using the readings, please complete test 1450 PS. there is also a book that i will pass onto you once you download the rest of the class readings

Forms of communication and mediation are constantly changing.

Adapting to media change alters the forms of religious practice and influences which doctrines, theological themes, and understandings are emphasized.

Religion is inseparable from the forms of its mediation. As media culture changes, religious institutions and practices change.

In part because religious traditions seek to connect believers to something that transcends and interprets culture, religious communities often understand their practice and ideas to be static, an unchanging source of continuity over time.

Some academic observers also treat religion as a static and unmediated activity whose social purpose is to conserve traditional values. Yet the historical study of lived religious traditions demonstrates that religion isfluid, changing over time and in different cultural contexts, sometimes conserving and at other times challenging cultural norms.

To understand religious traditions, it is necessary both to think about what has endured over time and to recognize the ways traditions have adapted to new cultures, issues, and contexts. For example, though Christians have a sense offidelity to a 2,000-year tradition, Christianity looks quite different in different cultures and time periods. The beliefs and practices among Middle Eastern Christians in thefirst century, medieval European Catholics, and contemporary African Pentecostals are best understood when we give attention to their differences as well as their similarities. Religion adapts to changes in political and social structures, in style and taste, and in who holds power in society to produce new forms of religion, which are expressed in changes in religion’s mediations.

Changes that make media technologies cheaper and simpler to use grant greater access to a wider number of people. When people from outside the traditional centers of religious authority take advantage of this access in order to experiment with new forms of practice and to reflect on their religious lives it creates new centers of power. This shift is typically met by resistance from estab- lished leaders and institutions whose power is confirmed by already established forms of media. Other chapters focus on the rise of new religious movements and consider how, in seemingly secular societies, other forms of cultural med- iation such as nationalism or fandom may do the work of religion. This chapter explores how the changes in media and mediation have contributed to changes within traditional forms of religion.

The changing religious world The concept ofreligionis a construction or category through which we try to understand a diverse range of beliefs and practices that we assume are related in some way. On the ground, religion is not an abstraction. People do not practice religion in general, they practice Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Candomblé, New Age, yoga, or some personal set of practice and belief which outsiders see as one expression of what they abstractly call religion. Understandingreligion requires attention to the way particular religious traditions develop over time, how they are mediated in culture, and how traditions change as they respond to cultural change and adopt new forms of mediation.

The reader may have a personal spiritual practice or ascribe to no religion.

Readers in Great Britain, Europe, Japan, Canada, or any number of regions of the United States, may have seenfirsthand the decline of once-dominant reli- gious traditions. Readers in other regions of the United States, or in Africa, or South America may have seen the rise of traditions that are new to these regions. A full picture of religion in the world requires that individuals and cultures be cautious about universalizing their own experience. The decline of some traditional forms of Christianity, the rise of Islam, the spread of Pentecostal Christianity, the secularization of Japan, or the growth of Buddhism in the West, must be put in wider context.

Some places, northern Europe being a striking example, have seen considerable decline in organized religion in the last half-century. The Nordic countries have been at the forefront of the move to establish clearly secular societies. In secular society one may believe or not. Secularity need not mean that there is no religion. Rather, the secular culture treats religion as a personal matter that has no place in the public square. This can be seen in efforts in some countries to ban the wearing of religious garb or overtly religious symbols in schools and other public settings.

Sweden, which had a long history of supporting a state church, disestablished the Church of Sweden in 2000. One Swedish researcher at Uppsala University, who is also a Lutheran pastor, suggests that, while Swedes report that they want the church to continue, they seldom attend. She suggests that today the church is a symbol of cultural identity that is important to many Swedes but which is largely disconnected from their actual practice (Marta Axner, personal communication). Though not as dramatic, the number of people who attend 70Religion in the midst of change worship services or proclaim membership in the churches and synagogues has dropped across much of the rest of Western Europe (Figure 5.1).Many sociologists, most notably Peter Berger, once thought that secularization would privatize religion, eradicating it from public life, and that religion would become less plausible to individuals, leading them to lose faith, so that religion would largely die away. This idea has largely been rejected. Secularization is a signi ficant process, yet institutional and emerging forms of religion continue.

