Religion, Media, and The Cultural Center of Gravity

Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D.
Center for Mass Media Research
University of Colorado

An Address to the Trustees of the Foundation for United Methodist Communications
Nashville, May 7, 1998

copyright 1998 Stewart M. Hoover

Among the documents I reviewed in preparation for my talk here this evening was the address given to you last Fall by James Wall. Titled "On the Road Again...", it was a reflection on the relationship between his craft as a media professional and contemporary religion as we approach the turn of the century. I would describe that address as a bit of a lament--a lament over the continuing inability of American discourse about religion, particularly that represented by journalists, to grasp what Wall saw to be a bright line dividing the "private" side of religion from its "public" side, and to appropriately center the ethical reflection that could be offered by religious traditions.

The argument went something like this: Religion is most easily understood--and discussed--in American culture as a private matter. It can have powerful and important effects privately, but its public face is seen very differently, largely as a source of political controversy, due to the activism of religions of the "left" and the "right." Against this, Wall wanted to place a role for religion as a public moral force, not linked to the political pressures of the day, but present in public discourse as a mediator between private belief and public action. And, an important implication was that the appropriate role for media in the ministry of the church is to be an instrument of that projection and mediation.

As attracted as I am to this argument, I want to suggest that to think of things in this way--as if a clear demarcation exists between the voluble and effervescent religion of the private sphere and the cool, rational, pragmatic religion of the public sphere--misses a vital point about contemporary religion and contemporary media.

That point is that the whole cultural center of gravity has now shifted. What was once easily understood as a line between private and public has been or is being erased as a result of forces at work in contemporary religion and contemporary media. What has emerged in place of an old dualism between the private and the public, between the religious and the secular, and between the sacred and the profane, is a less definite space where those distinctions exist in state of fluidity and flux.

Let me describe the trends that are bringing this about. First, religious practice has undergone great change in the decades since the 1960s. Described by observers such as Robert Bellah, Robert Wuthnow, Catherine Albanese, Wade Clark Roof, and Tex Sample, religion is coming to reside more and more in the hands of individuals and less and less in the hands of institutions, denominations, congregations, or para-church groups.

Sociologists call this the rise of personal autonomy in matters of faith. It is rooted in the twentieth-century revolution which has brought the self and the construction of the self and personal identity to the fore as the central logics of social practice.

We are now much more self-conscious and calculating about identity--that is--about faith, belief, taste, and value--than was the case in the pre-industrial past, and we feel a greater sense of ownership over both the quest and the outcome. Wade Clark Roof calls the religious valence of this identify-formation "seeker" or "quester" religiosity. It is not the totality of religious practice today, but it is the important religious momentum at this point in history.

At the same time, the world of the media is changing, too. Fracturing, atomization, diversification and restructuring are the facts of life there. More and more channels, more and more sources and a greater range of goods and services are emerging. Look at television. The old general-interest networks are in decline. In their place we find an explosion in specialized channels and services.

And of special interest to us here is the fact that in this new media marketplace there is an increasing range of programs, products and services which are either explicitly or implicitly religious. This television season, for instance, saw an unprecedented number of television series which directly involved religion, as well as religious themes showing up in many other series on a less regular basis. Touched by an Angel, one of the top-rated shows this season, and Nothing Sacred, which failed in the ratings wars, are only two of dozens of examples in television alone. Similar trends could be found in film and in other media.

What I am saying is that we are, in fact, seeing the media marketplace function as a marketplace. The rise of autonomous religious seeking has led to a rise in supply to meet that demand. It goes without saying that this is interesting and somewhat unprecedented. Jim Wall is right in the implication that heretofore, religion, either explicit or implicit, was much less a feature of media content than it has now become.

I think it is helpful to think of what has emerged as a marketplace, though it is much more like a bazaar or a flea market than it is like main street or a department store. It is a marketplace made up of the plethora of television, radio, cable, and direct-broadcast channels, the worldwide web, the publishing industry, the self-help industry, the recording industry, the film industry and their allied fields. It is a marketplace within which people are increasingly seeking and finding religious insight and religious meaning. And, it provides resources to fit all tastes. Everything from Christian kitsch to crystal healing to "the Goddess," to Joseph Campbell, to Deepak Chopra, to twelve-step programs, to the PBS documentary From Jesus to Christ, to anything by Bill Moyers. It is all there.

