was still a powerful, dramatic speaker using a persuasive rhetoric to convert audiences to a deeper religious practice. The logic of religious broadcasts was not much different from political campaigns, advertising, or radio talks. In the 1960s, however, there was a growing critique, especially in the churches, of the harmful effects on faith and morals of the manipulation of sex, violence, advertising, and other forms of increasingly commercial "hard sell" media. This set in motion a series of efforts to introduce "media education" which assumed that the audience was not simply a passive receiver of message effects. Audiences can be critical and have their own ideas about the media. Media education encouraged people to carefully select media use according to their personal values and to use these media to deepen one's value commitments. Media education has varied in its focus from a defensive view of media as highly manipulative to an appreciation of our benignly banal popular culture, but most approaches seek to strengthen the use of media from the perspective of one's own active interpretation and one's own cultural identity.

A more important contribution, in many ways, was the movement of education for freedom which emerged in the countries of the South, especially in Latin America.

The churches in Latin America, India, Asia, and Africa began a process of education of the rural and urban poor with a general educational philosophy of helping the poor and marginal form grassroots, participatory organizations to solve their own problems. These efforts incorporated the educational methods of Paulo Freire (1990a; 1990b), Badal Sircar's concepts of popular theater in India (1978) and many other popular movements. In many ways this changed the perspective on religious broadcasting and research on religious broadcasting, in large part because this emphasis was adopted by international associations of religious broadcasting such as UNDA (now SIGNIS) and The World Association for Christian Communication (WACC).

First, these educational methods stressed not just new production techniques but the affirmation and promotion of the popular cultures. The media, especially small media such as group communication, popular theater, and people's radio, were the sites where the poor and marginal could develop their cultural identity. Second, these methods saw as the reasons for poverty and oppression the passive dependence on the hegemonic culture which imposes a self-concept of "natural inferiority" and need to depend on the governing elites. Third, in the face of globalization of cultures, it is necessary for the poor and marginal to have their own media and to actively produce their own cultures. Thus, the concept of culture became central in religious broadcasting and in research on religious broadcasting

Another very important emphasis coming from education for liberation was to develop the sense of dignity, creativity and freedom of the person through dialogue in community. These movements were far more aware of the dehumanization that comes from the concentration of power in societies and the use of media to impose that power. The ideal form of communication was a communitarian, participatory, dialogical communication, and this ideal became a central ethical and theological principle in the media, religion, and culture perspective. This value position led many doing research on religious broadcasting toward theories and research methods of "cultural studies," with its different variants in the United States and in Latin America.

2. The cultural studies approach

Media studies began in the 1930s and 1940s in the U.S. There was virtually no communication research in Europe, at the time enveloped in total war. After World War II Europe began its own approaches to social studies and media. Public service broadcasting systems in Europe were much more concerned with national cultural integration and with the cultural quality of broadcasting. These systems did not need to establish the effectiveness of advertising as did the U.S. commercial broadcasters. Media researchers in Europe were concerned about the profound cultural transformations as the "welfare state" increased the incomes of the working classes and brought the working classes into a kind of broad middle status.

A decisive influence was the cultural studies approach that originated in France and which was picked up by the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain. The center began a program of research on the factors influencing the profound cultural changes in Britain, especially among the working classes (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1980). Not surprisingly, in contrast to the behaviorist, functionalist dependence on psychological conceptions of the individual which led to an emphasis on the blind behavioral effects of the media, the cultural studies approach borrows from the humanistic sciences of textual analysis, literary studies, semiotics, history, cultural anthropology, and cognitive structuralism. The focus was not on behavioral response but on the creation of meaning, or, more specifically, "signifying practices" which bring about "shared social meanings" in various "languages," especially mass media languages (Barker, 2000, p. 7). Contrary to views of institutions such as the BBC, the popular classes were not considered "cultureless" and passive consumers of media to be reshaped in the middle-class image, but active in the creation of a rich and strong culture (Hoggart, 1957; Thompson, 1963). Popular novels, films, and television were sources of ideas and symbols that people used to create their own personal and cultural identities. The leaders in cultural studies were scholars formed in literary and dramatic criticism, and they saw the media as a text that both revealed and reflected the nature of the culture but that was also a source of symbols for the construction of the great variety of subcultures. What was striking about the youth subcultures in particular was the use of popular music as a symbol of resistance to the dominant, hegemonic cultures (Hall & Jefferson, 1983; Frith, 1983). Rather than turn their backs on their poverty and working-class status, youth took from the media images that glorified their own popular class values.

Underlying the cultural studies approach was a strong commitment to the dignity, freedom, and creativity of all persons. The individual was seen, not as an object of culture and social systems, but as the author of culture. Although cultural studies has found Marxist analysis helpful for a critical understanding of the concentration of political-economic power in the formation of cultures, cultural studies rejected the economic determinism of classical Marxism. Instead they saw the person as a protagonist in the struggle with power to define the meaning of all economic products not as hegemonic ideology but as the affirmation of the cultural identity of the subaltern classes. Stuart Hall introduced the distinction of the concept of the encoding of the preferred, hegemonic meaning of media to support hegemonic power and the decoding of the message in terms of the identity of the media user. The studies of media fan groups have revealed how media users refashion the meaning of symbols of the media around their own person and cultural identities (Jenkins, 1992). Martin-Barbero's studies of the reception of telenovelas in Latin America suggested that the reading of media is a complex combination of seduction, rejection, resistance, and transformation of meaning (1993).

The American version of the cultural studies approach emphasized that media reception is a social, communitarian activity. The new religious, racial, ethnic, and gender movements in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the basis of their internal communication networks, collectively challenged the negative images in the media. Carey (1989), borrowing from cognitive anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1975), introduced the ritual, communion notion of media, and Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley (1983) used the anthropologist Victor Turner's theory of ritual (1969) as the audience experience of the state between the world as it is and the world as the community would like it to become.

A turning point was the development of media reception theory in the late 1970s and 1980s, analyzing how audiences take media narratives, role models, and symbols as materials for constructing their own life histories (Morley, 1992; Fiske, 1987). From this came a series of new methodologies of audience analysis roughly described as audience ethnography and including life histories (Grodin & Lindlof, 1996), personal accounts through letters (Ang, 1985), observation of groups viewing television (Lull, 1988), observation of households using media (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992), or participation in fan groups discussing programs (Brown, 1994). What has characterized reception study is the analysis of the use of media as one source of constructing meaning in a "natural life context" and a whole meaning construction process: a whole life-time, an ongoing-friend group, a whole household, a whole community or church congregation. The purpose is to understand the role of media in a complex pattern of meaning relationships.