However, some scholars argue that the declines in religious a ffiliation that sociologists measure mark the passing of “Christendom, ”signaling the end of the conviction that there is a transnational society organized around Christian institutions and worldview (McLeod and Ustorf 2003). Northern Europe is a helpful illustration of the interactions of religion and the secular. For all the evidence of secularization, religion has not disappeared from northern Europe or become only a matter of cultural heritage. Societies are complex, and this apparent turn from religion has not been absolute. The desire in some countries to ban religious clothing and other symbols from civic institutions like schools, the courts, and government o ffices has produced repeated con flicts among those who see the wearing of the Muslim headscarf in public as a vital expression of modesty, or a beard and turban as inherent to Sikh religious identity, and those who see these practices as an imposition of the religious into public space presumed to be inherently secular. In part, this is a matter of immigration; the trend toward secularization is challenged by the presence of migrants from the southern hemisphere. But even in the most secular of states it is not only immigrants who practice religion. Islam and other religions of the world have attracted converts in Europe. People also continue various forms of Christian and Jewish practice, return to pre-Christian practices, or adopt new religions.

Figure 5.1 Church for sale Stability and change 71 Religious practice in the United States and Canada, particularly in some regions, is far more common than in northern Europe; however, even North America reports an overall continued decline in church membership and attendance (National Council of Churches 2010). Will the US and Canada continue to follow Europe toward more secular practice? Will religion become increasingly privatized, moving perhaps out of the physical and digital public square? As this volume goes to press, people in Quebec are debating“The Quebec Charter of Values”which, if passed, would ban the wearing of religious dress and symbols, at least by employees in schools, the courts, and other civic centers.

In the face of these changes it is understandable that some people ask whether the focus on individual religious identity combined with the decline in invol- vement in institutional forms of religion signifies the end of organized religion in Western societies. Certainly once-dominant religious groups have declined in influence, replaced both by a drop in overall affiliation and a more complex range of religious traditions and voices. Thus, news reports and scholarly studies are increasingly likely to focus on new and emerging religious movements and practices.

Secularity is a powerful movement, particularly in the northern hemisphere, and understanding this change is vital to understanding the history of religion in many regions. However, secularity and the privatization of religion are not the whole picture; the survey cited above that reports a gradual decline in church mem- bership in North America also reports that almost 146 million people belong to churches in the US and Canada. An accurate description of the northern hemisphere must recognize the continued development of religious life in the face of the rise of secularity and the questions that these developments raise about religion.

Understanding the religious environment also requires attention to shifts in power and presence between religious institutions and movements themselves.

In the United States there has been a decline in the non-Evangelical Protestant denominations that were once described as the religious mainline and thought to be able to speak for the nation on ethical issues. At the same time there has been growth in Evangelical and charismatic Christianity, Eastern religions, Islam, and new religious movements. In contrast to Europe, religious practice in North America is more common and often more evident in the public square. Since the European conquest of North America, Protestant Christianity has been the dominant form of religion on the continent, its hegemony sometimes creating a discourse of the United States as a“Christian nation.” Increasingly Americans have come to recognize the diversity of their religious heritage. America was not lacking in religious practices when thefirst Eur- opeans arrived. The First Nations of the North American continent have their own diverse indigenous religious traditions. European immigrants included free thinkers and Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians as well as various types of Protestants. Asian immigrants brought animist, Buddhist, Taoist, Shinto, and Confucian practices. The forced migration of slaves brought both Islam and the indigenous religious practices of Africa to the Americas. 72Religion in the midst of change Any picture of the range of religions and their influence in societies around the world must be complex. The patterns of practice and change are uneven.

Some places have far more obvious religious practice than others. It remains the case that around the world huge numbers of people identify with religious communities and institutions. The study of media, religion, and culture, then, must include an examination of how these religious groups respond to media change in di fferent times and spaces.

The possibilities and limitations of media If religion is inseparable from its mediation so that there is no unmediated religion against which we can measure contemporary practice, then religion exists in symbiotic relationship to the media through which it is expressed.