What this means is that in contemporary life, the ways of being religious are moving out of the protected sphere of religious institution and tradition, and into the open ground of the symbolic marketplace. The rise of the autonomous self and the increasing diversity of the media marketplace are necessary but not sufficient explanations of this trend, however.

This marketplace approach to religion has deep roots in what Nathan Hatch calls the democratization of American religion. Briefly, Hatch argues that the religious ferment of the American Great Awakenings had at its base an individualistic, anti-institutional spirit. That spirit connected the democratic ideals of the political sphere with a set of ideals in the religious sphere that valued individual conscience and choice over institutional loyalty. This spirit of religion, in fact, is what gave rise to non-conformist denominational movements such as Methodism, the Disciples of Christ, and evangelicalism generally.

It is important to remember that this democratic spirit within American religion has both rejected institutions and their prescribed doctrine and at the same time embraced certain modes of religious practice which are rooted in and confirm this rejection. Religious authority, for example, has traditionally been suspicious of visual imagery, both two- and three-dimensional. One only need think of the curious and contested place of Warner Sallman's "Head of Christ" in American piety to see this. Think about where Sallman's Head has been "permitted" in Protestant practice. In which churches does it hang in the chancel; in the basement; in the store-room; or not at all?

But Sallman's head--as wonderfully described by my colleague David Morgan--also represents a kind of resistive practice among the laity. Regardless of how the theological elites felt about it, it found an important, meaningful place in the hearts and homes of people. American religion has always had this tension or struggle within it. On the one hand, religious institutions and religious authorities, doing their job as guardians of the faith and of doctrine. On the other hand, a laity empowered by their social, cultural and historical context to actually contest and resist those definitions.

I am suggesting that the kind of contestation and struggle represented by popular appropriation and use of Sallman's Head in the past is today exploding as more and more images, artifacts, services, organizations, and locations have emerged to satisfy a popular religiosity that has overflowed its banks. And a wide range of things come into play. It is not just visual imagery such as Sallman's Head. It is also objects, rituals and experiences, both embodied and more cerebral.

Let's think for a moment about what people get from all this. Objects, for example, have traditionally be derogated within mainline Protestant culture. They are what Coleen McDannell calls "Material Christianity" or what others have called "Christian Kitsch." They are tacky, profane, material, and sullied by commerce. One can take an alternative view, however. In an address several years ago to a religion sociology conference, Barbara Wheeler of Auburn Seminary recounted her experience doing research in an evangelical Seminary. One part of her reflection focused on the role of objects within evangelicalism. She said:

Evangelicals turn out stuff: thousands of Christian recordings: even more books -- a new Christian gothic novel, I was told by an avid reader of them, is published every week -- along with almost every other kind of fiction, poetry, Bible translations and paraphrases, advice, celebrity biography, and countless devotional volumes; magazines pamphlets, newspapers, broadsides, leaflets; plaques, posters, greeting and note cards, bumper stickers, ceramics, jewelry. As various as they are, and as much as they have in common with the rest of American mass material culture, most evangelical artifacts are self-evidently evangelical... Evangelicals have a vast and distinctive material culture. Almost anything that you can imagine they make, they probably do.

By contrast, she observed about mainline Protestantism:

...mainline Protestantism does not have enough of a culture. By comparison with the prolix popular culture of the evangelicals, mainline protestantism's inventory of symbols, manners, iconic leaders, images of leadership, distinctive language, decorations, and sounds is very low indeed.

Without these elements of culture, mainline Protestantism cannot create something a religious tradition must have to survive: a piety. By that term I mean to include much more than explicitly religious forms of activity.... I mean piety in the classic protestant sense: a whole way of life --shared practices, a catalog of virtues, models of Christian adequacy in the church and the world. Mainline Protestantism, I now think, is struggling because we have not established among us patterns of life, some of them religious in the conventional sense but many not so, that are fitted to our religious identity.