3. The beginnings of the Media, Religion, and Culture approach

A. Early history

By the early 1980s, the study of media and religion had at its disposal a new set of tools that the authors of the 1950s' study of the effects of religious television said were needed. Also emerging were new theologies of communication which defined the media as a process of bringing publics together to form dialogical communities. Evangelization was beginning to be seen, not as imposing a foreign religious culture, but as helping peoples discover and activate their best religious values. The reaching up to God is not something brought from outside, but is embedded in the nature of human existence and in human cultures. There was cross-fertilization of narrative theology (Shea, 1981), the life-history approach to moral development (Kohlberg, 1981, 1984), concepts of faith as evolving through stages (Fowler, 1981), the analysis of media reception as an interaction between media myth and narrative (Silverstone, 1981), and personal life histories (Fiske, 1987). Another very important influence was the new sociology of religion emerging in the 1970s and 1980s, which showed that religiosity could not be defined simply by the imposition of institutional religious affiliation (Beckford & Luckman, 1989; Beckford, 1989). It was evident that new generations of seekers were building their own belief system from symbols from a variety of religious traditions (Roof & McKinney, 1987; Roof, 1999).

By the 1970s and early 1980s the prominence of the televangelists began to stimulate many studies of religious broadcasting, especially regarding the sociocultural and political impact of new religious movements and the Pentecostals (Armstrong, 1979; Hadden & Swann, 1981; Frankl, 1987; Abelman & Hoover, 1990). Especially important were Peter Horsfield's Religious Television (1984), providing a summary analysis of research on religious broadcasting up to that point, and the Gallup survey of audiences of radio and television (Hoover, 1988, pp. 63-70). All of these studies confirmed that audiences were largely the devout church members, the elderly, less well educated, more rural, and tending to be heavier television users. Contrary to the claims of many religious broadcasters, television broadcasts made few converts among the unchurched, but television was most important in providing public symbols of identification for the new religious movements in the 1970s and 1980s.

The new studies of the sociology of religion in the 1970s and 1980s were confirming that a new religious configuration was coming into existence-more fundamentalist, intensely committed, more personalistic and spontaneous, more militant against liberal religious hegemony. No sociological study suggested that the religious broadcasters were an important cause of this, but broadcasting was part of the creation of a new culture.

In the mid-1980s Stewart Hoover, drawing on the many currents of thought about religious media described above, designed a new approach to the study of religion and media which focused on the role of media in the creation of personal religious meaning and religious cultures. Also important were discussions with the Jesuit-sponsored Centre for the Study of Communication and Culture in London (the original publisher of Communication Research Trends), which was encouraging a cultural studies approach and which published his book in its Communication and Human Values series. The central question in the study was, "What kind of religious culture are we creating in this era of great social and institutional change?" (Hoover, 1988, p. 12). Television was considered a cultural medium, a signifying practice. The study adapted the following aspects of the cultural studies approach:

* The focus was on the culture of a particular religious movement and the life context of people in this movement: their jobs, their families, the problems they faced, and their politics.

* The study focused on people involved with a televangelist movement, namely that of Pat Robertson, but looked at all the sources of religious meaning in their lives-their church, their political involvements, their general reading, their social affiliations, their many religious activities-and how they used these sources of meaning.

* The data were whole life histories and how these life experiences led up to the present searches for meaning in life, especially the precipitating factor that led to a kind of conversion to a deeper, more intense search for meaning.

* A particular focus was on the sources of meaning for their involvement in politics and other aspects of public life.

The study revealed that following a particular televangelist was part of belonging to a particular religious subculture, in this case, a somewhat more fundamentalist and conservative religious, political, and social culture. There were many sources of information that helped those associated with the movement to define the meaning of their life situation: interpersonal contacts, discussion groups, books and newspapers, and-since television was so important a part of these somewhat elderly and more sedentary people-various television programs. All those interviewed felt that this movement had provided crucial help in defining how to make sense out of a central meaning problem in their lives: a death of a family member, a serious illness, loss of a job, family crisis, or any of the many problems that could affect a person in modernity. Even though many did not regularly watch his TV programs, Pat Robertson was so much a public symbol of all that they believed in that they were ready to contribute relatively large amounts of money to make his voice heard. The networks of those associated with this movement included virtually all religious denominations-Protestants of all backgrounds and all social classes, Catholics, and even some Jewish people-but the "meaning problems" were sufficiently similar that all identified with what this media figure promoted and symbolized. In the highly differentiated modern societies divided into single-value concerns and single-issue politics, people of different subcultures tend to identify with different public media figures. Moreover, those who identified with a particular media figure tend to be in contact with each other and to live in a particular value world.

Hoover's study showed that the way certain people come to be identified with certain media figures depends very much on the history of their social backgrounds and social networks. It also depends on life circumstances that present crises of meaning that make people move out of a particular routine and search for new meaning. Sometimes seemingly chance experiences lead people toward identification with a media figure, but almost always the social history of a person leads them toward certain types of media use. The social history also provides different resources of interpretative capacity, different "filters," and different interests. What became most apparent, however, is that religious media are important providers of symbols that people can use to build their own systems of meaning.

B. Formulating a Media, Religion and Culture research agenda

In the 1980s and 1990s religion, which many had considered a phenomenon disappearing in the face of modernity, suddenly was recognized as becoming a much more central actor in the political, economic, and socio-cultural affairs of the world. The world-wide Pentecostal, evangelical movement was one dimension of this; Pope John Paul II was another dimension; and still other dimensions were the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu socio-political-cultural revitalizations, and the evident religiosity of the people of the new nations. The literally hundreds of new religious movements and "quasi-religions" came to be considered part of the "post-modern" culture. Many scholars began to speak of the "re-enchantment" of the world (Murdock, 1997).

The study of media also moved away from its administrative concerns to the recording of immensely varied ways of signifying to oneself and to others "who I think I am" (identity) or "what I would like to be," "with whom I and we want to be identified," and "what we think is important in life and in the world." Everything from billboards to T-shirts, to horror films, to home decorations, to the Internet-all are fitting identity signifying practices to be studied. They are religious because they were associated with what is called religious or because they deal with what the subjects involved consider to be matters of ultimate concern and what is considered to be "sacred." The preoccupation with signifying identity is due in part, on the one hand, with globalization and the confrontation of cultures and, on the other, the post-modern collapse of overarching cultural belief systems. The major institutions involved with providing signification materials are less and less the institutional churches and ever more the commercial marketing systems selling commodities that can be readily used to define and dramatize identities. The focus of study thus becomes the systems of persuasive selling that transforms everything potentially religious into commodities, from statues of Padre Pio to "I love Jesus" bracelets. The media-everything from the telephone to home video- have been a unifying focus in this because the media are what link us together.

