Religion & Media Review Essay

7/21/2019 Religion & Media Review Essay

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Review Essay

Religion and media:

A critical review ofrecent developments

David MorganDuke University, NC, USA

Abstract

This article considers recent changes in the definition of religion and of media as the basis forframing the study of their relation to one another and recent research in the intersection theyhave come to form over the last two decades or so. The history, materiality, and reception of eachhave colored scholarly work, and made ethnography, practice, material culture, and embodimentkey aspects of scholarship. A new paradigm for some scholars for studying mediation is aes-theticsno longer understood as the philosophy of the beautiful, but as the study of perceptionin the mediated practices that make up lived religion.

Keywords

aesthetics, materiality, mediation

Definitions of religion and of media have undergone broad changes among scholars over the

last generation. Religion has come to be widely understood as embodied practices that

cultivate relations among people, places, and non-human forcesnature, spirits, ancestors,

saints, godsresulting in communities and sensibilities that shape those who participate.

This departs from an older framework in which religions were defined as systems of ideas to

which believers assented (Hoover, 2006: 45

83; Lopez, 1998; Lynch, 2007, 2012; Orsi, 2005;

Zito, 2008).

By the same token, media have come to be understood as technologies of sensation, as

embodied forms of participation in extended communities joined in imagination, feeling,

taste, affinity, and affect (De Vries and Weber, 2001; Hoover, 2006; Hoover and Lundby,

1997; Meyer, 2012; Stolow, 2005, 2013). This approach clearly departs from an older defin-

ition of media as channels for targeting receivers with the delivery of messages in order to

shape opinion or achieve certain effects. The reasons for the shift in each province of inquiry

Corresponding author:David Morgan, Department of Religion, Duke University, Box 90064, 118 Gray, Durham, NC 27708, USA.

Email: [email protected]

1(3) 347356

! The Author(s) 2013

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are noteworthy and important, but I should like to begin by observing that their striking

analogy to one another has meant a synthesis of religion and media as a subfield in each

domain. I want to make the observation, but also to consider the topography produced by

the work occupying this intersection of two older fields of study.

Religious studies and media studies as academic fields are not themselves so very old, ofcourse, but each rests on identifiable cultural artifacts as an empirical basis for identifying

the sort of thing they do. One studies religions, comparing them, tracing their histories,

analyzing their ideologies, politics, and rites, with a strong legacy of attending to theologies

or the rationale of beliefs. The other studies media, focusing on histories punctuated by

technological domination and change, political control, and commercial exploitation, with a

strong traditional emphasis on the content and effect of individual mediums. Once again, the

analogy of the two discourses is striking, and yet the two have spent much of their history

ignoring one another.

This is especially ironic in the case of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, where sacred texts

dominate the intelligentsia of each tradition, and philology has often been its obsession. One

might think that theologians and scholars preoccupied with words, steeped in manuscripts

and books, would have spent more time thinking about the mediation of the religions they

study. But in every case, for believers and unbelievers alike, it was the ideas that mattered,

the immaterial substance hovering above pages and ink, which was taken to exist really only

in minds and souls, having originated as ideas in the deitys mind or spirit. Mind, like soul, is

not a very material conception. Add to this a strong relegation of technology, media pro-

duction, and in the ancient world, even the act of writing to lower echelons, to the work of

artisans, mechanics, craftsman, and slaves, and the result is a long tradition of spiritualizing

ideas. This way of thinking has endorsed a dualism of material medium and spiritual ideas

that replicates the prevailing ontologies of the three so-called religions of the book.

This should not be surprising in religions whose divinities speak in particular

languagesHebrew, Greek, and Arabicwhich practitioners assume have passed seam-

lessly into written words that are regarded by adherents as the definitive, authoritative

medium of the deitys self-revelation. In fact, we might wish for a recovery of the uttering

god, the aspirating, reverberating, articulating deity whose breath moves through sounds

and the sharp diction of idiomatic utterances. If we did, we would take one important step

toward materializing and embodying traditions that at certain points in their respective

histories found it compelling to shift from the performative aspect of divine speech to the

textuality of script, when the scribal word replaced the ritual word and the definition of

religion shifted from rite and hierarchy and the local culture of authority to the scholastic

rigors of learning, editing, canonizing, and polemicizing. This is a cultural turn when Paul

edged out Peter, when the epistle trumped circumcision in the definition of Christianity, and

in Judaism when the Temples ruin was followed by the rise of Rabbinic Midrash and the

