DRAFT

Media Scholarship and the Question of Religion:
Evolving Theory and Method

Stewart M. Hoover
Professor
The University of Colorado

Prepared for presentation to
The International Communication Association
Jerusalem, 1998

copyright Stewart M. Hoover
Do not cite, quote, or reproduce without permission

In a year when the American television networks seem suddenly to have discovered religion, at least in their entertainment programs, it might seem almost too obvious to suggest that religion has been under-theorized by media scholars. In fact, the arguments developed here have been in formation for quite some time, stimulated by the sense that of all of the traditional dimensions of social and cultural life, religion has been the least considered and understood in the social scientific investigation of the media.

This paper introduces a multi-year study of religion and meaning in the media age. Its arguments are an evolving set of theoretical and methodological reflections on the challenges and potential benefits of a scholarly focus on religion. The proposition here is that the task of accounting for religion is more complex than a simple addition of religion questions to research protocols, and that the consequences of problematizing religion within media theory and method are positive, indicative, and provocative.

For a number of interlocking reasons, it has recently become more important for media scholarship to come to terms with the problem of religion. While there may be a number of reasons why the question of religion has rarely appeared on the media studies agenda, it remains that current conditions, both in the lived worlds of media audiences, and in the theoretical and empirical worlds of scholarship, are moving the topic to the fore (Hoover and Venturelli, 1996).

Trends in the media over the past twenty years have seen a new and increasing presence of religion in content. First with the phenomenon of televangelism in the 1970s (Cf. Peck, 1991; Schultze, 1990; Hoover; 1988; Horsfield, 1984), and more recently with increasing attention being paid to the construction of religion in both news and entertainment content (Cf. Silk, 1996; Stout and Buddenbaum, 1996; Hoover, forthcoming), religion, spirituality, and substantive meaning have found their way onto the media agenda. Media scholarship has tended to lag behind these trends (Clark and Hoover, 1997).

This reticence on the part of media scholarship to look at religion seems anomalous in that trends within media research and theory--those broadly identified with cultural studies and culturalism--have identified the realm of "meaning" as a central focus of analysis (Cf. Fiske, 1993). There are, of course, a variety of meanings to the word "meaning," but the overall project of culturalist media studies, identified as it is with efforts to interrogate the actions and prerogatives of audiences (White, 1994) must necessarily be open to a range of types and sources of "meaning."

There are raging debates around culturalist media studies, to be sure, and one of them--the confrontation with political economy--is illustrative here. In a recent colloquy, major figures from political economy and cultural studies faced off in a scholarly journal (Garnham, 1995; Grossberg, 1995). Their discussion revealed a range of temperamental and paradigmatic conflicts between these two approaches, but clearly demonstrated something they share in common: an understanding of cultural meaning as resolving primarily around materialist conceptions of value, in particular value related to the prospects of waged labor.

This reveals, at the same time, a barrier to the consideration of the problem of religion that is rather fundamental. This is a more nuanced issue than might be expressed in relation to materialism's Marxist roots and traditional Marxism's understanding of the ideological force of religion (Hoover and Venturelli, 1996). It is instead a barrier rooted in a particular understanding of the relation of culture to social and material contexts. On the most basic level, materialist approaches, at least as expressed in current debates, privilege a rather direct linkage between cultural expression, cultural consumption, and the imperatives class awareness and class consciousness rooted in material conditions.

This is not to argue that religion must be seen entirely apart from material conditions. Indeed, I wish to argue for a new approach to the understanding of religion that rests very much on articulation of religion into the material sphere. The fact that religious meaning (and other ontological "meanings") falls outside the rational sphere does not at the same time remove its concomitant practices of meaning-making from the rational and material realm.

Nor does my argument deny that the prospects and prerogatives of class are central to the construction and maintenance of cultures, nor that these considerations do bear some necessary relations to the specific areas of cultural practice we might call "religious." Rather, it is to say that the range of practices we might assign to the category of religion necessarily includes things that are at some distance removed from the traditional cultural, symbolic and linguistic artifacts most closely related to conditions and relations in the material sphere of labor and economic exchange. For example, activities such as the ascription of identity through popular religious practices such as those identified with the "New Age" movement are not so closely bound to the conditions of the material sphere as other practices might be (again, accepting that there are nonetheless clear class connotations to the "New Age" and environmental spirituality movements).