The study of media, religion, and culture also began to move out of the institutional religious base into a more secular scholarly context as it became evident that religion is a central cultural institution that is dealing with the signifying practices that link together areas of meaning. The institutional churches have ceded ground to popular culture signifying practices as the places of unifying the meaning of life. Indeed, religion is now studied more in departments and centers of the study of popular culture, although many of the centers that are part of the media, religion, and culture network still have close links with institutional religion. This delinking of the study of religion from explicit connection with institutional religion makes it easier for the study of popular identity signifying practices to analyze critically the use of popular culture to establish cultural hegemony precisely through the commodification of objects of popular culture. In the view of some, the delinking of the study of religion from more explicit institutional definitions also helps to distance the study from more "essentialistic" conceptions of religion. Thus, the study of media, religion, and culture retains the central humanistic focus of the critical cultural studies tradition and the defense of the freedom, creativity, and sanctity of the person. The central question remains the same: what kind of culture are we creating in the context of mediated signifying practices and how do we evaluate this culture in terms of the meaning of human existence today?

The emphasis on studying religious media as part of a subculture, a life context, and a life history leads toward research on how different subcultures use media to build religious meaning: youth, women, the elderly, rural people, and a host of other groups. This introduces another important premise, namely, that every person and group has its own concept of what is religious, often quite different from the variety of institutional religious creeds, and may project a religious meaning on to media. The focus moves beyond the institutional representations of religion to more poetic representations of personal spirituality, a sense of unity with personal identity and inspirations of others. This attempts to understand the experience of transcendent community in film, music, and visual or plastic arts.

The study of media and religion as culture is also much more open to the processes of globalization and the "hybridized" reception of religious cultures as they travel around the globe (Asamoa-Gyadu, 2004). The ethnographic study of live rituals is able to catch the process of "hybridization" in the act of creation and to see the various roles and interaction of leading actors in the process of creating local cultures.

The study of religious conversion from a cultural perspective has moved away from a psychological reductionism and focuses more on the transformation of personal meaning systems and the integration of personal identities around central symbols. This has led away from understanding of religious and moral development or religious conversion as simply the result of "external" factors such as life crisis, new material opportunities, or powerful persuasion and, instead, sees this as a personal search for the ever more profound integration of meaning in personal lives and in cultures (Ihejirika, 2004).

Also central to the study of media, religion, and culture is the tendency in religious broadcasting to transform religion into an ideology which sacralizes and naturalizes the relations of exploitative power. The televangelists and many other religious broadcasters present themselves as the true national culture, sometimes under the guise of a "persecuted minority," thus drawing audiences into accepting and submitting to cultural hegemonies (Bruce, 1990).

C. The formation of the Media, Religion, and Culture network

By the early 1990s there was gradually forming a network of individual researchers, research centers, and research programs that identified roughly with a cultural studies approach to the study of media and religion. There are now some five or six centers in various parts of the world which generally follow the cultural studies approach to the study of media and religion. Some of the major ones are The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, University of Colorado; Centre for Communication, Theology, and Ethics, New College University of Edinburgh; Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Communication, The Gregorian University; the program of media and religion at Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California; and the Centre for the Study of African Culture and Communication in Nigeria. The conceptualization of the contemporary relationship of media and religion of people in this network tends to follow the lines described above. The consensus that this focus represents an important area of research led to setting up a more formal structure of international conferences, publications, and research groups.

During the 1970s and 1980s there had been a series of studies of the televangelists, but most of these were quite descriptive. It was evident that there was no coherent theoretical interpretation of the general significance of media and religion, much less a theory of media, religion, and culture. The book, Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture edited by Stewart Hoover and Knut Lunby (1997) attempted to pull together the various strands of thought and outlined the major concepts, arguments and issues in this area of study. My own chapter, "Religion and Media in the Construction of Cultures" was an attempt to provide a systematic theoretical explanation of the interaction of media, religious institutions, and religious movements in the development of contemporary cultures (White, 1997, pp. 37-64). Two of the contributions of this book, that of the Latin American Martin-Barbero (1997) and that of Graham Murdock (1997), both frequently cited, argue that the religion in the media is a major aspect of the "re-enchantment" of the world that is widely observed. The book remains, in my estimation, the best collective representation of major scholars in this field and provides some of the strongest theoretical formulation regarding the interrelation of media, religion, and culture. Sadly, few refer to the book.

There is, in general, an unfortunate aversion among many of those doing research in this area to work within the framework of a general theory of media and religion. There is much more interest in focusing on specific areas of interaction of media, religion, and culture, with only limited or case-specific explanations offered.

The international conferences of the media, religion, and culture network have proven much more influential. The first International Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture was held in Uppsala in 1993, with subsequent international conferences in Boulder, Colorado in 1996; Edinburgh in 1999; Jyvaskyla, Finland in 2003; Louisville, Kentucky in 2004; and Stockholm in 2006. Several collections of papers have appeared: from the Boulder conference (Hoover & Clark, 2002) and from the Edinburgh conference (Mitchell & Marriage, 2003). The conferences stimulated the foundation of the Journal of Media and Religion in 2002, and a book series with Routledge Publishers, initiated in 2003.

4. Themes and theses of the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective

A. The interaction of producers and religious culture

Much media research tends to take media messages and even the producers behind the messages as abstractions from the culture, as if a message appears from nowhere. The Media, Religion, and Culture tradition has emphasized the importance of examining how the content of religious media or religious themes emerge out of a socio-cultural context. For example, when Hoover (1988) studied the influence of the televangelist Pat Robertson, he analyzed how Robertson emerged from the resurgence of the evangelical movement along with other fundamentalist movements in the American cultural crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. Robertson and others responded to a new culture of religious seekers and the desire for religious experience. Their popularity, especially in the 1980s, owed much to the capacity of televangelists to understand what people of the 1980s culture sought. With their invitation of letters from the public and the careful analysis of the voluminous correspondence, the televangelists were much more in contact with the cultural pulse of the audience they catered to and knew how to build on the cultural preferences of this audience. The sensitivity to the cultural "feelings" of audiences and the ability to articulate the religious language of the audience explains why televangelists were able to get audiences to contribute relatively large amounts of money.

This awareness of the embeddedness of producers in the culture helped to explain why the media of the mainline churches, especially the Catholic Church, which were message-oriented (especially dogmatic, propositional messages) and insensitive to the culture, virtually collapsed in the 1970s (Medrano, 2004). Most of these productions were mandated by the hierarchy of the Church with relatively little audience support. Catholic productions placed little emphasis on letters from the audience, live presentations to audiences, or other forms of audience interaction that would generate audience support. An exception is Mother Angelica's Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), which built its relatively narrow but intensely devoted audience around its appeal to elements of Catholic popular culture such as religious habits, traditional ritual, Catholic iconography, and traditional hymns.

In a more recent study, Jolyon Mitchell's analysis of the emphasis in popular West Africa home video films on witchcraft, spirits (good and bad!), and exorcisms went beyond the content to include the intentions of producers (Mitchell, 2004). All producers are aware of the intense interest of their audiences in the war between the spiritual powers. Pentecostal groups produce many of the films, which feature the power of Pentecostal evangelists to control these evil spirits-in contrast to the weakness of the mainline Protestant Christian churches. One of the most popular and successful producers of these films in Ghana explained that he himself did not believe much in witchcraft or the battle of the spirits, but he knew that he had to include this emphasis because this element is so central to popular religiosity in West Africa.

