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

Religionrefers to a complex variety of beliefs and practices, and provides a way for us to understand cultural activity such as fandom that may not immediately seem religious.

Particularmedia culturesemerge around new forms of mediation.

People and their religions are shaped by their media cultures and adopt the forms and assumptions of that media culture. This makes media change a difficult cross-cultural project for many individuals and societies.

Digital media are creating new spaces for religious experimentation, and people and religious institutions and communities rooted in early forms of mediafind this challenging.

In the vocabulary of the Internet ahyperlinkis a highlighted term within a text where a mouse click connects you to some other crucial and related data, making it easy to move back and forth between the sites. The presentation of “media,”“religion,”and“culture”as a coherent area of study is based on the assumption that they have such a crucial connection to each other that, to understand any one of these concepts, we have to see it in relationship to the other two. They are intellectually hyperlinked. Thus, for example, to best understand and describe religion, we see it in relationship to media and culture, leaping back and forth between the concepts. Further, the concepts and their relationships are notfixed.Media, Religion and Cultureexplores the idea that media, religion, and culture are in an inseparable process of ongoing adaptation.

While we think of them as separate concepts, it might enrich our thinking to have a single term for this process, perhapsmedia/religion/culture.

More typically people think of“media,”“religion,”and“culture”as quite distinct from each other, often talking about the impact of one upon the other.

But the more scholars study them in relationship to each other, the more we see that they are so integrated and interactive that we understand these con- cepts best when we think about them as an interactive system within which people establish and express their identities, and relate to that which they regard as sacred or transcendent, and through which they interpret the worlds they inhabit.Today we see many examples of how religion is enmeshed with media in ways that make the two phenomena inseparable aspects of culture. To under- stand religion we have to understand media. Here are a few contemporary examples of how media and religion are integrated. At a conference on Islam and media sponsored by the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder (January, 2010) a young, urban Arab-American Muslim performs rap music to express an identity which is simultaneously Arab and American and to explore what it means to be Muslim in a context so di fferent from that of his immigrant par- ents. He is a graduate student who also writes academic papers about this practice. For him, Muslim identity is something being constructed and articu- lated through the forms of popular music and academic writings. Both require a conversation between the inherited sacred writings and traditions and his con- temporary location. Trekkers , a 1997 documentary film about Star Trekfans, portrays a woman who seems to confuse her role as an o fficer in the fan club with being an actual o ffi cer on the starship Enterprise. When called to jury duty, she wears her Star Trek uniform. Asked why, she explains that Star Trekexpresses the values of justice that should guide her service. For her, the fan club serves as a center of meaning-making ritual activity that seems very much like religious community.

The Star Trek films and television episodes are the sacred texts that provide the moral lessons that guide her practice (seeFigure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Star Trek convention 4Religious identity in media cultures The instructor of an online class at a Bible college leads students in a virtual communion service. Later a group of theologians, meeting online, debate whether this can be a legitimate Christian practice. For the class, the Internet has become a location for their religious life, and for the theologians it provides space to discuss both the boundaries of religious practice and the importance of the physical body in Christian practice (Duce 2013).

In each of these examples people use media, religion, and culture to understand, articulate, and embody identity. For them, media are not merely an external source of entertainment or information but a cultural expression they can draw on, appropriate, and remake to express religious and cultural identity. These vignettes illustrate that some people use media spaces to create religious selves, as space for religious practice, or as a public square within which they discuss religion.

Human beings inhabit media cultures, making it difficult to imagine other ways of engaging the world around us or to think clearly about how our own experiences of religion and media are connected. To draw on an old analogy, we are likefish asked to think about water. Because thefish is dependent on the omnipresence of water, it cannot imagine a world without water and thus cannot think about the significance of water in its life. Media are the water most of us swim in. Like thefish, many of us have trouble imagining a different world and thus recognizing the significance of the media environments within which we“swim.” Media, Religion and Culturedraws on examples from many different religions and cultures. Some of these will be familiar to you; others will be new and may seem strange. In addition to reflecting on how other people integrate religion and media, you might want to think about how media and religion may be part of your own experience and identity. Many people today do not simply inherit their identity—including their religious identity—from their parents or community. In many societies they are free to choose between religions, or choose to practice no religion. Or, they create and express personal religious identities by drawing on many influences, including family and community traditions, and the media they consume and create.