Thinking fairly conventionally about media, as though it were only a tool to illustrate something, we note that di fferent tools have di fferent e ffects. It follows that using di fferent forms of media to express a religion will reveal di fferent aspects of the tradition. The experience of listening to the Bach B Minor Mass, looking at Michelangelo ’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or participating in a sacred dance on Easter morning are all artistic mediations of Christianity that evoke di fferent bodily responses and draw attention to di ffer- ent elements of the religion (Figure 5.2). A new or di fferent medium provides a fresh perspective and in fluences the way we think about religion.

This idea, that the available media in fluence how people practice religion, focuses attention on the relationship between media and religion. Thinking in this way treats religion and media as though they were separate things, one of Figure 5.2 Sistine Chapel ceiling Stability and change 73 which (media) expresses the other (religion). Religion and media are not so easily separated. Music, painting, writing, architecture, dance, and the new media of our day are not simply illustrations of religion; they are locations of religion itself. To stay with but one of the examples above, the vast space of the Sistine Chapel with its intricately painted ceiling is not merely an illustration of religion, itisreligion at work, evoking in the Christian the vast and lasting power of their God, and of the empire organized in God’s name. It is not enough to say that, when media change, ourperspectiveon religion changes. If media and religion are intertwined in the way this book claims, then religion itself takes new form in the midst of media change.

The media/religion process can sound mechanistic, as if media technologies have an inevitable shaping effect on religion apart from what people do with them. That is also overly simplistic. Human agency is involved in the way that media are used. While technologies lend themselves to some possibilities and make others harder to envision, attention must be given to the human practices that develop around particular media tools.

Imagine you are watching a particularly beautiful sunset and pondering ways to convey the experience to your friends. You might mediate your experience in any of a number of ways. Perhaps you might address the phenomenon in purely scientific terms and write an essay analyzing how light refracted through pollution in the air produces a particular visual effect. Or, responding artistically, you might try to reproduce these patterns of light and color in a painting or capture them in a photograph. Perhaps the sunset evokes a sense of the sacred in you, a connection to something greater than yourself that transcends the everyday. If so, you might try to elicit a similar response from someone else.

You might sing a song or tweet about your own emotional and religious responses to the sight. You could write a theological treatise arguing that nature reveals a creator. In each case, the medium you choose lends itself to suggesting part, but not all, of your original experience. Even a multi-media presentation that combined all these mediations of your experience of the sunset would not be the experience itself. Further, your original experience of viewing the sunset is itself shaped by mediation. If you grew up hearing John Denver singSunshine on My Shoulders, or are familiar with Thomas Kincade’s use of glowing light in his idealistic paintings of American scenes, these things become lenses through which you view the sunset. If, on the other hand, your imagination is shaped byfilms and literature that use light and explosions as an apocalyptic image of a frightening end history, you might see the sunset differently.

Religious practitioners experience the sacred, and communicate their beliefs and practices, through some form of mediation. Whether they use sacred texts, theological arguments, rituals, spaces, images, scents, or sounds the medium they choose encourages particular ways of thought and practice. Reflecting on this, a University of Chicago blogger suggests,“We must confront the reality that a medium by the very terms of its existence remediates. It absorbs the form and content of other media and reworks, reconfigures, or otherwise refashions them”(Chakravorty 2012). 74Religion in the midst of change In illustration of the complex relationship between a mediation and the thing it signifies, the surrealist artist René Magritte (1898–1967) famously painted a work titled“The Treachery of Images.”It is a picture of a tobacco pipe above the wordsCeci n’est pas une pipe(“This is not a pipe”). With this cryptic caption the artist reminds us that what we see is paint and canvas, an image ofune pipe, not the pipe itself. Yet a rich portrayal elicits something in the human response that connects powerfully to the objects and experiences portrayed. In this case the painting evokes the idea of a pipe and perhaps reminds us of a famous pipe smoker like Sherlock Holmes or more complexly the smells and emotions connected to a family member who smokes a pipe. Similarly, one might look at a statue of the Buddha and easily recognize that it is a statue, not the Buddha. Still, the statue calls to mind the historicalfigure and his legacy. More than that, the mediation of the centralfigure of Buddhism evokes the beliefs and practices which are associated with the religion. For the practitioner of Buddhism such mediations are an inseparable part of the religion itself.