B. Bringing theology back in

Much research on media and religion has tended to exclude theology as a valid object of study and has followed the positivist tendency toward behaviorist reduction. The Media, Religion, and Culture tradition sees the study of media and religion as an interdisciplinary exchange and insists on the inclusion of theological perspectives in its analysis. The perspectives both of popular theology-the way ordinary people explain their religious experiences and the meaning they place on these experiences-and of formal theology-the explanations in a more systematic fashion-are important. Both are signifying practices and one must be ready to accept the theological reasoning process in order to understand them. That is, in order to enter into the meaning of a particular religious production, one must know the theology of the producers, the theology implied in the content, and the theology of the audiences interpreting and producing their own meaning.

The theologian Roberto Goizueta (2004), argues that underlying Latino popular Catholicism is a theology of "symbolic realism." Latinos understand God as really present in the rituals, icons, processions, music, and dance of Latino religiosity and believe that these reveal the power and creative dynamism of God. As one participates with all of one's senses and corporeal reactions, one has a deep experience of an incarnate God. Medrano (2004), in his productions for the American Latino community, felt that the programs had to reproduce the people, stories, rituals, icons, music, and dance that constitute the religiosity of the Latino in order to evoke the same experience of symbolic realism embodied in this religiosity. Even more, he argues that, in order to truly communicate at the religious level, the producer must be part of a praying, believing community and communicate not a message but an experience of God. It is close to the experience of creators of icons who must first meditate on the subject to enter into the deep emotional full experience of the divinity in order to reproduce in form and color the experience of the divinity. Embedded in this experience is a theology, and to understand this signifying practice one must bring in the theology whole and intact.

A central premise in this approach to theology is that the lived religious faith experience of a community, the world this community attempts to bring into existence, is the most important text of reference for theologians. In today's world of large national and global communities, the interconnectedness of community occurs largely through media. Here, the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective understands media not simply as transmitters of information, but as a selective construction of the meaning of the world we live in, a selectiveness that exists by discovering the interests and desires of the audience. The religious communities of today design their construction of the future largely in terms of the materials provided by the media.

C. Narrative fiction as a space for creating culture

Like cultural studies, the Media, Religion, and Culture tradition takes media as a text revealing the culture. For example, German Rey (2004) shows how the Latin American telenovela provides a good indicator of Latin American religiosity in general, and the different religiosities in Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, or Argentina, in particular. The telenovela portrays the sharp moral contrasts of good and evil, the fascination with expiatory suffering, but above all the providentialism of Latin American cultures. The telenovela shows that virtuous goodness always triumphs; separated families are always brought together; and honest, faithful effort brings results. If one compares this with Latin American reality, it is clear that a telenovela is more of a theological statement rather than a mirror of reality where brutally unjust people usually gain triumphant power.

Indeed, the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective is interested in narrative fiction or other forms of media as more than mirrors of reality, but as arenas of social discussion-what Martin-Barbero (1993) has called mediations. The meaning creating resides not in the media themselves but in the discussions about the issues that are portrayed. This may be at a more local level where housewives from the neighborhood sit together to watch a telenovela and comment together about how the protagonist handles her husband-and how they should be more independent in confronting their husbands. Or the discussion may involve a whole nation. In Chile the dominant entertainment is telenovelas that often have as many as 200 to 250 episodes and deal with major cultural, moral issues. For example, a recent telenovela, Macho, portrayed how a family with seven sons confronted the problem that one of the sons declared himself a homosexual. Never before had the issue of homosexuality been treated so openly-and a national discussion ensued.

The Media, Religion, and Culture perspective finds of particular interest how audiences use the media to draw out a narrative sequence to write the scripts of their own life stories. Often this deals with issues of ultimate, overarching meaning. In Latin America, for example, where the narrative fiction telenovela is a favorite with young people, many have noted that youth frequently find in the media a language to describe their "religious" experiences. Frequently, there is an ongoing dialogue between the television narrative and the personal life narrative (Yevenes, 2007). One young girl in her late teens, attempting to deal with the grief she felt at the death of her grandmother, drew strength and inspiration from how the protagonist of a telenovela dealt with a death in her life. The example of the telenovela also helped the young girl to understand better the theology of death drawn from her institutional religious affiliation.

D. Religion and material culture

The movement away from religion as institution and as dogmatic and moral propositions to religion as culture has brought much more attention to aspects of religion which are important in the everyday lives of the people. One of these is material culture-objects of everyday use that are used in religious signifying practices, from T-shirts with religious emblems to bracelets to crosses. Simple religious icons have always been important in religion, but today personal identity is established largely by mass-produced consumer items. We take on identity from what we consume; we buy and consume in order to communicate our social identity and aspirations to ourselves. Today, both social status in the power-stratification system and social identity are communicated largely through consumer items. Marketing specialists constantly search out new uses for items people have begun to use to communicate to others who they want to become and to be recognized as. Mass advertising has played a very important role in this and the mass media also have emphasized consumer roles.

The study of the subjective interpretation of popular culture has led to a deeper understanding of how popular religious art, so often relegated to a marginal role by theologically dominated institutional religion, can become the focus of stability for the emotional life throughout the life course (Morgan, 1999). The visual symbol often functions as a point of integration of meaning in life, and a popular devotional icon becomes the organizing principle of personal identity. In this, the study of religions, previously limited to the analysis of print media and print-based messages, becomes more open to the role of the visual.

E. The role of popular culture in religious education

The Media, Religion, and Culture focus has privileged popular culture, a culture very largely constructed in the media experience, as a source of religious meaning for a series of reasons. Fundamentally, it sees religion as the construction of limit experience or ultimate, overarching meaning; this is a construction of meaning that is continually shifting. The greatest problem for any religion is that its interpretation of the meaning of reality does not relate to the contemporary problem of the meaning of life. For this reason, all religions display a series of continuous new religious revitalization movements, new saints, new prophets, and the continuous generation of sacred founder texts. Popular culture is created largely by contemporary "entertainers," those who, in the words of Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley, can take us out of the present world and hold us between a world of the past and a world that could come into existence (1983, pp. 23-25). These entertainers live by being able to articulate the way the world makes sense right at this moment. As John Shea once argued, the popular artists are the first to sense the new, emerging religious meaning, even if it is too new to be given sanction by religious institutions as truly "religious" (1981, p. 45). Entertainers also appeal to the authenticity of audiences with texts that lie closer to the way people feel at a particular time, and they also strongly invite the audience to listen to their own construction of meaning for that text. This experience of being entertained includes the discovery of more of one's own personal existence.