Consider your own media location and religious identity. To what extent do you think of yourself as religious, spiritual, or secular, and how is that expressed in your life? Are you part of a religious group? Do you have personal spiritual practices? Were these practices passed down in your family, or have you adopted them on your own?

What entertainment and news media do you consume, and how do they inform the way you think about the world and about what it means to be human? Do you use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Second Life to present a portrait of yourself to the world? Consider the movies and television you watch, the video games you play, videos you may produce, and the social networks of which you are a part. What do your media practices suggest about the dreams, wishes, and commitments which make you uniquely you? What do they suggest about your understanding of the world you inhabit and the sources you draw from for meaning and direction?Relating media, religion, and culture5 It is tempting to think of the relationships between religion and media described here as a new phenomenon, perhaps emerging with the development of radio, cable television, or the World Wide Web. People ask, often with alarm, how these new media are changing religion. In doing so they often imply that religion was once afixed and unchanging reality that is now beset by change. They worry that the pure essence of religion is diluted as itfinds expression in new forms. This book suggests that this is not in fact a new phenomenon. Religion and media have always existed in relationship to each other, overlapping, serving some of the same functions, and changing in response to each other. In studying religion in any period or context we can and should ask how religion is mediated and ponder the implications of this mediation.

Key terms: culture, religion, and media Having argued that we ought to think about media, religion, and culture in relationship to each other, this introductory chapter will none-the-less separate the terms. This makes it possible to look more closely at these key terms. After defining more clearly what is suggested by media, by religion, and by culture, the following chapters will return to thinking of them in their interactive totality.

Culturecan be thought of as everything human beings make and maintain through language, ritual activity, and construction. It includes art, architecture, and technologies, but also the social structures that define power relationships:

kinship, government, race, class, gender, and so forth. A culture is an ongoing project of group identity construction. The things we make and maintain create a portrait of us as a people. These cultural portraits establish boundaries; they tell us who is included and who is not. We misunderstand a culture if we fail to recognize its boundaries and the way its boundaries change over time.

One can think of culture broadly, in terms of national and language cultures, but also on a smaller scale: pop, folk, and ethnic cultures, as well as media cultures that often transcend the boundaries between other cultural forms.

Media, religion, and culture are inseparably engaged in a process of ongoing adaptation. Religion shapes and is shaped by other elements in society. Changes in technology, in political organization, and in communications and media lead to cultural change, including changes in religion. And cultures adapt in response to new religious possibilities. There is give and take to this ongoing process.

Religionatfirst seems simple to describe and then quickly becomes complicated.

There are many competing definitions to be found in the discussion of religion.

People often begin with the assumptions of their own religion or those of the dominant religion in their society and then expand their definitions as they become aware of expressions of“religion”that do not quitefit their definition.

Many people see religion as a matter of belief, focusing on one or more central deities, such as the God of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or the gods in Hinduism or Greek mythology. But this definition seems inadequate when they start to consider types of spirituality that do not revolve around a central deity such as that of some Native Americans, Buddhists, or Taoists. 6Religious identity in media cultures Another approach in defining religion is to describe it in terms of practice and ask what adherents of religion do with their bodies. You can see that they go to particular places that they regard as sacred, they carry out rituals at par- ticular times, and they observe rules about how they should and should not behave.

Yet another approach suggests that religion is to be understood by the way it makes some things sacred and others profane. In this sense religion serves to set apart and protect what the practitioners understand to be sacred from the everyday messiness of life.

There are many ways to describe this complex area of human life. Here are two sample definitions from respected commentators on religion:

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973: 90) writes, A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, perva- sive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in [people] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Religious studies scholar Robert A. Orsi (2004: 4) suggests that religion is the practice of making the invisible visible, of concretizing the order of the universe, the nature of human life and its destiny, and the various dimensions and possibilities of human interiority itself, as these are under- stood in various cultures at different times, in order to render them visible and tangible, present to the senses in the circumstances of everyday life.

Notice that Geertz thinks of religion as a“system of symbols”that establish particular ways to act in society, while Orsi thinks of religion as a“practice” related to the interior life and how we understand the meaning of the universe.

As you listen to other people describe religion and develop your own working definition, pay attention to which of the multiple dimensions of belief and practice are included and consider what that suggests about what is central to religion.