In a similar vein, traditional positivist media scholarship has tended to particularize, rather than ignore, religion. The vast majority of positivist empiricism focused on religion has identified it as primarily an issue of instrumentalism (for a recent authoritative example, see Stout and Buddenbaum, 1996). That is, the assumption underlying most such studies has been that religious use of the media, or audience practices surrounding religion, must necessarily be understood in terms of the utility of the media to either extend, or undermine, religion as traditionally conceived. These approaches are rooted in a long-standing and influential theoretical sensibility--secularization theory--that positivist media scholarship has inherited rather unquestioningly from its "parent disciplines" of psychology and (particularly) sociology. While secularization as a social and institutional trend can be seen to operate in a number of contexts, its utility as a normative theoretical framework is now under serious scrutiny (Warner, 1993; Tschannen, 1991).

As Warner has put it, the normative side of secularization theory has confined consideration of religion to the prospects and prerogatives of religious institutions. Further, on the cultural level, it has been expected that a necessary syllogistic relationship existed within religions between institution, doctrine, belief, and action (Hoover, 1997). Thus, studies of religion could rather parsimoniously be confined to institution, history, or doctrine. Studies of religious practice, within or beyond the media sphere, then tend to be defined by, and focus on, the relation of those practices to the presumed regnant institutions, their histories and doctrines. As a result, religion that is not primarily understood with reference to the institutions and the large cultural themes, is defined as private and inconsequential. Its role is overdetermined, and the practice of media scholarship around it is reduced to the measurement of self-consciously institutionally-rooted religious associations and meanings.

The most influential voices in the fields of religion scholarship in recent years have begun a careful re-thinking of the whole approach to the question of religion, a re-thinking necessitated by the emergence of new modes of religious practice that seem to defy the traditional interpretive frameworks (Warner, 1993; Albanese, 1992; Ammerman, 1987; Roof, 1993b; Marty, 1992). These new understandings are rooted in religion sociology that looks at religion from (in a manner of speaking) an "audience" perspective. Rooted in a set of notions called "supply" or "choice" theories of religion (Iannacone, 1991; Finke and Iannacone, 1993) this evolving "new paradigm" (Warner, 1993) has been most influentially described by the work of Wade Clark Roof in his well-known book A Generation of Seekers (Roof, 1993a).

Roof's approach describes contemporary religious practice as centered on the particular sensibilities of the baby boom generation, which has taken a "re-constructionist" approach to religion, one where the practice of "seeking" is as important as is belief or belonging. This seeker model emerges at a time when individual quests around selfhood and identity have become the dominant modes of identity and consciousness (Anderson, 1991; Giddens, 1991), and thus autonomous action in the religious sphere can be seen as a natural extension of contemporary social and cultural trends. What emerges is an approach to understanding contemporary religion that resembles in some ways a market model. But, significantly, the underlying normative framework privileges the active practices of religious seekers and adherents. Thus, as a parallel to the interpretation of audience practice in the media sphere, this new way of looking at religion moves beyond an instrumentalist or positivist paradigm to a culturalist one.

The force and effect of these new understandings is a reconceptualization of the content as well as the practice ("seeking") of religion. An increasingly wide range of beliefs, artifacts, symbols and associations are included in the purview of this new religious "seeking." The so-called "New Age" movement is one of the prototypical expressions of this trend. Syncretically drawing on a wide range of conceptual and spiritual resources, it involves a blending of such things as feminism, eco-spirituality, eastern mysticism and western therapeutic culture. Fundamental to these new modes of religious practice is a shift in language as well, where the very term "religion" has, because of its association with religious institutions and practices of the past, been replaced by terms such as "spirituality," "consciousness," and "meaning" (Roof, 1993a, 1993b; Marty, 1993; Albanese, 1993).

It can be said that these emerging perspectives in the various fields of religion scholarship are moving the discourse in a direction that begins to merge rather directly with trends in media scholarship, but at a point beyond the traditional location of religion in media studies. For both culturalist media studies and new paradigm religion studies, the focus is on the meanings and practices of audiences, of meanings achieved rather than meanings ascribed (to paraphrase Warner, 1993, as well as a range of cultural theorists of the media).

There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that the new "reconstructionist" or "seeking" religion is expressing itself in the media marketplace. Important recent studies by McDannell (1996), Moore (1993) and Morgan (1998) have demonstrated, for instance, that religion (at least in the American context) has always been--in significant ways--a commodity. American Protestantism, in particular, has long accommodated itself to things such as tracts, devotional objects, vernacular art, and a variety of public performances and gatherings infused with commercial showmanship.