Religious educators, then, take responsibility for what might seem an impossible task, helping a new generation to assume the responsibility for the tradition of values of a religious community. Mary Hess, in her reflections on the task of religious education (2004, 2005), feels that religious education should be a process of dialogue in which the educator representing perhaps more centrally the tradition of the community listens to the way a young generation is constructing a contemporary meaning of the sacred text and lived tradition of the community by their authenticity. From this dialogue, which is both confrontational and discerning, emerge broader symbols with which all involved in the deliberation can identify. The discernment sets up a mutual critique of the tradition and the emerging culture. The partners in this dialogue feel that these symbols evoke what is most authentic about their honest desire to give witness in the culture to the values of the tradition in the language of contemporary popular culture.

F. The role of culture in the formation of religious institutions

Many analyses of the formation of contemporary religious institutions such as the Pentecostal movements have tended to explain the theologies, language, and practices of these movements in terms of "strange theologies," ideologies, or simply personal greed. Although personal beliefs and personal motivations certainly operate in the actions of the founders of Pentecostal or other religious movements, local cultures, and especially local religious cultures, are important factors.

For example, the Pentecostal movements sweeping Africa and parts of Latin America owe much of their power to attract adherents to the cultural institutions already strong among young Africans. Many of the founders and leaders are well educated and some are former university professors with doctorates in business, management, or engineering (Asamoah-Gyadu, 2004, p. 65). African religion has a strong orientation toward getting practical outcomes. Pentecostal leaders see their well-organized churches as bringing some rationality and principles of good management into the chaos and corruption of African societies. Pentecostal churches in Africa offer services of employment, special education, and contact with the most influential people in the industrial world. They appeal to the desire for modernity of many young Africans by borrowing many of the techniques of mass media hype from the American Pentecostals and ultimately from the American advertising and public relations experts. At the same time, they call on the Pentecostal theology of powerful evil spirits to respond to the belief in witchcraft and pervasiveness of evil spirits common in African cultures. Pentecostal pastors present their superior power over evil spirits as an example of their general superiority. The literal appeal to the biblical text convinces young Africans that this religion has clearly indicated foundations in tangible evidence. They appeal to upwardly mobile young Africans, especially young men, with their messages of capacity building, empowerment, and realization of potential (Asamoah-Gyadu, 2004).

To many, all this provides evidence of insincerity, greed, and an offer of false prosperity, but this conclusion provides no real explanation of the powerful attraction of these new religions. The young Africans drawn to these churches and movements experience a liberation and strengthening of their desires for modernity. Increasingly, many of the leaders in business and the professions find in these churches the integration of their personalities around their religious values.

G. Religious seeking and the new Internet media

Many in the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective subscribe to the thesis of major sociologists of religion such as Wade Clark Roof (1999) that many people now tend to pull loose from institutional religious systems and respond more to their own personal project of identity and self construction. There is less a conscious process of identity building and more one of simply responding to what an individual enjoys, doing what makes him/her feel good, or what makes sense in one's own personal life. Religious seeking is rooted in a person's internal emotional structure. Religious seeking may always have emerged from internal motivational dynamic, but today people around the world experience more socio-economic and political freedom in their own life context and less institutional constraint. There is a much wider range of educational and occupational opportunity. If marriage does not bring internal emotional satisfaction, people tend to move into other relationships.

The research of Roof (1999), Wuthnow (1992) and many other sociologists of religion confirms the broader theory of sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) that late-modern consciousness now finds itself in a more or less constant quest to construct an ideal "self." Religion and much seeking of meaning that is quasi-religious is a project of self construction. The Media, Religion, and Culture research methodology has sought to trace this self-building, seeking accounts of stages of life-course development, focusing on the moments of much more intense seeking of meaning and the factors that are involved in this.

Internet use is a particularly interesting case because it leaves the subject a great deal of freedom to respond to one's own internal motivations. The now voluminous research on religious use of the Internet has now categorized many different types of persons and uses. (See, for example, Hoover & Park, 2004, who refer to three of these studies: Brasher, 2001; Zaleski, 1997; and Hadden & Cowan, 2000. To this may be added Bazin & Cottin, 2004; Bunt, 2000; Babin & Zukowski, 2002. For a fuller review, see Campbell, writing in Communication Research Trends, Vol. 25, no. 1, 2006.)

Hoover and Park (2004) refer to Christopher Helland's (2000) discussion of two major types of religious presence in the Internet: "religion online" where institutional churches provide information services of publicity, education, and outreach to their committed members and "online religion," which is open to the subjective construction of religion of seekers. Whereas religion online is self-consciously controlled by the church authorities, online religion responds to the nature of the medium, unstructured, open, and non-hierarchical. Online religion is open to whatever definition of religion that the users wish to give it. Usually, online religion is much closer to what is now referred to as "quasi-religion." As Hoover and Park note,:

 Many of the web sites representative of religion
 online assume that seeking takes place. They
 provide resources, handles, information, links,
 and so on designed to attract the seeker and
 bring him/her in. More interesting, though, is the
 relationship between seeking and online religion.
 The elasticity and subjectivity of the
 "selves" that presumably "seek" online enable
 them to integrate their quests into the kinds of
 settings and locations on the web. ... As
 autonomous seekers move into the online environment,
 their practices need not bear any necessary
 relationship to established or ascribed categories
 of religion. (2004, pp. 124-125)

What Hoover and Park found is that those who have a religious seeker personality or were in a phase of life when religious meaning systems were shaken tended to use the Internet for a religious quest much more. Individuals who were satisfied with their present experience in an institutional religious community were much less likely to use the Internet to construct a religious self. This confirms earlier research on religious life histories that the use of religious media is much greater in times of less religious certainty.

H. Family processes of constructing meaning in a media-saturated family context

Most studies of construction of meaning in the media experience are based on an individual telling the story of how he or she individually constructs life meaning. Other studies report that individual young people construct meaning through interaction with their peers. The Centre for the Study of Media and Religion at the University of Colorado, working with the team of the "Symbolism, Media, and Lifecourse" project, took on a far more complex research task: how families-parents interacting with each other and with their children of various ages- construct meaning of media (Hoover, Clark, & Alters, 2004).

The statement of the objectives of the project is worth quoting in full because it sums up well much of the general methodology of the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective:

 In our research, we were interested not only in
 describing the stories of families as they negotiated
 media practices in their homes, but also in
 analyzing these stories in relation to what we
 have come to believe are the larger structures of
 late capitalist social organization. Thus, we
 sought to generate a "map" of sorts; a map of
 how parents and children negotiate media rules,
 to be sure, but also one that took account of the
 reflexive parenting that we came to see as
 emblematic of parental identity and practice at
 this point of U.S. history. Our aim was similar to
 that outlined by media researcher Timothy
 Gibson (1999): to develop "an adequate notion
 of the totality of a particular society and a
 detailed understanding of how that totality patterns,
 constrains, and becomes reproduced within
 the realms of everyday life." (Hoover, Clark,
 & Alters, 2004, p. 21)

In other words, to understand meaning making practices, research must "simultaneously" take into consideration both "micro" and "macro" aspects of cultural construction.