Those who study and try to describe religion typically do so in one of three ways. Some think of religions primarily in terms of the God or ultimate con- cern around which the religion is organized. Others proceed descriptively, teasing out the practices of those who identify with the religion. Still others think functionally, asking what purpose the religion serves for its practitioners and for society at large.

Thefirst group believes that religion is best understood in terms of its relationship to a transcendent force that gives meaning to people’s lives. Those who approach religion in this way call the participants“believers”and seek to define this transcendent something that they believe in. These students of reli- gion try to understand the ideal form of human life that the believers areRelating media, religion, and culture7 attempting to live out, and how this way of life is faithful to their under- standing of God, gods, or a sense of the transcendent to which they seek to be true. To see how this works, consider a particular religion with which many readers will be familiar: Christianity. Employing thisfirst approach, one would tease out the distinctive claims that Christians make about God and Jesus, assuming that Christianity is best understood by clarifying what Christians believe and by contrasting that to what the adherents of other religions believe.

Those who proceed in this way might also notice that the particularities of these claims are so important that Christians divide themselves into sub-groups based on their specific understandings of God and Jesus, and sometimes these groups further split and form new communities based on questions about doctrine and belief. Further, they might ask how Christians’distinctive beliefs inform their decisions in daily life.

The second approach describes religion by its rituals and distinctive practices, and thinks of those who participate in the religion as“practitioners.”This approach suggests that religion is best understood and identified by looking at the actions of the people who practice it. Approaching religion in this way, those who study religion ask when and where the practitioners gather. What do they do with their bodies and voices? With respect to Christians they might observe that they tend to gather on a particular day for worship and that, though they have a variety of styles of worship, there seem to be some practices that most Christians hold in common such as forms of prayer, a holy meal, and so forth. In trying to understand the differences between various communities of Christians, scholars who think in this way would look at the differences in their practices rather than the differences in their beliefs. They might note that some are celibate and others marry or that some fold their hands to pray and others lift them skyward. For some the sermon seems the center point of worship and for others the holy meal, an altar call, or speaking in tongues.

Extending this approach, researchers might look at the way Christian practitioners express their religious identity in their homes and communities, through actions such as praying at meals, displaying the Bible or pictures of Jesus or Christian saints in their homes, placing bumper stickers with Christian messages on their cars, or by carrying out acts of charity, social reform, or civic activism that they identify as forms of Christian witness.

The third approach defines religion by looking at its function in society.

Such an approach thinks of religion as part of a larger society that is served by the religion. This approach looks less at the individual benefit of believing or practicing the religion and instead asks how society as a whole might benefit from it. Considering Christianity from this third perspective, some have sug- gested that the faith helps to provide order and stability to society by prescribing and proscribing certain behaviors and relationships. They observe that, starting with the Emperor Constantine in the third Century CE, governments have aligned themselves and their country with Christianity, and in so doing claimed the Christian God’s blessing and asserted that their policies were expressions of the divine will. Some who think of religion in this way suggest that, when a 8Religious identity in media cultures religion’s authority is invested in the existing social order, it inevitably justifies inequities in society, and point to the use of Christianity to justify the practices of slavery and gender inequality as distressing examples of this problem.

In a famous and influential book on the sociology of religion,first published in 1912, Emile Durkheim (2008) says that the function of religion is to distin- guish areas of life that are set aside as sacred from others regarded as profane.

Durkheim is particularly interested in what ties human communities together.

He sees the function of religion as unifying a society by gathering a community around a shared understanding of what is sacred in order to establish a common morality. This leads him to assume that religion serves a conservative purpose, that it justifies existing social relationships in order to provide unity. Certainly we can think of examples in which religion serves that function. Others (Grimes 2002) argue that religious ritual can also serve a transformative function in society. These conflicting possibilities for how religion functions in society can be seen in the civil rights movement that began in the United States in the 1950s and’60s. As slaveholders had done in the defense of slavery, some people used religion to justify long-standing racial inequalities, resisting social change and suggesting that the existing social order expressed a divinely established hierarchy among the races. Others found resources in religious beliefs, texts, and practices that justified, required, and blessed a movement to change the social order. This was true among abolitionists who resisted slavery and later for Christians and Jews who found religious motivation to participate in the civil rights movement. In your own reflection, look for examples where religion serves a conserving function and for those where it serves a transforming function in society.