This commodifying sensibility now also expresses itself in contemporary approaches to traditional artifacts and practices such as in (for recent examples) the appropriation of the "Santos" of Spanish North America, native American art, and "sweat lodges." Contemporary trends such as the recent raft of religiously-oriented series on network television; the rise of media-based "self help" programs, products, and productions; the boom in the religious publishing and media industries per se; "fandom" around series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation; the themes in a number of recent films such as Michael and Contact; and trends in the book and magazine industries, are all illustrative of religious commodification finding its way into "secular" media as well.

The argument here is that these emerging trends in the worlds of religion and the media suggest a convergence around a new way of conceiving of the problem of religion within media scholarship: the question of religion in the media age. Further, this convergence emerges from the application theoretical and empirical tools already extant in the respective scholarships. To put it simply, contemporary thinking about the question of religion has begun to problematize the traditional understandings which have defined the approach to religion taken within media theory and research. Where it traditionally has been marginalized, particularized, or ignored, this new way of thinking about it implies a re-thinking of our scholarly approach to it at the same time.

Religion's marginalization thus has been rooted in two dominant streams of thought: materialist conceptions which have devalued its ideological or (alternatively) its non-rational character; and positivist approaches which have tended to particularize it within a trivial instrumentalist framework. In the face of such received understandings, "new paradigm" religion studies see religion as a continuing authentic mode of cultural practice, but one that expresses itself in a quite postmodern way: through seeking and appropriation of symbols within a marketplace of choice. The emerging question is not so much whether there is religion in the media age, but rather how we are to understand relations between religion and the media. Specifically, is it better to understand it as a question of religion in the media age, or a question of the emergent religion of the media age?

The most straightforward way to operationalize this emerging perspective is to conceive of a situation where 1) religious seekers turn to a 2) largely commodified and mediated inventory of symbols; and that 3) through that inventory they practice 4) acts of selection and consumption that are at the same time acts in the production of cultural meaning (Bordieu, 1984; Foucault, 1972; Gramsci, 1971).

Implications of Evolving Theory

One of these converging vectors is clearly culturalist media studies and its concern with reception and meaning (Cf. Jensen, 1996; White, 1994; Lull, 1991; Hobson, 1982; Morley, 1980; Hall and Jefferson, 1976). On one level, then, raising the question of religion can be seen as only a difference in degree, where the range of things we might call "meaning" is expanded to include ontological and transcendent, as well as linguistic, meanings. However, the implications of this project are deeper and more profound, and in fact hold the prospect of resolving a number of interesting theoretical, conceptual, and methodological relations.

First, raising the question of religion allows empirical analysis a concrete point of purchase on a specific cultural practice--religion--through which we can understand better the issue of culture in general. The meaning practices which we may see operating in this emerging model could provide valuable insights into the capacities of the media sphere and media audience practice to support meaning-making of a rather subtle and negotiative kind. The whole discourse about the active audience and the polysemy of texts is invoked, and by identifying the terms of the discussion as religious terms, connections and associations may be brought into relief. The issue of religion thus allows a resolution of the empirical quandary of how to study media from a culturalist perspective, how to account for and interpret meaning practice within audiences and how to legitimate audience practices where the prima facie point of that practice is not directly either class-relevant or instrumentalist.

Along the way, a number of other issues also may be addressed. First among these is the problem of how to approach the definitional question of religion itself, that is, "what is religion?" Implicit in the new paradigm approach and the seeker model is a solution traceable to Clifford Geertz's classic essay (1973) on religion. Geertz proposed the anthropologist's approach to religion--that something is religious if its adherents think it is. This nominalism is not merely an arbitrary or pragmatic construction when seen in he context of reconstructionist or seeker religion. In fact, the practice of seeking and appropriation is religious practice in a rather fundamental way. This is, in a sense, "postmodern" religion, where the autonomous actions of individuals to select and appropriate symbols and practices into a new pastiche is constructive, meaningful, and legitimate. The benefit to our project of the study of religion in the media age, is that the essentialist challenge to define "religion" is thus met and transcended.