Resistance and adaptation to media change Some religious traditions are concerned that the complexity of the relationship between the signification and the signified leads to idolatry. Magritte is hinting at this phenomenon with his pipe painting: The painting is not a pipe, just as a statue of the Buddha is not the Buddha. Traditions more open to image think people understand that the statue invites the practitioner’sreflection on the Buddha. Other traditions have feared that this distinction is not so easily made and fear that such images would be revered instead of the sacred thing being represented by the statue, painting, or other image.

Expressing this concern, the Hebrew Scriptures speak of Yahweh as one who, unlike the deities of the Israelites’neighbors, cannot be portrayed. In the story of the golden calf, Moses becomes angry when he sees the Israelites turning to the golden statue portraying the Canaanite deity Ba’al and he smashes the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. During the Reformation in Europe, early Protestants destroyed religious paintings and smashed stained glass windows to express their desire for a pure and unmediated experience of God.

This rejection of images did not mean that these traditions did not have their own esthetic or produce their own sacred spaces that mediated their under- standing of the sacred (Goethals 1990). These early Protestants and the Israelites before them wanted to ensure that the images themselves were not becoming a focus of adoration, and they wanted to create conditions so that believers could have what they imagined would be a pure, unmediated religious experience.

Sunni Muslims, historically, have also taken this approach toward representa- tional images of their sacredfigures. Theyfind attempts to depict the Prophet Muhammad particularly offensive. Again, this does not mean that their traditional religion does not have its own mediations; think, for example, of the esthetic expressed in the architecture of a traditional mosque or in the elegant calligraphy that often illuminates verses of the Qur’an. Sunnis believe that the beautiful canStability and change75 point to the divine, but they also fear that when an image of the divine is too concrete it can be confused with that to which it is pointing.For Jews, Christians, and Muslims the ambivalence about image expresses a theological concern that nothing come between the people and the Holy One.

However real that concern, this book argues that we have no experience of the divine that is not embedded in the human mediations of that experience. Much of the popular discourse about religion and media expresses a similar concern that mediation dilutes some pure experience of religion. This may be due more to anxiety about change than to a concern about how people actually practice religion. Books like Allan Bloom ’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) seem to treat religion as though it were a fixed reality that is now beset by acculturated media change. In this view, mediations are seen as debasing religion. However, the relationship between media and religion is unavoidable.

There was no pre-media golden age of religion. Media/religion/culture is and always has been historically located and is thus a changing phenomenon.

Though change often produces anxiety, societies seldom reject new forms of media. Even Amish Christians with their horse-drawn buggies and traditional dress do not reject change outright. It is a misunderstanding of the nature of their religious lives to conclude that the Amish simply choose to live in the past.

Rather, they are slow adopters, carefully evaluating the impact of new technolo- gies on their family and community life. For instance, many Amish opt not to have a telephone in their homes, but they may allow it in the workplace for reasons of commerce and safety. Phone booths are sometimes positioned at the intersection of farms so that several families can share them for approved purposes without the phones disrupting the household (Umble 1992). Media scholar Heidi Campbell studies the ways in which religious communities both resist and adapt to new media. She calls this social adaptation of technol- ogy to religious purposes the “middle way. ”Among the groups she studies are ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel who have worked out religiously acceptable ways to control access to the Internet. In ways similar to how the Amish adapted to the telephone, the ultra-Orthodox Jews considered whether the Internet would disrupt community life and introduce religiously inap- propriate outside in fluences. They weighed this concern against the possibility that the Internet could be a useful tool for Jewish education and commerce. As a result, they developed kosher tools that could screen out objectionable material and steer users toward approved sites and sources (Campbell 2010). Both those who adapt to media change and those who resist new media cultures are impacted by media change. Media change contributes to chan- ges in religious practice, alters centers of authority, and shifts theological emphasis. InChapter 6we will consider, for instance, how Evangelical broad- casters adopted the mode of the television talk show, including its valorization of celebrity culture, and how this media practice changed Evangelical religious practice. One small piece of evidence that Christian communities are seeking to adapt to new media technologies can be seen when clergy who once resisted the use of television have installed big screens in their sanctuaries so they can 76 Religion in the midst of change provide graphic illustration of their sermons or simply make it easier for a large congregation to see what is going on. Preachers also adapt to the parameters of the medium of television and the norms of communication that it establishes even when they are not using video images in worship. Because TV and other forms of media have contributed to people’s shorter attention spans, ministers preach shorter sermons and lead worship services that have more visually and aurally stimulating activity. Both thoughtful students of religion and media and self-aware religious practitioners endeavor to understand how both resis- tance to and adoption of emerging media contribute to changes in the practices, theologies, doctrines, and locations of religions.