A further question is whether there is something irreducible about religion, something ineffable and unique that is distinct from media and culture. Some who have studied religion from the perspective of other disciplines suggest that religion is only an expression of other cultural forces and processes such as politics or economics. Noting that religion offers explanations of the natural world and the cosmos, some people suggest that religion is a proto-science replaceable by more replicable scientific processes. Others, seeing that religion can be a source of both conflict and unity in society, understand religion as a subset of law, government, or ethics. Those in religious and theological studies, however, usually argue that religion is“a distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other”(Asad 1993). Readers might ask, “Is there a conflict between the claim that religion is a unique sphere of practice and belief, and the assertion that media, religion, and culture are inseparable?”This question opens on to theological questions that are beyond the scope of this volume. The assertion here is simply that, while religion is a distinctive phe- nomenon, it cannot be seen apart from its location in culture, expressed through its changing mediations.

Although none of these approaches provides a full and adequate picture of religion, keep these various approaches to understanding religion in mind as you think about how religion and media interact and overlap. In describingRelating media, religion, and culture9 religion strive for a definition broad enough to explain religion in both its institutional and emerging forms and to give a sense of what religion is like both for those who practice culturally dominant forms of religion and also for those at the margins of society who practice less known, minority forms of religious life. De finitions help us draw clear distinctions between what is religion and what is not. However, the boundaries of religion are a much debated topic. Consider a few cases:

As new forms of Buddhism emerge in the West, some who practice more traditional forms of the religion ask whether these new forms are recognizable as Buddhism.

In describing the fervor of Elvis Presley ’s fans, particularly after his death, some people have used the religious concept of venerationto understand what the singer meant to his fans. They point to what they describe as “shrines ”to the singer created by “followers ”and describe their visits to his Graceland home as “pilgrimages ”(Doss 1999). (See Figure 1.2.) One provocative study of religious movements in the US and South Africa (Chidester 2005) says that even “religious charlatans ”can perform the work of religion. The author suggests that religious frauds and fakes can evoke a genuine religious response among their followers.

Does a reworked form of a religion still qualify as that religion? Can extreme adoration of a celebrity be likened to a religion? Can ostensibly fraudulent religious leaders end up doing religious work?

Figure 1.2 Elvis shrine 10Religious identity in media cultures Attempting to define the boundary of what constitutes religion raises the question of whether everything that is described as religious belongs in the category. Some scholars (Ward 2011) question whether it adds to the clarity of our understanding to say that every aspect of media culture that scholars have described as religion is fully religion. Perhaps they are only similar to or like religion. This distinction suggests that culture provides material and practices that may not quite be religion, but that we could understand them better by considering how they are like religion.

For now, think of religion as a human activity of practice and belief through which we connect the everyday to something we hold to be ineffable, transcendent, or sacred. Religion includes theological ideas about what is sacred, but religion is more than ideas. It is embodied in ritual activities such as bathing, kneeling, lighting candles, pilgrimage, and forms of religiously motivated public service or social action. Further, religion by its sense of the sacred and its activities serves some function in society. For good or ill, it makes adifference.

The termmediaalso needs to be defined. Though we often talk as though its meaning is self-evident, the definition of“media”may be as contested as that of“religion.” People often think of media as a modern phenomenon that began with technologies such as the telephone, radio, or the movies. But, as long as people have been communicating, there have been media. Speech is one early medium, cave painting another. From these earliest human efforts to communicate, to pass on their thoughts, concerns and experiences, people have been developing new ways to communicate. Typically, new forms of media serve an amplification process. They allow us to reach a wider audience. Think, for example, about how writing made it possible to preserve and pass on a message, and how printing made it possible to cheaply prepare many copies of a message, sharing the written message with far more people.

These forms of communication can be said tomediatean idea, practice, or experience. What do we mean bymediate? Regis Debray suggests that the common word“communication”leads us to misunderstand the process of sending a message. Messages do not simply travel unchanged from one person to another. Rather, Debray says that both“sender and receiver are modified from the inside by the message they exchange, and the message itself modified by its circulation.”He usesmediationto refer to this complex process.

Thinking about the means of this mediation, Debray cites Peter-Paul Verbeek, who says, Things play a role precisely in this relationship between human and world.…Human beings act with the help of artifacts and perceive through them. This role of things can be characterized asmediation.