A second issue addressed or resolved is the problem of understanding media behaviors in a postmodern context. That is, there is reason to believe that the practice of meaning-making is today much more fluid and negotiable than in the past, in the absence of legitimating or totalizing authority (Jameson, 1994). We know, for example, that today's media marketplace is much more fractured and segmented than in the past, with the whole idea of traditional categories such as that of genre now brought into question. There is, in this situation, a formidable pragmatic challenge to traditional genre or source-based media research. Not only are there now many more sources than in the past, the proliferation of channels now is becoming radically integrated through such things as the internet. How do you account for media practice when that very practice now cuts across traditional categories? Turning our attention directly to audiences as our point of contact, and to their practices of use, selection and appropriation is consistent with a growing line of culturalist media research (Fiske, 1987; Morley, 1992). But there is a more valuable implication. Looking back, so to speak, through the eyes of audiences, toward the panoply of media-based sources and then understanding how they navigate that universe, renders the problems of atomization and fracturing less formidable.

A third issue addressed here is the question of meaning-making itself, and its role and status in the media age. As a study of religious practice around media must necessarily focus on a specific kind of meaning (i.e., that of a "religious" kind) the inquiry can provide a heuristic for the broader issue of the capacities of these practices to support meaning-making in general. Of course, religious meaning is a specific kind of meaning, but conceived in the terms of the seeker or marketplace model, it is of a piece with other, "merely" cultural meanings.

Fourth, the study of religious meaning in the media age can address the conflict between culturalist and empiricist paradigms within media studies. While this conflict is in some ways fundamental, there are ways in which holding the central focus of the research--religion--"constant" can enable a mapping of media practice along both culturalist and empiricist lines. This can be seen implicitly in the discussion to this point. The emergence of "new paradigm" religious studies can be said to have resulted from a culturalist critique of a set of normative positivist-empiricist claims about the nature of religion. The most important contributions to this "new paradigm" are approaches to the study of religion which focus on culture and on the cultures of groups, subgroups and movements which have been revealed to be active in a resurgent and voluble symbolic and practical way. Where traditional scholarship focused on the measurement of stability and change within social-institutional settings, the new paradigm addresses itself to practice in other spheres, spaces where cultural action is relatively more present. The interpretive turn has moved the discourse away from a rootedness in structures and toward questions of symbolic action.

But the result, rather than producing a rejection of empiricism in favor of culturalist interpretation, is instead an amalgam of both approaches. From empiricism come generalized understandings of the nature of contemporary practice, which are then theoretically problematized through culturalist interpretation. The applicability all of this to questions of media theory and research is also one of scale and dimensionality. Both culturalist media studies and new paradigm religious studies are about the negotiation by individuals of new meanings within a structured set of institutional and social arrangements. Both thus involve questions of the boundary between private and public and between rational and non-rational modes of understanding. Both also involve the negotiation of meanings in a way that places individual and group meaning-making in a dialectic relationship with received, historically-legitimated sources or "received" sources of meaning and value.

Finally, and most basically, a study of religion in the media age such as that which might emerge here is one that is audience-centered, but that can also be oriented toward the interpretation and elaboration of the capacities of the media marketplace to act as a locus of seeking and meaning-making. One of the things that both culturalist and positivist-empiricist media studies share in common is a tendency to overdetermine the capacities and the limits of media practice. This reveals itself in a reluctance to problematize such things as (in the case of positivism) the instrumentalism implicit in nearly all research and theory; and (in the case of culturalism) the ready assumption of a direct linkage between material conditions and specific, individuated acts of meaning negotiation with media.

For positivism, it is too easy to assume that the pragmatics of method (the operationalization of message or signal or channel or source) imply a normative judgment of the nature of media practice and media experience. For culturalism, it has been too attractive to want to find direct, realist connotations linking textual readings with class or cultural location.

Emerging Method

What has emerged from the considerations here is a specific empirical approach to the problem of religion in the media age, one that we call "Media, Meaning and the Lifecourse." Most basically, this study uses a combination of qualitative methods to begin to map and describe the capacities of media audience practice to support or participate in the making of meaning in contemporary life. While the study is not limited to religious meaning, religion is a central question, and one that is addressed in a number of ways in its instrumentation. The study has evolved four separate methods as a way of approaching these issues. It is a study that is based in households, and that directly looks at the private sphere and the space of leisure as its focus (drawing on the work of Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992; Lull, 1988 and 1992, and others). It should be noted, in passing, that "household," in this study, is not intended to mean only "family" in the traditional sense, or that the study is limited to the household proper. The household is the basic sample frame, we might say, but other contexts, practices, and networks are followed out from there where appropriate. Further, the types of households we have encountered are rather diverse, including single-parent, gay, blended, associative and consensual, as well as traditional families.