What emerged in this research involving some five or six associates and graduate students at the University of Colorado was the realization that a very complex set of factors influenced media practices among families of the United States in the last 10 years. The research attempted to take into consideration the extremely diverse understanding of what is a family or household in the U.S. at present: not just traditional nuclear families, but various forms of single parent and companionship families and many types of dysfunctional families with, for example, an alcoholic husband-father. Most of the families approached, in some form, the classical modern nuclear family and virtually all were attempting to assume some set of norms of good parenting. Thus, family values and some ideal of the kind of values adults desired for their children entered into the picture. Good parenting included guiding the media use of the family. Regarding media use, one of the central findings is that most families apply what Carey (1989) called "public scripts" about media and values in America or what Ellen Seiter (1995, 1999) has termed "lay theories of the media." The common public script or lay theory is that the "sex and violence" of the media are harmful to all in the family, especially to children. This may prompt the question: Why does a nation tolerate a media system that virtually all agree is harmful to its people? Here enters another set of factors: the sacredness of freedom of expression, the assumption that "the buyer must beware," and the view that the entrepreneurial drive for profits in the capitalist system is necessary for the political-economic well-being of the nation.

Another set of factors are the parents' religious world views, which often dictate a more or less strict view of parental guidance. The script which parents used was often their memory of how their family of origin had experienced the media and the view that the media had become less favorable to parenting. In the background, too, lies the assumption that every person is entitled to his or her sense of self- realization. Children were often aware that they were entering a very different technological and political-economic world than their parents had known and that they had to chart their own script for use of media. Most parents experience the tension of trying to protect their children and, at the same time, allow the children to respond to their own sense of self and personal identity. Finally, it was apparent that the media practices varied considerably according to the socio-economic status and disposable income of the families (Alters & Clark, 2004, p. 178).

Given the complexity of the factors influencing family media practices, it is not surprising that no unifying theoretical perspective emerged in the research (Clark & Alters, 2004). It is evident that neither sociological theory-in its general theory and variants of family theory-nor media theory seem capable at the present date of providing the materials for formulating this general theory. Much intellectual work remains to be done.

5. The International Study Commission

In 1996 the Porticus Foundation initiated the International Study Commission on Media, Religion, and Culture made up of 15 scholars and media producers to carry out a more focused study of the emerging shape of religion in the media-dominated age and how the institutions of religion should respond to these challenges. The commission has met with local religious leaders and scholars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Australia to interchange perspectives on media and religion in those parts of the world.

In 1999, to encourage more research and scholarship on media and religion in countries of the South, the commission began a program of scholarships for Catholic doctoral candidates from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The scholarships are granted by the Porticus Foundation under the title "International Catholic Fellowships for Research in Media, Religion, and Culture." The program does not simply pay tuition but attempts to bring together the approximately 30 fellows in roughly yearly meetings to discuss their research among themselves and with senior scholars in the field.

The commission has also been interested in reaching church leadership and leadership in seminary formation. For this audience Peter Horsfield has prepared The Mediated Spirit, a CD that traces the role of media in the development of Christianity (see http://www.mediatedspirit.com). The CD-ROM has proven to be a very useful resource for researchers, teachers, and youth leaders, or those simply interested in understanding the nature and reasons for the changes in religious faith and practices taking place today. Horsfield has also assembled a comprehensive bibliography of publications of the members of the commission which, when complete, will appear on the commission website (http://www.iscmrc.org).

Over the 10 years of its existence the study commission has attempted to explore the following questions:

* In what ways can we say that the media have come to occupy the spaces traditionally occupied by religion?

* What is the relationship of religious authority to modes of symbolic practice?

* How must we re-think the relationship between religion and media?

* What does this new situation imply about epistemology?

In the background of these questions lies the emergence of global cultural and religious contact, the disappearing vestiges of collective nationalistic-ethnic definition of religious identity (the tradition of cujus regio, ejus religio), the personalization of religious choice, and the recasting of social relationships and information-seeking in the moulds of communication technologies.

The book, Belief in Media (2004) summarizes, in some ways, the thinking of the commission about these questions, and my own chapter in the book, "Major Issues in the Study of Media, Religion, and Culture" (White, 2004), attempted to summarize the thinking of the nearly 10 years of discussions and research of the commission. Perhaps a good way to close this review and to bring together more briefly the current thinking of the Media, Religion, and Culture approach is to sum up the evidence about the interaction of media and religion emerging from the numerous studies of people using the more open-ended ethnographic interviews of the cultural studies methods. The situation in which people are increasingly cut loose from the institutional religious framework that structured the parameters of their cultural beliefs and values provides the backdrop. At one time an institutional religious framework structured the way people perceived their world, their standard questions about this world, and the standard answers to these questions. These religious institutions were often closely associated with national and ethnic geographical territories. As people have moved out of these structured social contexts through globalization and physical and intellectual migration, they have had to piece together their own coherent world views, their own definitions of the key questions, and their own answers.

Virtually all of the hundreds of interviews that one might consult in this research tradition over the last 20 years reveal people searching for answers to questions and solutions to the everyday problems of family unity, health, financial security, realizing lifelong dreams of personal aspirations, crises of personal friendship and affection, and a host of other problems.

Virtually all the respondents have carried some degree of answers and coping mechanisms in their own personalities and either knew how or did not know how to relate their personal identities to the immensely varied situations that the extremely differentiated role situations of late modernity present. How well people responded to situations or found answers depended very much on how well their personalities were organized around central symbols that carried answers or coping mechanisms with them. For example, a young man whose personal identity came to be organized around the ideal of the successful businessman with the belief systems and values-including religious values -that this implies might move through life coping well with all the problems that life might present, including severe difficulties and reversals. Virtually all people had (or were constructing) some form of coherent world view or framework of ultimate explanation (Wuthnow, 1992).

Culture is understood most commonly in terms of Ann Swidler's (1986) concept of culture as a "tool kit," a pool of explanatory resource symbols that one might draw upon to make sense out of puzzling situations. The religious in these studies is defined in terms of what a given subculture considers religious, but this is most often experienced as what lies at the very edge of structures of rational explanation; what underlies and is present in all explanations is the transcendent (Ammerman, 2004). For example, for people whose lives mostly center on the experience of nature away from the congestion of cities, the transcendent sacred is the dynamic force of nature which is beyond explanation because it simply exists and at the same time underlies all of the power and beauty of nature. One of the best explanations of this basic theory of the Media, Religion, and Culture approach is found in the introduction to Lynn Schofield Clark's (2003) book reporting her research on the role of media in the religiosity of teenagers in the U.S.