Things…mediate how human beings are present in their world and how the world is present to them.

(Debray 1996: 44) Relating media, religion, and culture11 To understand these processes of mediation or communication requires attention to more than just the technical capacities of media and the way they change with the emergence of new media. Understanding them requires attention to what human beings do with media. Above, in defining religion, it was argued that we need to pay attention to religiouspractice: that religion cannot be understood as only a matter of belief and doctrine. Rather, we have to pay attention to what people do with those beliefs and doctrines, to the way they organize their lives in relationship to them. A similar claim could be made about media, that the concept is best understood by paying attention to people’s media practice. How do media practices organize individual and community lives?

If mediation refers to both the complex process through which we, our hearers, and our messages are changed in the act of communication and the artifacts through which this process happens, what does it mean to mediate religion? Working from Orsi’sdefinition of religion as the“process of making the invisible visible,”cited above, we can see that mediating religion involves both the“things”(language, actions, smells, and sounds, as well as texts, images, and so forth) through which religion is expressed and the way that all of the actors involved (religion itself, as well as the senders and receivers) are changed by the process of communicating about religion.

Understood in this way media are not merely carriers of messages. They are perhaps lenses through which we engage the world around us, shaping—as much by their form as their content—our perceptions of what constitutes reality. This process cannot be understood by focusing only on the technologies of communication; it is found also in the uses that human beings make of technologies. We are not powerless in the face of the media sphere, but we must work within its possibilities and limitations. Having a presence in the media confirms our importance, even our existence, and absence or exclusion from the media fundamentally questions our relevance. As we will see more clearly later, religion is shaped by the media culture it inhabits. If Muslims are only represented in the media by images of fundamentalist terrorists, young Muslims trying to articulate an identity that is both Islamic and modern may feel invisible and unheard. The young Muslim rapper described earlier expresses his identity by pushing back and making an Islamic American space for himself, however small, in a larger media culture.

There are many different forms of media, and each medium communicates in quite different ways. This distinction betweenmediaandmediumis not simply a concern about grammar. When people use media in the singular, as in the claim“The media promotes violence and sexism”or“The media provides a distorted picture of religion,”they are making an ideological argument that the disparate forms of media speak with a single voice that articulates the values of the controlling elite. However, we might ask whether media is a singular block of power that besieges and transforms culture. Are Fox News, MTV, Twitter, and the website of a desert monastery really part of a monolithic force with a single message or effect on society? When people speak about media 12Religious identity in media cultures using a plural verb, saying,“Mediawieldgreat influence on our opinions” rather than“the mediawieldsa great influence,”or when they speak of the implications of a particular medium in a particular cultural context, saying for example,“Evangelical television serves to confirm the identity of an Evangelical audience rather than to convert non-believers,”they recognize the complex relationship between audiences and various forms of media.

Religion as a dynamic process One common misunderstanding about the interaction of religion and media is based in the assumption that religion is afixed and unchanging reality that transcends the cultures within which it is embedded. This misunderstanding of religion, perhaps rooted in the fact that religion makes truth claims about ultimate reality, leads to the suggestion that media are a singular cultural force that impinges on religion, changing it in ways that dilute what is assumed to be religion’s pure, transcultural, original form. When religion is viewed positively, this approach suggests that media developments cause religion to turn away from some idealized pre-mediated past. When religion is viewed negatively, the approach suggests that religion is passive and anachronistic, while media are progressive and dynamic. But if religion has always been mediated and if many different media are affecting and being affected by this changing religious process, then we are trying to describe a much more complicated human process.

Media cultures It should be clear by now that the termmediais not meant to signify a monolithic entity speaking with one voice to compel social conformity or change. Rather, there are different, identifiable periods and regions shaped by a medium of communication or the interaction of several media. The internal logic of this system of communication, interacting with other cultural factors, enables what we might call amedia culture. That is a culture that is defined by the logic inherent in the dominant forms of mediation and by the ways of being in the world which they encourage. The Enlightenment, for instance, emerged in a period of growing literacy in Europe. Learning to read and write encourages a particularly linear system of logic. Letters add up to words that in turn add up to sentences and paragraphs gradually advancing an argument, idea, or narrative.

