Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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of cultural systems and processes. Johnson suggested that cultural studies researchers would therefore benefit by thinking about their work in terms of studying different stages of the circuit of cultural production and consumption. His ideas were later developed in a key textbook, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Du Gay et al. 1997), in which the authors suggested that the circuit of culture involved processes of production, forms of representation in cultural texts and objects, the use of these cultural products in the formation of social identities, the wider ways in which these cultural products were used and consumed, and the structures which regulated how these forms of culture were produced, distributed and used. The point here is that these different points of the circuit of culture do not exist in isolation, but in complex patterns of inter-connection. For example, the decisions that media producers make about the representation of the content of their products is not simply their own autonomous decision, but influenced by their perceptions of what their audiences want as well as financial and other regulatory structures which encourage or prohibit particular forms of content. In the study of religion, media and popular culture, scholars have tended to pay attention to particular points in the circuit of culture. The study of religion and film is a good case in point, in which a considerable amount of work has been done on the representation of religious characters and narratives in film. There has been much less work done, by comparison, on the processes by which films relevant to religion are made, the ways such films are consumed by their audiences, and the legal, financial and cultural regulatory structures that shape these processes (see Lynch, 2009a). As we have seen, researchers interested in media, popular culture and lived religion, particularly in media studies, anthropology and visual and material culture studies, have done much more work on cultural consumption. But there is still relatively little work done on the processes by which media and popular culture relevant to religion are produced, or complex systems of cultural production, consumption and regulation as a whole. Part of the challenge for the field is methodological. Students and scholars in religious studies, for example, are not usually trained in the range of empirical methods that are needed to examine processes of cultural production and consumption in real-world settings, which means that ideas about the ritual or mythological functions of media and popular culture are generally left at the level of theoretical assertions rather than being examined through real-world investigation. Again, people trained in religious studies do not necessarily know how to access information about media and culture industries which is more familiar to those working in film and media studies. This suggests the value of cross-disciplinary training and collaboration, both for new students in the field and for more experienced researchers.
A final area of study that is just beginning to attract more sustained interest concerns religion and virtual realities. Electronically-constructed virtual worlds have become an increasing part of many people’s cultural lives through the expansion of the video games market (annual income from which now exceeds that of Hollywood film), and the online virtual world of Second Life. Religion can be found up in the expanding world of consolebased and online video games, both in the form of religions invented as part of the worlds constructed for fantasy games and in the form of games designed and marketed for niche religious audiences, such as the Evangelical video games, Catechumen and Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Video games have also been designed to encourage the development of particular kinds of spiritual practice, such as The Night Journey, produced in conjunction with the video artist Bill Viola, which seeks to encourage an attitude of contemplation in the game player. Different forms of religious institution and practice can also be found in the virtual world of Second Life, which includes not only meeting places for a wide range
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of traditional and alternative religious groups, but also virtual forms of real-world religious pilgrimage sites (such as a virtual Mecca). As the forms of interaction on Second Life become more complex (e.g. with the introduction of live voice communication), so richer possibilities emerge for different kinds of religious practice. These include practices which may not be available in a person’s local community, such as opportunities to have a same-sex wedding in a progressive, virtual church. As the methods of interface with these virtual worlds also become more complex, this also raises possibilities for more sophisticated forms of aesthetic engagement with these virtual worlds. Future work in this area may consider in what ways existing religious power-structures and aesthetic regimes are imported into these virtual worlds, and in what ways these worlds make possible new forms of religious organization and practice.
The wider study of religion and contemporary society
As we have seen, then, the period since the 1990s has since undergone a significant expansion of academic work on religion, media and popular culture, which has made important advances in how we think about this field as well as raising important areas for future study. Thinking about media and cultures of everyday life in relation to religion is not simply a niche area of academic work for those with interests in cultural studies, but also has the potential to add to our understanding of some of the most important issues facing the study of religion and contemporary society.
First, the study of media and popular culture can help to clarify how religious groups and ideologies survive and even thrive in the cultural conditions of late modernity. The secularization thesis proposed that as societies became increasingly modernized, so the social significance of religion would decline. In Western Europe, there is considerable evidence to support this thesis. Yet at the same time, it is clear that this process of decline is uneven and that whilst some religious institutions are dying out, others are able to survive, find new members and influence wider public life. Some previous attempts to explain why some religious groups fare better than others have focused on the attraction of conservative religious beliefs in a cultural climate of risk and uncertainty, or on demographic trends (particularly birth rates) in specific religious communities. Another possibility worth considering is that the ability of religious groups to survive and thrive in late modernity is related to their ability to generate sub-cultural worlds of media and popular culture through which adherents feel part of a wider collective, learn and maintain particular sensory and aesthetic regimes for encountering their vision of the sacred, and find reinforcement for particular ways of seeing and acting in the world. This may be especially pertinent for the ability of religious groups to retain their younger members. There is considerable potential, then, for thinking both about how such religious sub-cultures operate, including analysing the ways in which they succeed and fail in maintaining hegemonic views of the world and how religious authority is reinforced or challenged through them. Understanding such sub-cultures in a wider social context might also give us greater insights into how some religious groups are more able than others to maintain a core of active adherents in a cultural climate that they experience as indifferent, or even hostile, to religion.