Talmud. The turn from orality to textuality shaped the study of religion for a very long

timeand, indeed, was the very origin of the modern academy. Only in the last several

decades have scholars insisted on discerningeven in the most textual practicesthe traces

of embodiment, of breath, of hand, of posture, of somatic registration. Reading and writing

are body practices with spiritual and other consequences (Griffiths, 1999; Horsfield, 2013;

Kittler, 2010: 5488; Ong, 1982: 78138; Peters, 1999). Recent work on various aspects of

the language and textualities of the three religions has focused critical attention on oral and

inscribed aspects of mediation (Coleman, 2000; Hofmeyr, 2004; Horsfield, 2013; Moosa,

2006; Stolow, 2010; Stordalen, 2013).

348 Critical Research on Religion 1(3)


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For its part, media studies has happily presumed that religion expired somewhere between

the French Revolution and Marxisms dismissal of religion as the opiate of the masses, a

largely inert pacifier that was no match for more interesting distractions such as entertain-

ment media. Secularization was supposed to mean that the nasty incursion of religion into

public life would be no more and that the secular state, safely insulated from ecclesiasticalcontrol, would arise. Disestablishment happened, to be sure, but religion did not go away.

There are far fewer practicing Christians in Europe today, but growing numbers of Muslims,

Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists in London, Birmingham, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and

Hamburg. Indebted to Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, media

studies still by and large embraces the secularization thesis. You will not find many religion

scholars housed in media studies departments. You will need to walk across campus to find

them, and they may very likely give you an odd look when you knock on their doors and ask

to be admitted to their seminars on Augustine or Paul or the Caliphate or the Babylonian

Talmud. However, if you look carefully, you can find a growing number of seminars on

Religion and Media, Religion in the Public Sphere, Digital Religion, and the

Material Culture of Religions, where inherently interdisciplinary studies of what Jeremy

Stolow (2005: 125) has aptly termed religion as media are quietly charting out an encoun-

ter of two neighbors who are only just meeting.

The turn toward recognizing the intimate and longstanding, even immemorial, intercon-

nectedness of religion and media under the broad heading of mediation has been stressed

by anthropologist Birgit Meyer, who has championed the recovery of the senses in the study

of religion, especially in regard to media. In what she calls sensational forms, Meyer

argues that religious images, dress, characteristic spaces, routines, and practices tend to

structure experiences of the transcendental (2006: 20). The condensation of practices,

attitudes, and ideas shapes what people feel, sense, and imagine, but it is not a rigid

determination because the structure or form of sensation is open to change and historical

development. The idea recalls Bourdieus understanding of habitus as the production of

second natures. A habitus is not a Platonic archetype, but history turned into practice

(Bourdieu, 1977: 78)dispositions that function as structuring structures. . . without in

any way being the product of obedience to rules (1977: 72). However, rather than engaging

in structuralist analysis, Meyer relies on ethnography. Nor does she ground her study in the

scrutiny of properties inherent to one medium or another, nor to the aims of producers or

the effects of media on consumers. It is the actions of those experiencing media that intrigue

Meyer. The form in question is embedded in the bodies of practitioners, the condensation of

long experience, best understood as a disposition or sensibilitya shared form of practice

that allows people to collectively and individually perform their identity.

Among scholars principally interested in new media and audience and effects studies,

attention to the history of media has often suffered, leading to a kind of infectious cult of

the new. But a steady stream of research over the last two decades demonstrates the interest,

range, and availability of historical work (Burke Smith, 2010; Hangen, 2002; Hofmeyr, 2004;

Lundby, 2013; Morgan, 2007, 2008: 119; Nord, 2004; Peters, 1999; Rosenthal, 2007; Sloan,

2000; Stolow, 2013; Sweet, 1993). Ethnographically informed accounts enliven our sense of

lived religion and mediated practices, and helpfully shift from the traditional emphases on

media production to reception (Coleman, 2000; Hoover, 2006; Morgan, 1998; Schofield

Clark, 2003). However, a fulsome understanding of mediation will insist on the temporality

of habitus and the formation of sensory dispositions over time. New media always happen

within existing ecologies, relying for their effect and appeal on the patterns they change and

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the attitudes and interests they challenge. The agony of learning a new software, the con-

gregations unease with liturgical reform, the threat of radio, television, and cell phones to

certain traditional authorities, the annoyance of teenage textingall of these are somatic

disturbances, disruptions to the inherited aesthetic of foregoing mediations. The historicity

of mediation could not be more embodied and salient, and the dense interweaving, evenvirtual identity, of religion and mediation should not be missed. Take away a Lutherans

hymnal, an Orthodox Jews tefellin, an Evangelicals dog-eared bible, a Catholics rosary, a

Hindus inscription of a yantra and you numb the sensation of their religions.