Thus learning to read and write initiates one into a system of thinking based on the assumption that knowledge is built in this linear development fashion. The practice of reading aloud in groups encourages the sense of shared under- standings and community identity. In contrast, the practice of silent reading separates the reader from the family or community, encouraging a sense of the individual self and even more the individual interpreter.

If the media culture created by writing and literacy encouraged a linear way of knowing, how have later media developments produced contrasting ways of knowing? Marshall McLuhan famously said that“the mediumisthe message” Relating media, religion, and culture13 (1964). He suggests that television encourages a different kind of knowing, one less linear and more synthetic, where viewers are obliged to pay attention to everything in the image at once. Where the developments in philosophy, theology, politics, and literature of the Enlightenment were the products of the careful linear logic and careful distinctions taught by literacy, electronic media culture rests on gestalt thinking in which the viewer takes in multiple layers of content simultaneously and produces meaning in the interplay. With the emergence of digital media and the Internet, we are living through a period of media change as significant as the emergence of print and the spread of literacy.

In a relatively short time computers, cell phones, and various technologies for audio and visual recording have emerged. The Internet and its cyberspaces have become ubiquitous, and new patterns of meaning making emerge based on their logics.

It can be tempting to give sole credit or blame to technology for this new culture. One of the critiques of McLuhan’s thought is that it expresses a sort of technological determinism, as though new media make particular cultural changes inevitable. It is more accurate to recognize that new media open new ways of communicating and practicesandthat people respond to them in a variety of ways. Media cultures emerge not only out of media change, but out of the choices that people make about how to use, resist, or adapt new technolo- gies. Clearly a new media culture is emerging influenced by the development of digital media, but it will be best understood by studying the choices people make about how to use these new digital tools and spaces.

Changing media spaces In thinking about the World Wide Web, most people probably conclude that it is a source of information through which one can gather data and learn of events as near and personal as the breakup of a couple you know and as distant and public as political revolutions in distant lands. However, the emerging media culture of the Web cannot be understood only in terms of theflow of information. Like changes in media in the past, the transition to digital media culture involves more than a shift in communication technology. The Web pro- vides a media space where people play games, have meetings, and create complex communities. On the Web, technologies merge and interact, and those who have access are instantly connected. To understand this networked media culture it is not enough to note that messages are sent and received more quickly. In the contemporary media culture, people use these technologies and devices to create and express personal and community identity. These changes interact with other cultural elements, and new ways of envisioning the self and society emerge.

This change is happening at a much more rapid rate than was typical of media change in the past. Perhaps a personal example of this transition is helpful.

I grew up in a mid-sized American city in the 1950s and’60s. My home had one telephone hardwired to the wall in the kitchen, a black-and-white television that got three channels affiliated with the then dominant national networks, 14Religious identity in media cultures and a radio and record player contained in a large cabinet that dominated the living room. My family shared these devices and negotiated how or when to use them. How we used them was part of our shared family identity. In that media culture, where access to media was shared, most media programming was designed to appeal to the entire family. It was an assertion of independence from the family when—perhaps in thefifth or sixth grade—I got a transistor radio and could listen to rock and roll.

While there were some advances in media technology including the popu- larization of color TV, the media world of my childhood was fairly stable.

When I left home for college I took the portable typewriter that my mother had used when she was a college student, and I would not purchase myfirst primitive computer until I was writing my doctoral dissertation in the 1980s.

Consider how rapidly media culture has changed since then! Today children and young adults live in a markedly different media culture. They assume that a rapid rate of media change is to be expected. The multiple televisions in their homes access hundreds of channels, of which they may actually watch dozens.

Rather than serving one big audience, television has become a location for a series of niche markets with specialized programming for every family member.

Not only has television changed in my lifetime, a wide range of new forms of media have emerged allowing new ways of relating to media. Individuals can download movies on their personal devices, text and tweet, gather in media- generated“flash mobs,”and express themselves by sampling and reassembling media, creating their own videos, maintaining Facebook and MySpace pages, blogging, and postingfiles on YouTube.

The point of this story is neither to bemoan nor overly idealize the change.

Hopefully readers will notice that the rate of media change has accelerated and seems to continue to accelerate. Further, this media culture does more than quickly exchange messages. Rather, it connects people in networks locally and globally, providing both ways in which people can withdraw from society and new forms of human community. In the end, social media is as much a space for identity construction as a tool for passing messages.