In fact, mainline protestants do not handle much of anything. I never would have realized this if I had not done research in such a different milieu. What I further gained from the evangelicals and now have to offer my own religious community is the realization that our lack of paraphernalia is a dangerous situation. We do not need the evangelicals' particular dry goods or pious practices, but we, like the evangelicals, are bodied beings, and a religious tradition that has little or nothing to look at, listen to, and touch cannot sustain us very long.

In his recent book on the visual piety of American Religion, David Morgan makes a similar point. In a helpful amplification, he places the salience of such objects and images in a psychological context. Citing the work of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, Morgan posits that the value of objects, be they visual or tactile, lies in their ability to ground identity. They give us touchstones in our lives, linking us to our past, grounding us in the present, and giving a hint of our future expectations. This is important, says Csikszentmihalyi, because without such objects, we risk falling into a state of confusion and entropy.

I would extend this argument to the artifacts, objects, and programs of the media sphere. The point I wish to underscore is that these ways of doing religion, popular, material, commodity-based, represent more and more of what American religiosity is today. And, they are gradually moving the center of religious culture into the center of media culture.

For over two years now, and for at least two more, we have been and will be engaged in a large-scale study of religion and meaning-making in the media age. The research centers on the marketplace of symbols, thinking of it as an inventory out of which people select and adopt symbols, values, and ideals that inform their identities, both religious and social. We are conducting interviews and observations in a wide range of households, attempting to understand how, in the context of daily life, this symbolic inventory is accessed, related to, and used. In the end we want to be able to say something about how meanings are made in a time and in a context that is are many ways unprecedented, and which have been left unexamined by the theological and secular academy.

What we are doing is very different from the approach taken by most previous research on the media. Rather than taking the perspective of media producers or owners, and thus looking at media in terms of their effectiveness at conveying messages, we radically stand with the receivers of those messages, looking back, with them, at the whole inventory which they have available and from which they choose.

What are we finding? First of all, there is a good deal of confirmation for the conceptual approach I have laid out here. It turns out to be quite useful to conceive of things in this way. People very much encounter the media environment as a source of symbols and values--some of which they adopt, some of which they throw away, some of which they re-interpret and reconstruct for themselves. They do not, by and large, see the world as a dualistic struggle between the sacred spheres of the home, church, or tradition against a secular or profane sphere of the media. For them, in their practices of daily life, it is all part of a universe of symbols.

In fact, when they do seem to center their meaning-making around the symbolic resources of the public sphere, they use those resources according to one or more of three systems of logic we are calling "media discourses."

First, there are the discourses in the media. These are the symbols, ideas, impulses, values and narratives that enliven media texts and artifacts. People, on some level, are attracted to, and derive meaning from, participating in these discourses. They like, and derive pleasure and meaning from, being conversant in The X-Files, or the Simpsons, or Friends.

Second, there are the discourses about the media. People find great value and meaning in being able to use the symbols, values, ideas, languages and practices they encounter in the media sphere as resources for their daily social interactions. Conversations within and beyond the household are often based on shared knowledge and a sense of common feeling derived from media experience.

Third, there are the discourses of the media. Everyone we have interviewed has had a sense of how they should think and behave with regard to the media. People know they should watch more public television and less Baywatch. Parents know their children should watch less television and play fewer video and computer games. Children know they should not watch violence or sex. Everyone thinks of their media behaviors, on some level, as guilty pleasures. These conditioning ideas about media experience have long been thought of by social scientists as impediments to understanding what people really "do." They'll tell you what they know they should about their media behaviors, but you can never be certain what they are actually doing. We look at it differently. We are interested to understand how these "shoulds," in fact, are related to and contribute to the meanings people make from their media experiences.

What draws people to media symbols and artifacts in the first place? There seem to be three broad categories here. First, there is a category we simply call "I like it." There is some indefinable attraction or motivation that draws people into images, artifacts, programs and experiences in the media sphere. A wide range of psychological theories, from subliminal to Freudian to behaviorist, have been directed at explaining these tastes and desires, but to no avail. The fact that more new programs, films, books and other media fail than succeed, suggests to me that on some level we will never know or be able to predict more than that some things are liked and some things rejected.