Some helpful work on aspects of mediated embodiment stands out (Connerton, 1989:

72104; De Witte, 2013; Lo vheim, 2013; Sobchack, 2004), but more is needed. One feature

of embodiment that has begun to receive attention is affect and emotion, and for good

reason (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Scheer, 2012). The human brain codes memory forma-

tion as well as all forms of sensation with feelings or emotions. Look at the world and you

will not see only beings, things, and places, but all of these rendered in the stark and subtle

colors of fear, anger, tenderness, resentment, hope, desire, and esteem. We file and retrieve

memory traces with emotion; and we forget with emotions, repressing the unpleasant, over-

looking the bothersome, ignoring the unclean, deviant, or impure. We magnify the tiny and

conceal the colossal with feelings of disdain and dread. These processes are so fundamental

to the economies of perception and memory that religion without emotion is not religion.

Mediation is how feelings are packaged and deposited, remembered and rehearsed, shared

and broadcast, transmitted and ritualized. Feeling is a complex array of coding, character-

izing, classifying, clouding, and obliterating in the affective technologies of mediation.

Everything I have said so far has underscored the major thematic ofmediation. This has

become an important idea over the last decades because of the greater attention given to the

understanding of the related terms media and medium since McLuhan (Eisenlohr, 2009;

Engelke, 2010; Meyrowitz, 1985; Stolow, 2005). In some sense, media has been a prob-

lematic term since it came during the first half of the twentieth century to refer to the mass-

media of broadcast entertainment and journalism, fueled by the industry of commercial

media production, its government regulation, and the left wings disdain for it as a tool of

social control or aesthetic and moral impoverishment (Ewen, 1988; Hendershot, 2011;

Rosenthal, 2007). Of course, broadcast and print journalism and entertainment remain

important and active domains of research (Buddenbaum, 1998; Lundby, 2009; Silk, 1995;

Sumiala-Seppa nen et al., 2006; Winston, 2009, 2012), and not only because media produc-

tion and regulation as well as journalism are big business. They are also powerful ideological

formations that have shaped modernity at a fundamental level. The study of film and reli-

gion (Dwyer, 2006; Lindvall and Quicke, 2011; Mitchell and Plate, 2007) and even more

recently of religion and digital media has built importantly on the longstanding interest in

mass-mediated forms of religiosity (Campbell, 2010; Helland, 2005; Howard, 2011). Interest

in mass-mediated communication inevitably raises the important issue of consumption and

commerce, which have received able attention from several authors (Einstein, 2008;

Hendershot, 2004; Schofield Clark, 2007).

If media has tended to refer to the production and regulation of commercial instru-

ments, mediation has taken up a different discursive focus, largely through the impact of

anthropology, ethnography, religious studies, and cultural studies. This is not hard to under-

stand. It has come to seem impossible to study religion as culture without studying its

mediationstextualities, spaces, gender, foods, dress, movements, sounds, and forms of

embodiment. As a result, some scholars have looked for help to a re-conception of aesthetics.



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Several have suggested this in recent years, but the project remains incomplete (Coleman,

2000: 143165; Meyer, 2006; Meyer and Verrips, 2008; Morgan, 1998: 2634; Pinney and

Thomas, 2001). Traditionally understood as the philosophy of the beautiful, aesthetics

might be pushed in a different direction, one closer to the terms original meaning in the

eighteenth century: the study of artistic perception as a form of cognition. A great deal ofwork on embodiment, film, and art has relied on Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of

Perception (1962), and to good effect. Recent studies of mobility and media are making

further use of phenomenology (Bu scher et al., 2011), and work on sensory ethnography

has made important use of phenomenology (Pink, 2009), but the productive application

of phenomenology to religion and media aesthetics remains for future work.