Changing locations of authority Religious institutions and traditions turn to multiple forms of authority, including religious texts, councils, and authorityfigures such as the Dalai Lama or the Pope that establish and interpret right doctrine and practice. In times of change, when believers experience conflict between these and other cultural centers of authority, the power of these individuals, religious texts, and councils, is often questioned, and new unofficial“authorities”can emerge.

Today social media create a space for these alternative voices. New authorities emerge who may lack traditional credentials but who have command of the new medium. For instance in Islam, particularly in the Shi’a tradition, Imams are trained in particular historic traditions and their authority rests on a com- bination of charisma within the community, training, and location within these traditions. But new media have given voice to a variety of online, radio, or television teachers of Islam from outside those traditions, and often trained in secular universities. They challenge the traditional authorities, opening a wider debate about Islamic life today (Echchaibi 2012).

The use of new forms of media as a location for religious innovation is not a new phenomenon; new or appropriated media have always provided means for lay and folk movements to develop new symbols and practices that contend with religious authorities’efforts to shape practice and doctrine. In medieval times the carnival provided a relatively safe space to mock the priests and lords of the manor, as have its popular culture descendants such asfilm, television, and comics. The practice of venerating Our Lady of Guadalupe (one of the cultural manifestations of Mary the mother of Jesus), whichfirst emerged among the poor in Mexico in the sixteenth century, has myriad contemporary expressions in folk art, tattoos, pilgrimages, and home altars. Something similar is happen- ing when common people in East Asia incorporate the images and actions of animistic practice into folk Buddhism. Paying attention to these mediations of alternative spiritualities and practices reminds us that religion goes where it will.

New practices and voices emerge to meet unmet needs, in so doing empowering new centers of religious life.

A concrete example of how media, religion, and culture change in relation- ship to each other can be found in Isabel Hofmeyr’s study of how John Bunyan’s Stability and change77 allegorical Protestant novelThe Pilgrim’s Progress was transformed as it was taken out of its original European context and put into a vastly di fferent one. The seventeenth-century English novel was hugely popular among European Pro- testants. Missionaries carried the book with them to Africa, where over time it was translated into some 80 African languages. In the process of translation into new languages and cultures, various concepts within the book took on di fferent meanings. Bunyan ’s focus on original sin was of central importance to his European readers. Original sin, as an explanation of the fall of humankind, was not, however, a crucial doctrine for African Christians. As a result, the images in the novel were interpreted di fferently by African translators and readers. The idea of original sin drops out of the African translations, or it takes new meanings.

Hofmeyr writes, “The most famous image of Bunyan ’s story, namely the burden on Christian ’s [the protagonist ’s] back, stood for original sin. In many African editions, this meaning is erased, and instead the burden comes to stand for colonial rule itself ”(Hofmeyr in Morgan 2008: 206). Hofmeyr ’s account of these translations reveals the complex interaction of media, religion, and culture.

When missionaries bring European Christianity to Africa, both the religion and the receiving culture are changed by their interaction. The translations of The Pilgrim ’s Progress were a location of an emerging African Christianity with a distinctive theology appropriate to the needs and worldview of Africans.