The second category of attraction and motivation is more familiar, that is one we might call "function" or "information." There are those times when a television program is only a television program. News viewers, for example, are probably partly drawn to news for "the news." They want some information, and that is where they go to get it. This is where we would also place the function of social connection mentioned earlier. People really do consume media messages in order to maintain contact, both within the household and beyond it.

The third category is the most interesting and in some ways most important. That is, that people seem to go to media for the kind of reason suggested by David Morgan and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Media artifacts have an important function as objects that ground identity. They are touchstones through which people define themselves and their place in the social and cultural landscape. The media provide the symbolic resources through which these definitions take place. Their power is not a power to convict or to manipulate so much as it is a power to provide the means within culture to define and to name.

It is early days yet for our research, but if we were pressed, we might point to the following as what we might call "effects" of the media on religion.

First, a "flattening" of symbols. The overall framework I presented here would predict that religious symbols would be becoming submerged in the general universe of symbols of the media sphere. There is evidence of this in our interviews. Religious symbols, traditionally legitimated by religious doctrine, history, and practice, today struggle to find any particular or special place. The former situation in which symbols such as the cross could be held in a hierarchical relationship to other, more secular or cultural symbols, has broken down. Today, for instance, Madonna can take the crucifix off the wall and (to coin a phrase) "get down" with it, or place it on her body in juxtapositions that formerly would have been thought blasphemous, with the consequence that it becomes in part her property, her symbol.

The outlines of this flattening (as with most of what I am saying) are best seen in relationship to practice. As my colleague Lynn Schofield Clark has shown in her work with teens, there is a generational effect here. One of the ways that the traditional hierarchy of legitimacy was maintained was through institutional loyalty and participation. People who went to church heard the stories, celebrated the traditional symbols and values, and participated in their maintenance and reconstitution.

Sociologists tell us that a huge generational shift is coming when the children of the Baby Boom--who came late or never to conventional participation in formal religion--themselves come to the fore as young adults. They lack the cultural memory of religion that would support the traditional view of the cross, for example. This is certainly what Lynn has found in her work. Which symbols are in the canon and which are not, and the relationship between them will be of little interest when these post-boomers themselves become parents.

An early hint of this shift in understanding came several years ago on NBC's Saturday Night Live. You may recall the incident where the Irish pop singer Sinead O'Connor, who was a guest host of the program, ended her last song by holding up a photograph of John Paul II, tearing it in half, and saying "fight the real enemy." This sent shock waves through a predominantly young audience which had for several years been consuming images of Madonna's cavorting with the crucifix with little reaction. In contrast, the reaction to O'Connor's act was huge--and telling. The cross, as an object of history and tradition, had lost much of its power to shock and convict. The Pope, by contrast, was someone known, in the here and now, and understood via his media presence, to be a real human being.

A second area of effect has to do with the range of symbols which are present in the media inventory. One of the traditional areas of media effects was called "canalization" by early pioneers in the field. This has also been called the "agenda setting" function of the media. That is, that their effect is not so much in telling us "what to think" as "what to think about." The range of topics covered in news serves to direct public comment and public discourse within a narrower, defined range than the universe of possible topics. In the same way, we might say that if what I've said earlier is correct, that the symbolic marketplace of the media sphere is coming to be the place where religious meanings are made, then the raw material of those meanings will necessarily be a narrower set of resources than all possible ones.

Finally, it may follow from all of this that certain narratives, symbols and stories come to be established at the expense of others. For example, it would make sense that dominant American cultural myths would also dominate in the narratives of prime time television. The struggle between individualism and commitment, as described by Robert Bellah, is a common theme in television narratives. Cultural critics call this process "naturalization" or the "making natural" of certain symbolic constructions and the denial of others. It is too early to present a systematic analysis of this, but it is something we expect to learn more about as we proceed.

So, by way of conclusion, what does all of this mean? What are the implications for organizations, such as yours, which are responsible for the media work of mainline institutions? A few learnings stand out at this point.

First, the major message here is that to exist in today's public culture, it is necessary to exist in the media. To withdraw entirely in the face of an omnipresent media sphere is to choose marginalization and loss of voice. In a way, I am saying "just do it!" but I also would urge some reflection and contemplation about appropriate approaches.