In the manuscript on which he was working at the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty

described the chiastic relation of the body as sensible and the body as sentient (1968:

137138), and asserted that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is con-

stitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle

between them, it is their means of communication (135). This suggests that consciousness

itself is a form of mediation in which the body, or the flesh, as Merleau-Ponty put it, con-

nects the invisible, the sensing body, to the visible, the felt objectand this intimacy is the

way in which some have sought to define both media and technology. McLuhan has been

criticized for confusing media and technology in just this way, but when we regard embodi-

ment itself as both, the slippage is understandable. McLuhan defined media (or media

technologies) as extensions of human beinghuman bodies, social bodies, and the various

conceptions of what a human being is (McLuhan, 1964: 21, 70).

We need not share McLuhans sensational view of contemporary media or the view that

all cultural change is driven by technological change to recognize that technologies mediate

the body and the world around us, and that religions, like every other cultural activity, are

and always have been mediated in some way. The pay-off of this recognition is that

technologies of sensation structure the felt-life of a religion, telling us much about how

people build and maintain their worlds, and what roles religions play in the ongoing work

of cultural construction. This has been variously explored in a new volume edited by

Stolow (2013), which shows that we are in a position now to dismantle the conceptual

distinction between body and technology in order to develop the idea of mediation.

Though variously defined (Hoover and Lundby, 1997: 298309; Meyer, 2012: 2331;

Morgan, 2011: 138140; Stout, 2012: 30), the term may be best described as any practice

of communication that intermingles the body with the world around it such that modes of

embodiment become the measure of what people claim to know or feel as true. The debt

to phenomenology is obvious. A few examples will signal how broadly I intend this view of

mediation: dressing in clothing specially suited to an occasion that would not be the same

without appropriate dress; ritualized gesture in worship that is a fundamental ingredient in

the efficacy of the ritual; eating food at holiday events that helps create the experience of

the holiday; reciting scripture whose intonation infuses it with solemnity and power; and

gazing at sacred images in ways that constitute a religious form of address and relation.

Each of these instances means adapting ones body (of which the mind is an integral part)

to the circumstance of an experience in time and space, creating a form of presence that

shapes ones relation to self and other, past and future. Each of these actions grasps what

we experience as real, both shaping us and shaping the world about us. By understanding

how media do this, we move closer to understanding how religions work as complex forms

of communication.

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Describing how this happens, accounting for the role of the body in human interaction

has been a major concern of social science over the past century and more. Durkheim

classically described one dominant theory of the ritual construction of society, achieved,

he argued, by the repeated staging of collective effervescence, which was invested in myth,

totem, and symbol in order to preserve the rite and enable repeated access to its constructiveenergies. Media theorists have endorsed and argued with Durkheim on this. Dayan and Katz

(1992) developed an influential account of the media event as an instance of Durkheimian

functionalisms quest for social solidarity. Figuring out how modern societies, especially

democratic societies, continue to cohere without the coercive forces of monarchies, social

castes, and strong ecclesiastical structures has occupied social and political theorists since the

seventeenth century. Nationalism, the public sphere, racial ideology, economic self-interest,

social contract theory, and accounts of the moral economy of sympathy have been among

the many explanations offered to account for societys resistance to entropy.

Where are media and religion in this? The power of media pervades most accounts of the

maintenance of public and republic. Propaganda and instrumentalist media, for example,

have been studied as sources of cohesion. Advertising, political communication, public

schools, public relations, and journalism have been adduced as the occasions and media

for making citizens who reproduce social order rather than tear it down. Religion has often

been ignored by those who espouse the ideal of secularization. The intertwining legacies of

the Enlightenment, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber certainly encouraged social analysts

to regard modernity as disenchanted, devoid of religion, God, and the transcendent. Yet

since the 1990s, scholars have increasingly recognized the persistence of all kinds of religions,

including patriotic traditional religions like Christianity, but also the modern cult of nation-

alism and the collectivist rites of civil religion mediated in print, radio, and television as well

as in parades, mass movements, flags, totemic personalities and culture heroes, and political

organizing. The rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, eventuated by Roe v. Wade

and the trajectory of Ronald Reagan in the United States, could not have commanded the

career it did without television and radio (Hoover, 1988); and the production of books,

music, videos, and films that followed expanded Evangelicalisms national ambitions by

appealing to consumers (Hendershot, 2004). The social and political careers of media else-

where in the world have received important scrutiny for their religious significance. For

instance, Pentecostalism and the so-called prosperity gospel in West Africa have made

aggressive use of television, radio, billboards, and bumper stickers (Chiluwa, 2008; Ukah,

2008); Charles Hirschkind has studied the importance of cassette tapes in practices of lis-

tening in Egypt (2006); Arvind Rajagopal has considered the place of television in the rise of

Hindu nationalism in India (2001); and Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley (1995) assembled

a useful volume of essays on religion, media, and social change in India.