A second key issue for the study of contemporary religion is the relationship between religion and the wider public sphere, including the place of religion in relation to public institutions such as government, education, welfare and the legal system. The new atheism is part of a wider phenomenon of secularisms that seek to maintain clear boundaries
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between religion as a matter of private concern, and public life characterized by rational ways of thinking and arguing that are not conducted along the lines of narrow confessional assumptions. At the same time, many religious groups are attempting to maintain or expand their involvement in the delivery of school education, the recognition of religious conscience and beliefs in the legal system, and respect for religious sensitivities in public arts and media. Tensions around these issues in many Western societies have been fuelled by the growth of some religions linked to migration, notably Islam, associated liberal fears about the resurgence of fundamentalist religion, tensions within liberal thought between values of tolerance and equality of opportunity, as well as other sources of social and political grievance. These contentious issues about the place of religion in contemporary public life are particularly fought through the media. The media has become a key site for public awareness of religion, as fewer people have direct contact with religious institutions, and also provides a context for this debate to take place through news coverage and other interactive media. Media outrage over particular interventions in this debate, such as the pilloring of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, by some British tabloid newspapers for suggesting that there should be some recognition of Sharia law within the British legal system, also exemplifies how the media actively constructs shared beliefs around national identity, otherness, and the dangers of particular forms of religion. Understanding how the media represents, and makes possible, particular forms of interaction around the place of religion in public life is therefore another key area for study.
A third important area for study is the cultural circulation of religion beyond the traditional boundaries of religious institutions and personal piety. Whilst there is a long history of the subversion and re-working of institutional religious symbols in what is sometimes referred to as folk religion, the expansion of mass media in the twentieth century created new ways in which religious symbols and figures could be used and represented against the grain of religious orthodoxy. Schofield Clark (2005) has, for example, described the recent rise of the ‘dark side of Evangelicalism’, in which Evangelical beliefs and symbols acquire a wider cultural life and are used in ways far removed from Christian orthodoxy. Marilyn Manson’s subversive use of Christian imagery in his music, learnt from his teenage years at a private Christian school, provide a good illustration of this. This cultural circulation of religion extends not only to figures and symbols from particular religious traditions, but also to the concept of religion itself. Some of the public commentary, for example, anticipating the introduction of Apple’s new i-Phone used religious allusions to emphasize its significance, depicting it as a miraculous moment of salvation. Notions of religion can also circulate through media and popular culture to refer to practices not conventionally thought of in religious terms, with for example club nights being given religious names, or people referring to sporting venues as shrines or to sports fandom as a kind of religious devotion. What is interesting about such uses of religion is not necessarily whether popular music or sport could be thought of as religious in some sense. Functionalist concepts of religion are problematic in this context as we noted earlier. But the fact that religious language and imagery is being used in this way is illuminating both in terms of what people are attempting to do and say about their cultural practices, often in an ironic and knowing way, through such uses of religion, as well as suggesting what people imagine religion to be. The persistence of religious language and symbols in societies in which growing numbers of people have little formal religious involvement, and in which these religious resources are detached from their institutional moorings, invites further analysis. The unconventional circulation of religion through globalized media and popular culture also creates significant possibilities for conflict. The case of the international
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protests over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad provides a good example of this. The fact that these protests were inspired, not by the original publication of the cartoons in a Danish language tabloid, but by their re-publication in news media in the Middle East intended to stimulate public protest, exemplifies that cycles of cultural representation and protest can occur through complex processes and can be shaped by a range of religious, cultural, commercial and political factors. These protests feed into wider controversies about freedom of speech, artistic freedom, the nature and limits of blasphemy, and respect for religious beliefs that further energizes conflict and debate concerning the place of religion in public life. Understanding more about the nature and effects of the circulation of religion within media and popular culture beyond the boundaries of piety therefore provides another important basis for understanding religion in the contemporary world.
Finally, the study of media and popular culture can also help to illuminate broader questions about operative forms of the sacred in contemporary society. Faced with the plurality of religious and secular life-worlds, some scholars of religion have returned to the concept of the sacred, examining what different religious and secular forms of the sacred shape contemporary life. The notion of the sacred used here is not that of some form of universal religious experience – as suggested by Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade – and which has since been criticized as a liberal, theological account of mysticism. It reflects, instead, a revision of Émile Durkheim’s understanding of the sacred as a social form that shapes communal identity, values and experiences of collective effervescence, and concepts from cultural anthropology in which the sacred acts as a non-negotiable marker of essential values or boundaries (see Antonnen, 2000). As a social force that shapes communities and becomes a basis of social action, the sacred is generated not through some kind of pure inner experience of transcendence, but through social and cultural processes in which the sacred is remembered and made real in people’s lives. Media and popular culture are central to such processes in everyday life. The mass production and consumption of images of gods, saints and shrines is, for example, an important point of connection between many people’s lives and the vision of the sacred in a particular religious tradition. But it is not only religious forms of the sacred that are mediated in such ways. Secular forms of the sacred are also remembered, celebrated and fought over through media and popular culture. One such example is the periodic repetition of news stories concerning the abduction or abuse of children. Whilst the individual cases vary, the feelings which they are intended to evoke suggest that such news stories are not simply providing information, but serving as a kind of ritual for recognizing the sacrality of the care of children. We may well need complex ways of understanding the genealogies and forms of the sacred that shape contemporary life, discovering that religious and secular forms of the sacred are often more inter-twined than might at first appear. But an integral part of this task will also be to consider how these forms of the sacred take concrete form in people’s lives through media and cultures of everyday life.
In summary, then, the study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life is a relatively recent field. Although informed in part by the more serious academic attention paid to the study of media and popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, this work has only grown significantly within the study of religion over the past two decades. We are already at a stage now where there is greater clarity about theories and methods that might help this work, as well some of the important questions that scholars in this area are turning to. Beyond this, though, we are beginning to see a growing recognition by a wider range of scholars interested in lived religion of how issues relating to media and popular culture are bound up with some of the most important questions for understanding contemporary religion. From
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its relatively recent growth, then, the study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life is starting to offer important ways of helping us to understand the cultural grounds on which contemporary forms of religion and the sacred are constructed and contested.
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