When people meet situations of uncertainty, lacking in some degree a coping mechanism in their personality organization, and begin to search for information, the most important sources are interpersonal contacts, and these contacts often lead into movements of cultural revitalization that provide a patterned explanation of life problems and patterned coping mechanisms. These movements of cultural revitalization carry with them a series of media sources that provide a continual flow of information on how to cope with life's problems. Followers of the movement generally and consistently use the media associated with the movement because they know that they will provide solutions to questions and lead ever more deeply into the wisdom of the movement. Often, at the center of these movements of cultural revitalization stand prophetic founding figures whose messages seem to contain the answer to all the problems. In the recorded interview data, one finds members of the movements continually remarking that the prophetic figure seems to have all the answers, always makes sense to people, is a clear communicator, and is always accessible. (This summary draws on the interviews of Hoover in his study of the followers of televangelist Pat Robertson, 1988; the interviews of Clark with young people in the Denver area of the U.S., 2003; and the more recent and valuable unpublished field notes of Walter Ihejirika, studying converts to Pentecostalism in Nigeria; Columbanus Udofia studying youth and contemporary Christian music in Nigeria; and Ray Debono-Roberts studying the life histories of members of the charismatic movement, the "Thy Kingdom Come Community" in Malta.)

Do the media occupy the spaces traditionally occupied by institutional religion? The closest answer is that the institutional churches were once based on a population much more homogeneous in terms of cultural background while today's societies are a mosaic of movements, leisure networks, associations, and communities of interests. Each has its own world of media use and information sources. Each movement may have its own version of the broad umbrella institutional belief system of religion and politics. But the broader belief system of a church, a nation, or a continental society such as Europe is mediated through an immense variety of subcultures, each with its particularly strong religious symbols. For people attracted by the values of the ecological movement, for example, the relation with nature can become the major religious experience and their major form of responding to life's problems. Their media use will also center very much around ecology issues. People vary in their closeness to the centers of the subcultural networks; they may be moving in and out of various cultural networks, but their religious symbols will be found in what these subcultural networks consider to be religious. If the symbols somehow relate to the institutional church umbrella and if the major symbolic figures of the umbrella church are sympathetic to the values of their subculture, then they may draw on these symbolic resources.

Regarding the relationship of religious authority to modes of symbolic practice, it is unlikely that the relationship is one of strict legal or doctrinal imposition. Everybody seems to pick and choose from available ethical models what their experience tells them is a good way to act. Most tend to model their lives after persons known in interpersonal networks, but they would probably not identify them as "religious authorities." Some may take as their religious authority the leader of their institutional identification, but most would select a person they know through the media whose life, writing, and teaching models for what they think is a good way to act. The media tend to give prominence to institutional leadership such as a pope (Gans, 2004), and people tend to identify with the institutional leadership presented by the media to the extent that the media figure symbolizes what they feel is the good life. Cultural revitalization movements engage followers at the point of "meaning gaps" in their lives and help to solve these meaning gaps by bringing followers to identify with central leadership symbols who "make sense," that is, they present a coherent pattern of meaning, making everything in their life "fit together." Virtually all central leaders in revitalization movements become mediated symbols, starting their own TV or radio programs, writing their own books, or putting out their magazines. Sometimes the followers push the leaders into the media. Often media organizations seek out the leaders and offer them contracts. At times the leaders sense that they must become mediated for the sake of what they are trying to do. The media projection of leadership symbols gives them authority in "making sense" and the fact that many in the movement follow them gives them authority (Hoover, 1988; Ihejirika, 2004). Berger pointed out in his sociology of religion (1969) that the public evidence of large numbers of followers, what he calls "massification," is an important source of the authority of the belief system. It is well known that the media give prominence in their reporting on the public appearances of leaders of institutions and movements such as a papal visit as a gauge of the authority of that leader as moral leader. Margaret Melady (1999), in her study of the papal visits to the United States in 1987, reports that those planning the papal visit made sure that the Pope would make public appearances in those cities where there was assurance that a large public turnout of a particular kind of crowd, in this case Hispanics, could be mobilized. The supporters of canonizations of individuals whose symbolic power is being carefully created will make every effort to have a "record" crowd present overflowing out of St. Peter's square, and these supporters will make sure that the size and fervor of the crowd is vividly portrayed in the mass media. The media prefer gigantic crowds because this also reinforces the importance of the media themselves; that is, the size of the crowd justifies both the media presence at the event and the fact that the media are where the great majority of the people are-where history is being made. This implies the belief that the media themselves make history and that history cannot be made without the presence of the media. Moreover, the fact that the media are present strengthens people's identification with a symbol that the people feel sums up their belief system. The visual presentation of the media event draws out many iconic identifications that reinforce the strength of identification (Morgan, 1999).

Most great religious leaders who have made their way to the top intuitively understand all this; their communicative charisma is often one of the criteria of their selection by followers who want to promote the institution. Great public religious figures, such as John Paul II, often have acting experience, that is, the experience of directly moving crowd response, and they-and their carefully chosen public relations managers-know how to mobilize public identification. In the election of the present Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger quickly outdistanced all other candidates because, in his celebration of the funeral of John Paul II, he showed that he had carefully learned the power of Vatican pageantry in developing symbolism in the public sphere.

Of course, all those who do not identify (in their personal experience) with the hegemonic public symbols, are part of what Kathleen Jamieson calls the "spiral of cynicism" (Jamieson & Cappella, 1997). They wait for their opportunity to mount a counter public symbolism and the clash of public symbolisms becomes the culture wars of today. The media almost certainly have intensified cultural conflict in the world today because the media work so much with stereotypes and play on emotional prejudice. The media take the processes of social interaction out of the direct interpersonal context-where most conflicts can be resolved, or at least negotiated-and live off the drama of cultural conflict. The beginning of the resolution of culture wars lies in favorable interpersonal contact that generates symbols, but these unifying symbols must then be carried to the level of the public sphere which usually means the media sphere (Browning, 2000).

The third question which the International Commission for the Study of Media, Religion, and Culture has posed is the need to rethink the dichotomies enveloping media and religion, the dichotomies of sacred and profane, good and bad media, media as either instrumental manipulation or idyllic communalistic participation. A list of these common and trite "culture wars" appears in my already cited chapter (White, 2004, p. 209). One of the most obvious ways that the Media, Religion, and Culture research breaks down the dichotomies occurs in the study of the reception of the religious programs, which shows a valid construction of religious meaning at times quite different from the official, institutional meaning of images. Implied in this is a distrust in classical "essentialistic" conceptions of religion and openness to ideas of what is religious emerging out of popular religious experience (White, 2004, pp. 202-204). Another departure from the dichotomies is the Media, Religion, and Culture interest in popular culture expressed in the continually and rapidly changing tastes in popular media. Mitchell's study of horror films in Ghana shows that what seem garish and bizarre portrayals (to Western canons of film) are in fact serious religious reflections on the moral dilemmas of everyday life in Ghana, what one Ghanaian producer calls "moral parables" (2004, p. 116). The Media, Religion, and Culture program of international, comparative research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America has helped to free the conceptions of media and religion from the fixed Western categories.