Second, we must take seriously the fact that your symbols must compete with others on more or less level turf. Some of the most important and valued symbols of the church have been appropriated by secular and commercial voices. Others have lost their authenticity and uniqueness. They cannot be recaptured simply by force of will.

Third, we must abandon efforts which set up dualisms between church or religion and media as separate spheres, authentic and sacred on the one hand, and inauthentic and secular or even profane on the other. That is simply not the way people think about or use media today. The media are a given, a taken-for-granted environment of meaning and cultural commerce. They are not all-encompassing or all-pervasive. They are, however, a reality to be reckoned with, and one we have too easily ignored, dismissed, or wished away in the past.

Fourth, we must remember that meaning happens not in the messages we produce but in the audiences which receive them. Our task is not to perfect our messages so that they result in the meanings we intend, but to make them authentic representations of core beliefs and values, effectively crafted for presentation in the media sphere.

Fifth, we need to re-think what it means to be a church in the media age. The emergence of the media sphere has created entirely new conditions for ministry. The effectively communicating church must be one which understands its communication in terms of its authenticity and its relation to the way its members live their lives. This is to say that communication, as other activities of the church, must be contextual and grounded in experience and in praxis.

It has been tempting to think of the church in the media age as one which articulates itself to the demands of the principalities and powers which exist at the center of the media industries. Media ministries of the mainline churches historically sought a place at the center of dominant media institutions.

The theologies of culture which emerged from neo-orthodoxy at mid-century conceived of the church's role as a voice holding a dominant position in public discourse. In his important book on popular religion, Peter Williams noted that neo-orthodoxy's project in media and culture was primarily concerned with ethical reflection on social issues.

The underlying assumption is that social problems are the result of ignorance and bad faith, and that individual human decisions are a major factor in setting right what has gone wrong. Broad social forces are real causal agents, but they can be mastered through informed analysis and through an ethical conscience based on principles commonly shared by Christianity and Judaism (p. 208).

The approach to media that necessarily follows is like the one lamented by Jim Wall. The church and the media are autonomous and fundamentally unrelated spheres. The church's approach to the media should be to make them (that is, the media) the context where this informed analysis takes place. The media can and should be made into a forum for rational consideration which functions as an instrumental extension of the church's voice which is then projected into secular society.

In the 1950s and 60s, this voice in public discourse was assumed to be secure as a matter of legacy. At the same time though, this was never a comfortable place. It involved much compromise with little real return.

The recent erosion of the church's position in the public media might be seen as an opportunity to think about a new theology of culture. This has been predicted by an emerging voice of theological reflection on these matters: Peter Horsfield of the Uniting Church of Australia (he also happens to come from the Methodist tradition within that church). Peter suggests that part of our problem may trace back to neo-orthodoxy and the theologies of mid-century themselves. In particular, he identifies H. Richard Niebuhr's "Christ and Culture" paradigm, which has served so many voices as a justification for sacred/secular and public/private dualism in reflections on the media and public culture. I quote him from a post to his Christ and Media Culture discussion group on the internet:

I think the framework of analysis Niebuhr used in Christ and Culture was inadequate. The only Christ we know is Christ within a particular cultural form. This cultural form both enables relevant understanding and experience of God's action in particular ways while at the same time restricting other understandings. We know no "Word" except "the word made flesh" - which, as Paul notes, was a scandal to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews... However much we may desire it it is not possible to find a free space, separate from the world we live in, to evaluate what's Christ and what isn't. Absolutising a particular position is not a solution, which is what fundamentalism tends to do. What media-culture are we "extracting" people into, once we extract them from this one, and on what grounds do we say this other one is better or more gospel-like?

The mainline churches have found it easy to see this when we have talked about cultural difference: women, people of color, the poor, people from the south. We understand these voices to be radically contextual and we understand the necessity of letting them speak from their own contexts. This implies rather radically that meaning is made in context and that what is important is the making and understanding of those meanings. What I am saying is that in our own lives as participants in media culture, that is where the action is as well. It no longer serves us to focus on the church and the media as separate, autonomous entities locked in conflict over the hearts, minds and souls of defenseless eyes and ears in the public square. We need to begin to understand that most meanings are in one way or another modulated by, constrained by, but--most importantly--enabled by the instruments of the media sphere.

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