In the midst of this changing media culture, religion adapts and reframes itself. One influential thinker in thefield of religion and media suggests that today religion and media occupy the same“conceptual and practical space” (Hoover 2003). Following in that tradition, this book seeks to understand media, religion, and culture as integrated processes. Discussion questions 1 What are the implications of the author’s claim that media, religion, and culture are hyperlinked, that they should be thought of as“An inseparable process of ongoing adaptation?” 2 What is a media culture? What are some examples of new media cultures from the past and how did religion and society adapt to them?Relating media, religion, and culture15 3 What was surprising or interesting about the definitions of religion sug- gested in the chapter? Which of them seemed most helpful or appealing to you and why?

4 How would you define religion?

5Inthereflections that follow both Lofton (Oprah) and Stolow (telegraph) reflect on religion outside its usual institutional locations. What do their essays suggest about religion and its function in society? References Asad, Talal (1993)Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chidester, David (2005)Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Debray, Regis (1996) trans. Eric Rauth,Media Manifestos, New York: Verso.

Doss, Erica (1999)Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Duce, Janice L. (2013)A Theological Inquiry Regarding the Practice of the Eucharist in Cyberspace, PhD dissertation, University of Denver and the IliffSchool of Theology.

Durkheim, Emile (2008) trans. Carol Cosman,The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics (first published in French in 1912).

Geertz, Clifford (1973)The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.

Grimes, Ron L. (2002)“Ritual and Media”in Hoover, Stewart M. and Lynn Schofield Clark, eds.Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press.

Hoover, Stewart M. (2003)“Religion, Media and Identity: Theory and Method in Audi- ence Research on Religion and Media”in Mitchell, Jolyon and Sophia Marriage, eds.

Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture, London: T&T Clark.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964)Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York:

McGraw-Hill.

Orsi, Robert A. (2004)Between Heaven and Earth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ward, Pete (2011)Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion, and Celebrity Culture, Waco, TX:

Baylor University Press.

16Religious identity in media cultures Reflection Consuming Oprah ’s products, consuming Oprah ’s spirit Kathryn Lofton The charismatic genius of Oprah Winfrey is, first, her ability to make her particularity something universal and, second, her unabashed desire to make her universal the subject of a multimedia empire. Oprah encourages con- sumption as a means to change the experience of living for her viewers (Figure 1.3). The practice of buying feeds internal and external change for such women, dressing and surrounding them with a material beauty that should be re flected in their spiritual interior. Like a lot of religious move- ments, she believes her adherents will look di fferently and act di fferently than everyone else; they will literally wear their sancti fication.

Figure 1.3 Oprah magazine This practice of gift giving and gift wearing reverberates throughout her empire.“The O Bracelet,”for example, was“hand beaded by women in Rwanda and Zambia.”O Magazinecontinues:

Let’s just assume (A) you know that women in Africa face a pileup of hardships—serial rape, AIDS, illiteracy, hunger, poverty, genocide.

(B) You care and would like to help, althoughhow on earthis the daunting question. (C) If we changed the subject to jewelry—hey, catch that sudden glint of spirit, the lift of pleasure? Without doubt, tiny bits of shimmer and color release slaphappy chemicals in the brain. (Science will prove it; you watch.) The purchase advocated by Winfrey achieves climactic global effect.

Uncomfortable observers, be at peace (the narrative proceeds): we aren’t girls who just want to have bauble fun. We are girls distracted by a scientific slaphappy that is a glint of spirit around which anyone could rally. The article hawks:“So may we twist your arm into slipping on one of these bracelets?” Purchasing is an act of spiritual politics for Oprah’s imagined audience.