The first method is observational. A small number (limited by the effort necessary to carry out this type of research) of households participate in an observational study, where researchers actually observe household patterns of leisure and the place that media behaviors hold in those patterns. This is a rich source of material, and has already provided some important insights into the question of the capacities of the media sphere. For example, the notion that a naturalized sense of the flow of life in the home and around media can be approximated from any "objective" measures (as has been argued by Kubey and Larsen, 1996) is called into serious question when one reviews field notes of such observations (for a complete discussion, see Hoover, 1996b).

The second, (and the central) method is in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with all household members as a group, and then subsequently with individual members separately. The focus of these interviews is to gain an understanding of the place that media take in the conceptual terrain of the household, and then to understand the ways in which media function as a "symbolic inventory" (of the kind introduced earlier) at times of transition and passage. The intention is to map both the household, and extra-household social networks, and to try to understand how media practices relate to those broader social contexts. In this, as in the observational phase of the study, the media are treated horizontally, broadly, and generally. No hierarchies of media are assumed, and all media technologies are considered and investigated.

In this phase, one of the most interesting findings has been the role of the telephone as a medium of meaning-making. It is clear from both the observational and the interview studies, for instance, that the telephone has long ago become naturalized as a fundamental practice of life and has been so integrated into private practices of social relations, that it makes no sense any longer (if it ever did) to think of it as a source that is technological and thus somehow "outside" of the organic relations of the home, family, and social network.

The third method is that of peer-led focus groups. While we are still at a pilot phase with these studies, they have proven very useful in studies of adolescents being conducted by one of the research team (Clark, 1997). These groups are organized and led by an adolescent confederate with whom we work to design the instrument that will be used. The process of construction and design, intended to naturalize our investigations within the particular discourses of the social group involved, is in itself a valuable tool of investigation. As we negotiate with the confederate in the creation of the instrumentation, the selection of texts for provocation purposes, etc., we gain valuable insights into the status and construction of the media within her or his social networks and contexts. The confederate conducts the focus group, using a tape recorder, with none of our staff present. The tapes are then transcribed and the researcher and the confederate go over the transcripts together, providing still further insights into the questions at hand.

Fourth, at a later stage of the study, we will be developing focus group instrumentation to take on the road, and conduct in a variety of locations and contexts throughout the country. The overall study was originally provoked by the question of what kind of instrumentation might be used in focus or even large-sample quantitative studies to get at questions of media and religion. The current study evolved as a rather elaborate approach to the development of such instrumentation. Whether such is possible (that is, whether the articulation between culturalist and empiricist modes of analysis described earlier is possible) remains, of course, to be seen.

Conclusion

At this early stage of the research, there is already a good deal of evidence on which to base a description of the interactions of individuals with the symbolic inventory of the media sphere. It is clear that our informants do, in fact, negotiate and appropriate meanings within the symbolic marketplace of the media. Consistent with previous work by others, the symbolic resources thus acquired further serve a variety of purposes in subsequent action, from social connectedness to identity-construction. We expect to learn much more about these things, particularly as they relate to those meanings and constructions that relate to what we traditionally thought of as "religious" modes of knowing and religious meanings.

Beyond the "content" of meaning practice, however, there are also implications for our understanding of the nature of media "audiencing" itself. For example, there are "discourses of the media" through which audience members legitimate and qualify their relations with the media sphere. These discourses are, of course, class-connected, but they emerge in common social interaction to a surprising degree. Thus media-based meaning-making needs always to be understood in part as a function of the discourses through which it is mediated and through which it is known. A second, and more profound example of insights into the nature of media-based meaning practice was alluded to earlier: the extent to which the media are embedded in an ongoing social flow of life in the household. They are not discontinuous, but rather naturalized in the temporal and spatial contexts of the home to a great degree.

Our traditional ways of understanding and interpreting media audience practice have instead assumed a kind of discontinuity in action and a continuity in discourse. That is, we have treated media behaviors as somehow grafted onto (and secondary to) more basic and fundamental dimensions of social life, and we have treated discourses about the media as needing to be continuous and consistent with the overall cognitive practice of the individual as a sensate moral being. In contrast, what seems to emerge from the field is a picture of media behavior as consistent with, and organically embedded in, the flow of life, while discourses about the media operate in a discontinuous relationship with that flow. This becomes particularly evident in a project such as that described here, where the point of scholarly interpretation is to understand meaning-making in a normative sense. The epistemology of meaning in the media context comes into relief as a complex and nuanced set of questions.

The argument here is still in formation. But there appears to be some justification, both conceptual and pragmatic, for suggesting that it is long past time that media scholarship come to grips with the thorny question of religion.

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