Noticing changes in the water The speed of media change in contemporary societies makes us aware of how religion and media are linked in ways that were less evident in periods when change was slower. Some observers see the way religion is changing in our fast- paced digital culture as a positive development leading to new and more relevant forms of religious life. Others believe that some earlier essence of religion is being lost or trivialized in these interactions. Whatever judgment people make about the way religion is changing today, it is necessary to recognize that this is not a new phenomenon; religion has always embedded new media technologies and it changes in response to new possibilities of expression. Chapter 1made the analogy that people live in media cultures like fish live in water, suggesting that it is hard to recognize the pervasive in fluence of media. That analogy rests on the assumption that the media culture in which we “swim ”is relatively stable and therefore goes unnoticed. When media change comes slowly, we hardly recognize how these technologies of commu- nication a ffect religion. But when radical changes in communications systems occur and media change accelerates, as is happening at present, our attention is drawn to the intersections of religion and media and the way both are trans- formed as a result. When the water changes, the fish ask, “What is changing and what impact will it have on us? ” Writing and print technologies serve as historical examples of how once new media technologies that had a profound e ffect on religion are now so established that we largely ignore their in fluence. Many, though not all, religions possess 78 Religion in the midst of change writings that their adherents regard as sacred. Examples include the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, the Torah, the Upanishads, and the Bible. It is long established that people use the written word to capture religious histories, stories, legal codes, and teachings, and that practitioners study, reflect on, and venerate these sacred writings. It seems unremarkable to us that people preserve their histories, sacred stories, and rules in this way. Yet we know that preliterate cultures had religions that did not rely on sacred texts; their sense of the sacred was orally communicated in stories, expressed in rituals, and preserved in sacred objects or spaces, all passed down through the generations. Once we see that religion is possible without sacred texts, a whole series of questions emerge. How did religion change when writing and literacy made such texts possible? What were these religions or their predecessors like before their sacred texts were written, gathered, and interpreted? How did the adherents decide which writings were uniquely inspired? Which voices were privileged and which suppressed in that process? Did they adopt or resist later media change such as the printing press, audio and visual recording, or the Internet?

In preliterate religion there was a unique power in knowing and being able to recount in a compelling manner the oral histories and sacred stories of one’s community. The storyteller’s ability provided the authority to guide the commu- nity in the present. Writing shifted that power base. The literate, with their power to capture and rework those stories, creating a written record, came to power. They shaped the new practices that emerged around reading, interpreting, and venerating the sacred writings.

Remembering how religion interacted with the rise of literacy and writing should remind those who study the relationship between religion and media today that this is not a new relationship. People’s questions about the rise of digital communication are similar to the challenge raised by the rise of literacy.

As digital media take on some of the roles oncefilled by earlier forms of mediation, those who participate in these new forms of communication will inevitably shape new expressions of religion. The digital realm provides a forum for discussion and a location for the expression of human feelings. People will create new digital spaces that contest with the old physical architecture of the sacred. What has changed in our era is not that religion is embedded in media culture for thefirst time but that media change is taking place so quickly that we are more likely to notice it. Discussion questions 1 The chapter suggests that religions change over time, and that their place and function in society changes. Paradoxically, today many societies see both greater religious diversity and a rise in the secular.

What evidence of these changes do you see in your local and national community? How do these changes alter the way people think about religion and its role in society?Stability and change79 2 Some people suggest that media are so powerful that the internal logic of new forms of media imposes changes on religion. Others suggest that it is more important to pay attention to how people adopt and adapt these new forms. Which argument seems more compelling, and what evidence do you see for your answer?

3 As illustrated by the Magritte painting titled“The Treachery of Images,” the relationship between an esthetic image and the object or person it evokes is complex. This is perhaps even more complicated when the visual reference is to the sacred. How do images evoke the sacred, and what anxieties does the religious use of images evoke? What makes an object, image, or place sacred? Is there some experience of the sacred, holy, or numinous apart from the way they are mediated? If so, what is it?