We learn that the designer of the O bracelet was Mary Fisher,“the well- heeled suburban mother from a prominent family who stunned the country by announcing at the 1992 Republican Convention that she was HIV-positive.”Mary“hit life running,”spending“a lot of time in Africa”working with AIDS victims who are“blown away to meet a white woman with the disease, much less one sitting on the ground next to them, talking frankly and trading crafts skills. In Rwanda they call her Mirarukundo—‘full of love.’”Mary then connected with Fair Winds Trading, an organization“that develops markets for the arts of the world’s poorest.”The bracelets will be sold exclusively at Macy’s department store. Oprah promises that the purchase will make you feel good,“that you’ll feel even better knowing how it’s improved the life of the woman who made it for you. Call it an ethical luxury. A conscientious indulgence. If nothing else, it’s a really good buy.” This is a powerful example of how consumer and political life are fused through a spiritual understanding of the self.“The O Bracelet”translates the globalizing complex in multiple ways, simultaneously selling a universal brand (the“O”) in its form and name, collaborating multiple agencies, and bracing any nervous critics against the assault of polarization with the narrative of triumphant women overcoming disappointing men, befriending other women to“hit life running”as leaders of a new globalized economy of female empowerment and missionary purpose. Every confusion is alle- viated by purchase. The moral is assured as the advertisement-as-article concludes:“If nothing else, it’s a really good buy.”The making of thegood buy (how it is done, and for whom) is central to any description of the making of the American secular, and the spiritual that enfolds it. 18Religious identity in media cultures Reflection Telegraphing as spirit Jeremy Stolow Nestled on the back page of a November 1861 edition of Harper’s Weekly appeared an image celebrating the inauguration of the first transcontinental telegraph line. Even more profoundly than the postal system and print industries that preceded it, the electromagnetic telegraph invoked a coming age of free exchange and virtual tele-presence. This new vision of wired nations and unchained spirits is dramatically depicted by the image of an angel, moving as lithely as a tight-rope walker along the telegraph wire, her wings folded in wait for an even more e ffortless journey to come (Figure 1.4). By the time its cables had reached the Paci fic Coast, the telegraph had already come to occupy a prime place in the American imaginary, providing (among many other things) a metonym for the “kinetic revolution ”that was placing new priorities on motion, transformation, and progress in all facets of civil, cultural, economic, and political life in the Jacksonian era. Long before Google, Second Life, or the Web 2.0, telegraphy was implicated in the creation of phantasmic, electrically mediated communities of knowledge-seekers, conversation partners, and like-minded souls dispersed across the entire globe.

Figure 1.4 Illustration from Harper’s Weekly The choice to depict the bearer of telegraphy’s utopian gifts in the form of an angel was not unique toHarper’smagazine, nor is it particularly surpris- ing. Thefigure of the angel has been linked at least since St. Augustine to the idea of instantaneous travel, and angelic speech has been described as a transference of pure, interior thoughts from one party to another without any degradation or loss.“Angels,”John Durham Peters (2012) summarizes,“are exempt from the supposed limitations of embodiment, and effortlessly couple the psychical and the physical, the signified and the signifier, the divine and the human. They are pure bodies of meaning.” But, as it so happens, angels were not the only spirit entities drawn to the telegraph line. An appreciation of telegraphy’s transcendent, magical nature had already been well established in American popular culture.

Not least in the case of Spiritualism, a movement whose development precisely overlapped with the rise of the telegraph. One particularly prescient observer of the telegraph’s apparent promise to render distance obsolete was the Universalist minister and trance speaker, John Murray Spear. In 1854, Spear was the recipient of detailed plans, provided to him in a trance state by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, for the construction of a“soul-blending telegraph.”The soul-blending telegraph was an inter- continental telepathic transmission system to be powered by a corps of sensitized mediums installed in male/female pairs in high towers. This network of harmonized spirit mediums promised stiffcompetition with existing telegraph services, which were still beset by operational difficul- ties, and which had yet to announce success in the ongoing effort to connect distant continents. Spear thus imagined an imminent future of communicative harmony on a global scale, a utopian dream to which the crude workings of the electromagnetic telegraph only imperfectly pointed. Commenting on the (at the time, yet-to-be realized) project of the American industrialist, Cyrus Field, to lay a submarine telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, Spear writes:

The purpose is a laudable one, and should be encouraged; but it is seen that such a means of communication would be exceedingly expensive, and, of necessity, would rarely accommodate the poorer classes, while it would enrich others. It is a hazardous scheme—the most so of any proposed.In that submarine wire lies the snake of a most dangerous monopoly.

Who living in our contemporary moment, marked on the one hand by fantasies of hyper-connectivity and techno-transcendence, and on the other by the specter of sinister corporate intentions and digital divides, cannot hear the echo of Spear’s cry?

Reference Peters, John Durham (2012)Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 20Religious identity in media cultures