The fourth question raised by the commission deals with the epistemological practices implied in studies of media and religion. Has the Media, Religion, and Culture research helped to bring the way we think about media and religion closer to the experienced realities? Perhaps the most significant thing about Media, Religion, and Culture research is that it uses an ethnographic methodology that takes us into the everyday life of various subcultures and allows us to see the world through the eyes of the inhabitants of those worlds and how those inhabitants use the media to see that world. One of the best examples is Clark's five year study of youth and the media in the U.S. (2003). Another example is Ihejirika's study of the conversion experiences of Nigerian Pentecostals: their perception of a world inhabited by good and evil spirits and how they see Pentecostalism giving them greater control over this world (Ihejirika, 2004). Clark's essay (2002) on the move from an epistemology of institutional power over media and culture to an epistemology of increasing autonomy and reflexive awareness questioning our creating of culture in the media while we create it provides one example of an attempt to theorize this new epistemology. Another example is Jan Fernback's exploration of the epistemology of the ritualization of the experience of computer-mediated community (2002).

6. Is the research of the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective addressing the real issues?

I would argue that the expansion of the research on media and religion that has occurred in the last 25 years has brought us closer to answering the kind of questions that were posed by religious leaders in the study carried out by Parker, Barry, and Smythe nearly 60 years ago. True, the way we ask the questions has changed considerably. We now have not only a very clear idea of what groups listen to religious broadcasts and how the use of religious broadcasts contributes to patterns of religious development and spiritual growth, but also a precise sense of how religious broadcasts are likely to fit in a complex mix of many other communication sources. We can explain these much more complex processes because of more ethnographic studies of media use within the life context and life histories of people in very different social and cultural contexts.

The typical religious broadcaster or local parish priest may want to know how to help people grow spiritually. If spiritual growth is a transformation of a person's consciousness, then we can know such consciousness only as a particular kind of personal or group (family) signifying practice-a cultural meaning- creating process. This approach characterizes the Media, Religion, and Culture research.

But one can still question whether the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective or any approach to research on media and religion is really dealing with the major problems with religious media.

To what extent are religious media dealing with the enormous social injustices that exist in the United States and in most other advanced industrial countries? It is widely recognized that these disparities in opportunity for education or adequate health services are increasing. Religious media often pretend to be the conscience of the nations, but rarely do these media take up the real issues of poverty, the growing underclass, and the suffering of children in these contexts of social injustice. The Media, Religion, and Culture perspective argues that it has adopted a cultural studies approach, but the tradition of critical theory, which is supposed to be part of the cultural studies tradition, is rarely found in the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective.

One might ask whether the Media, Religion, and Culture approach has taken up issues of social exclusion in religious media: the exclusion of women or of racial and ethnic groups in most developed countries. Has the Media, Religion, and Culture research taken up the exploitative relations of the countries of the North or the injustices supported by the social elites in developing countries? Has research dealt with the issues of conflict, war, and migration? All too often religious media ignore war.

In the face of widespread belief that public participation in governance has declined and that the media are part of a decline in the demands of accountability for governing elites, research has failed to examine the role of religious media.

All this remains a research agenda that the Media, Religion, and Culture perspective might well take up.

An earlier version of this essay appeared under the title "The 'Media, religion and culture' perspective: Discovering a theory and methodology for studying media and religion" in J. Srampickal, G. Mazza, & L. Baugh (Eds.), Cross Connections: Interdisciplinary Communications Studies at the Gregorian University (Saggi celebrativi per il XXV anniversario del CICS) (pp. 313-342). Roma: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana. -Ed.

Editor's Afterword

Religion and the means by which we communicate are cultural institutions and they interact closely with other cultural phenomena. They can be studied like other institutions, but religious believers often are reluctant to subject their own religious beliefs to the same objective treatment as they do other cultural phenomena. The beliefs held sacred by others might easily be treated the same as non-religious beliefs or myths, but our own beliefs flash warning signals if we approach them as objectively as we might the beliefs of others. The signals become more strident in proportion to the degree of sacredness with which the beliefs are held. This can result in reticence on the part of a social scientist with strong religious beliefs who tries to study his or her own beliefs as objectively as those of others, or as objectively as an "outsider" might do.

The early encounter between religion and the social sciences was affected by the positivistic assumptions of some social scientists. Religious people who wished to use social science approaches to study their religions often found secular social scientists to be unwelcoming because of their own positivistic and materialistic prejudices. The unwritten assumption seemed to be, "If you can't count it, it's not worth studying." As was noted above, religion sometimes was written off as "just a form of mild neurosis," thereby weakening any claim it might have for serious study. "Cultural studies," relying on a wider range of evidence, proved to offer a more favorable environment for the study of religion than some other research approaches, in spite of seeming to lean somewhat towards Marxist-style analysis.

Fortunately social scientists in more recent years have broadened their outlooks and have become more receptive to both qualitative research methodologies and to the study of religion. Unfortunately, though, much of the growing interest in religion has coincided with a growth of social and political problems around the world which have roots in religious differences. The war in Iraq is a case in point. Failure to take account of the complexity of religious factors in that country has been a major contributor to the escalating chaos there during the last few years. The political role religion can assume even in the modern world has become painfully evident there and in many other trouble spots. Conflicts, even those that appear purely political, often cannot be resolved without a deep understanding of the religious factors that influence the various parties involved.

The most influential contemporary religious movements owe less to modern communication media as such than they do to combinations of more traditional forms of communication with mass media and/or the Internet. Outstandingly successful in this respect is the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Ideologically averse to cinema and other forms of pictorial imagery, Islamic fundamentalism has spread its message largely by word of mouth and print media. However, its promoters have been alert to newly-appearing possibilities. For example, satellite broadcasting facilities set up in the Middle East seem to have been used to reinforce the influence the fundamentalists had long been fostering through more mundane means, such as direct interpersonal contacts, during the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and in religious schools throughout the Muslim world.

Another example of the use of combinations of media is the Protestant fundamentalist movement in the United States that has promoted support for Israel through a series of novels on the "end times" allegedly as predicted by the book of Revelation in the New Testament. Tens of thousands of copies of the several novels in this series, supplemented by films and television programs, have stimulated support for Israel and spread anti-Islamic sentiment among many millions of readers in the United States. This "Christian Zionism" appears to have subtly influenced individuals at the highest levels of the American government for some years up to the invasion of Iraq in early 2003. As recently as 2006 the White House convened off-the-record meetings with leaders of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), a group that supports "Israel's expansionist policies" as "a biblical imperative" (according to The Nation, August 8, 2006, (web only).

This complex political case provides a good example of a situation that commingles religious influences with mass media and many other cultural influences. Study of cases of this kind require attention to a large number of factors that demand a holistic research methodology that can ensure that as many of those factors as possible are given an opportunity to be recognized and their influences given their due weight.

-W. E. Biernatzki, S.J.

General Editor

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Robert A. White, S.J.

whitesaut@yahoo.com