4 If visual media can evoke the sacred, can they also be blasphemous? Is this a matter of the content of the image, or of the way people use the image? Does the text of a Buddhist incantation mean something differ- ent, or perform different religious and cultural work, when it appears as a tattoo on the body of celebrity actress Angelina Jolie rather than on the wall of a Buddhist temple in Bangkok? Does an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe serve different purposes or have different meanings on the wall of a chapel in rural Mexico, in a home altar in a barrio of Los Angeles, or on a tee shirt worn by an Agnostic Anglo hipster?

5 The chapter discusses the way that African Christians appropriatedThe Pilgrim’s Progress. How and why did they interpret the novel differ- ently than the European missionaries who brought it to the continent?

What do we learn about how art and literature have meaning, and about the relationships between media, religion, and culture, from reflecting on this example?

6 The following reflections both deal with the way religious communities have adopted emerging forms of media. Echchaibi reflects on an alter- native Muslim website intended to serve Muslims in the West, and Morgan on an image that illustrates the way eighteenth-century Protes- tants adapted to the emergence of inexpensive print technologies. How do the two communities use these new forms of media? Who is the audience for these new forms of religious media? Who is given voice through them, and does this cause a shift in who holds religious authority? If we think of eighteenth-century tracts and images and twenty-first-century websites as places where religious identity is being performed, what do we learn about the producers and consumers of these images and messages? References Berger, Peter L. (1967)The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City: Doubleday.

Bloom, Allan (1987)The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon & Schuster.

80Religion in the midst of change Campbell, Heidi (2010)When Religion Meets New Media, Abingdon: Routledge.

Campbell, Heidi, ed. (2012)Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, London: Routledge.

Chakravorty, Swagato (2012)“Mediation.”(blog) Chicago School of Media Theory, http:// lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/mediation, accessed November 5, 2012.

Echchaibi, Nabil (2012)“Alt-Muslim: Muslims and Modernity’s Discontents,”in Heidi Camp- bell, ed.Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, London: Rou- tledge.

Goethals, Gregor T. (1990)Electronic Golden Calf, Cambridge: Cowley Publications.

Hofmeyr, Isabel (2004)The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

McLeod, Hugh and Werner Ustorf, eds. (2003)The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morgan, David, ed. (2008)Keywords in Religion, Media and Culture, London: Routledge.

National Council of Churches (2010)Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, New York:

National Council of Churches.

Umble, Diane Zimmerman (1992)“The Amish and the Telephone: Resistance and Reconstruction,”Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge. Stability and change81 Reflection Altmuslim Media spaces for a modern Muslim voice Nabil Echchaibi Who can speak on behalf of Islam and who is a Muslim? Islam has no o ffi cial authority figure or central clerical structure that represent the faith. A rather pluralistic and di ffuse notion of authority has always de fined this religion. Historically, Muslims have vested some of that authority in a variety of religious scholars and charismatic leaders of Sunni, Shi ’a, and Su fiIslam. Such a decentralization has been recently intensi fied by rising literacy rates and wider access to media technologies in Muslim majority countries as well as by an increasing presence of Muslims in secular Western countries. Shortly after the tragic events of 9/11, an American Muslim of Pakistani descent launched Altmuslim.comas an introspective space for Muslims to o ffer critical perspectives on Muslim life, politics, and culture.

With contributing editors and writers from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK, Altmuslimpositions itself at the forefront of an emerging independent Muslim media in the West. Its articles, opinions, media reviews, podcasts, and video commentaries seek to project an alternative view of Muslims as intellectuals, politicians, and artists. Post- ings from contributors with a wide range of ideological orientations and religious sensibilities have included commentaries on the “Gay Muslim Phenomenon, ”Muslim views on divorce, female Muslim artists, social justice in Islam, and Muslim American gra ffiti. Shahed Amanullah, the founder of Alt-Muslim, does not think of himself as a religious authority, but his site has over the years promoted a dynamic conversation about Islam by non-traditional and heretofore excluded Muslim voices (Figure 5.3).

Through a careful grooming of new Muslim commentators, Altmuslim seeks to mediate a diverse religious experience and create an alternative frame of reference for self-de finition for other Muslims. The site addresses Muslims as producers of their own knowledge about their faith and encourages them to imagine ways in which their religion can be harmonized with modernity.