Religion, mediated religion, is everywhere, but critics of functionalisms emphasis on

social cohesion (Couldry, 2003; Sumiala, 2013: 2730) have urged that media rituals are

less responsible for that than are expanded incarceration, law enforcement, a mushrooming

security apparatus, and militarization, and that cohesion itself is not all that evident in light

of transnational flows, population migrations (forced or otherwise), ethnic cleansing, civil

wars, and social unrest. The role of media in promoting this strife and violence has not been

lost on some media scholars (Hackett, 2006; Mitchell, 2012). Nick Couldry has argued for

recovering another reading of Durkheim, one that stresses the cognitive rather than emotive

side of Durkheims study of ritual, urging that such scrutiny of everyday practices of

categorisation. . . captures the pervasiveness of the structural links between media rituals



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and social life (Couldry, 2003: 8). In other words, we stand to learn more about how people

actually map their worlds by means of media practices than we do from their emotional

evocation of a mythic social center.

Yet one wonders if it is necessary to exclude one or the other approach because people use

media to do bothto feel and think about the worlds which are both imagined and real, felt,and conceptually parsed. Certainly any map of social structure will have much to say sim-

ultaneously about borders and center, real or perceived. A full-bodied aesthetic analysis of

religious mediation will direct its attention to both emotive and cognitive because perception

and imagination are always already both affect and ratiocination. Scrutinizing the aesthetics

of religious mediation will define cognition in broader terms in order to discern the social life

of religions as a diversely mediated phenomenon.

Aesthetics has traditionally belonged to the domain of philosophers, art theorists, and

literary critics. However, redeployed to study the role of embodiment in the mediation of

thought and feeling associated with religions, aesthetics will need to become part of a

much more interdisciplinary project. The study of religion and media over the last two

decades has proved to be just that. To date, no single discipline has emerged as dominant,

which goes far to account for the vitality of the discourse. Anthropologists, sociologists,

historians, critical theorists, and scholars in media studies, religious studies, and cultural

studies mix freely at conferences and symposia dedicated to the topic of religion and

media. Judging from the many events hosted by international centers of activity in

Boulder, New York, Sao Paulo, Jyva skyla , Sigtuna, Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Utrecht,

and Amsterdam, among others, the willingness to speak across the boundaries of academic

fields and disciplines is generous and productive. Yet the welcome diversity of methods

and conceptual frameworks can also discourage critical rigor and integrative study.

Presentations at the conferences are often remarkably uneven. Much of the work is

under-theorized and devoted to celebrating the novelty of the latest media technology,

and there is little sense about what it might all add up to.

Yet a series of conferences has worked to create a forum for scholarly exchange, which

has led to the formation of the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture, Inc.,

which seeks to professionalize the field as part of the landscape of formal academic associ-

ations. However, for the many scholars committed to their established disciplines and not

interested in creating a new one, the more compelling strategy for making an intellectual

difference may be to affect the dominant structures of academic teaching and research within

their own disciplines by drawing on interdisciplinary research and collaboration with col-

leagues in other academic fields. If that is the case, we may be witnessing a gradual differ-

entiation. On the one hand are those who operate under the broad canopy of media and

religion, which they take to be the intersectionof two otherwise distinct realmsfor exam-

ple, journalismandreligion, ecclesiastical authorityandpopular culture, themediatizationof

traditional religion (Lundby, 2009). On the other hand are those scholars whose focus is

better served by the more pointed nomenclature of religious mediation, which they under-

stand not as a discrete field of inquiry, but as a fundamental aspect of the religious worlds

they study (Meyer, 2012).

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Author biography

David Morgan is Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Duke

University, NC. Author ofThe Embodied Eye(2012),The Lure of Images (2007),The Sacred

Gaze (2005), Protestants and Pictures (1999), and Visual Piety (1998), Morgan has also

edited Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture (2008) and Religious Material Culture:

The Matter of Belief(2010). He is an editor of the journal Material Religionand co-editor of

a book series at Routledge entitled Religion, Media, Culture.


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