In the wake of the national debate on gay marriage, for instance, Alt- muslim published two di fferent viewpoints on homosexuality in Islam:

one favorable opinion by a feminist in Cincinnati, a member of Muslims for Progressive Values, and the other an opposite view by a poet and activist in Brooklyn. Despite their wildly divergent views using two different readings of the Qur ’anic narrative of Lot, both authors recognized the urgency to address what is largely a taboo topic in Muslim communities and invited their readers to engage in a reasoned debate about theological interpretations of homosexuality in Islam and the limits and virtues of their relevance in a secular and pluralistic democracy. By soliciting this kind of heated commentary, Altmuslimtries to jumpstart an important dialogue about sensitive issues that average Muslims are eager to discuss but don ’t have the opportunity or the platforms to share their opinions.

Another signi ficant feature of Altmuslimis its creative appropriation of non-linear digital esthetics and interactive communication modes to draw Muslims into an alternative religious experience. Besides reading provoca- tive commentaries, site visitors are invited to rate their mosque experience, read and leave reviews on Zabihah—a guide to local halal restaurants and products —and shop for Muslim apparel, toys, books, music, and more on halalapalooza , a site that Amanullah has designed to direct tra ffic to halal commercial companies. More than just a space for debate, Altmuslimhas harnessed the power of digital media to project a model for an active Muslim subject and prescribe religious ways to intervene and domesticate modern public space and secular practices.

Figure 5.3 Website founder Shahed Amanullah Stability and change 83 Reflection Religious tracts in the eighteenth century David Morgan Speaking, reading, writing, and hearing were regarded by Anglo-American Protestants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the indispensable and authoritative means of transmitting and learning the Gospel. Reading was rapidly becoming the most important form of communication as print production and circulation expanded across the transatlantic British Empire. Newspapers, magazines, almanacs, tracts, and sermons were dominant print media during the period. The more people became used to reading, the more Evangelical organizations turned to print to reach them. Organizations began to form during the 1790s in England and slightly later in America to produce and distribute pious print, focusing on children, immigrants, the poor, and laborers as well as prostitutes, drinkers, sailors, soldiers, in fidels, gamblers, and theater-goers —all populations whom Evangelicals felt were at risk in the emerging industrial revolution, which conducted a massive migration of peoples from the countryside to urban life. The shift threatened traditional social arrangements. Religious tract, Sunday school, Bible, and Mission societies issued an astonishing variety of print products aimed at these groups in order to compete with the secular print that vied for their attention. Although the spoken word was considered by many Protestants to be the foremost medium for publishing the Good News, print was the more prac- tical means for broadcasting to an expan ding world what Protestants believed was necessary to be “heard. ”But advocates of religious print refused to concede a contradiction. They argued that print fitted seamlessly over speech, and they encouraged authors to produce tracts written in co mmon style, using speech and diction derived from spoken discourse. Leaders of publication societies in Britain and America wanted writing to be patterned on speaking, and they argued for the ancient continuity of speech and writing. One of the founders of the Religious Tract Society in Britain proclaimed that “God himself [was] the author of a short religious tract:

with his own hands he wrote the Ten Commandments of the law. ” 1The idea flattened the distinction between speaking and writing, hearing and reading, and launched Protestant evangelism in a global flurry of print.

When Evangelicals imagined the work of evangelism, they envisioned preaching as an ideal speech act: one that su ffered no translation from one language and culture to another, and one in which the European or American preacher could hold forth in a direct articulation of the Bible as the recorded word of God. The illustration inFigure 5.4captures this dream of universal direct discourse very well. The neatly dressed missionary orates with Bible in hand before a gathering of people from around the world.

Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and Middle Easterners listen contentedly to the Anglo preacher whose speech Anglo-American missionary societies converted into scores of languages during the nineteenth century.

Note 1David Bogue,The Diffusion of Divine Truth (London: printed by S. Rousseau for the Religious Tract Society, 1800): 11.

Figure 5.4The Christian Almanac Stability and change 85