Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hjarvard, Stig

Titel

The mediatization of religion: From the faith of the Church to the enchantment of the media

Ist Teil von

• The Mediatization of Culture and Society, 2013, p.88-112

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• With the help of the most sophisticated media technology, supernatural phenomena have acquired an unmatched presence in modern societies. In blockbuster movies such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Twilight Saga, and the Harry Potter film series; ghosts, elves, vampires, unicorns, monsters possessed by evil, and spirits working for good, are vividly alive and inhabit the world on a par with mortal human beings. The metaphysical realm is no longer something one can only imagine, or occasionally see represented in symbolic forms in fresco paintings or pillars of stone. The media’s representation of the supernatural world has acquired a richness of detail, character, and narrative that makes the supernatural appear natural. The salience of the supernatural world is, furthermore, supported by its mundane character in the media. Watching aliens, demons, and vampires in television series such as The X Files, Supernatural, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer week after week, season after season, and spending an hour or two every day fighting supernatural monsters in computer games like World of Warcraft, playing a magic character of your own creation, all make the world of the unreal a rather familiar phenomenon. The supernatural world is not confined to the media genres of fiction. Television reality series such as the Discovery Channel’s Ghosthunters were among the first in a wave of television programs dealing with the supernatural, the paranormal, and other (quasi-) religious issues. These were followed by the British Most Haunted and the American Ghost Hunters series. In Denmark, for instance, national television has dealt with ghosts, exorcism, and reincarnation in such programs as The Power of the Spirits and Travelling with the Soul. On entertainment shows such as The Sixth Sense, astrologists and chiromancers appear together with psychologists and fashion specialists. Not only have such popular forms of religion become more prominent in the media in many countries, but the institutionalized religions (Christianity, Islam, and so on) have also drawn greater attention in news and other factual genres. In the Nordic countries, Islam has received far more attention during the last decades (Lundby and Lövheim forthcoming), not least due to immigration’s presence on the political agenda. Christianity, too, has received more journalistic attention. Institutional forms of religion not only receive more news coverage, but the treatment also has a stronger focus on opinions and debates, making use of a wider range of journalistic genres than in earlier times. Considering the Danish press in the period from 1985 to 2005, Rosenfeldt (2007) documents a multiplication of stories involving Christian issues (approximately three times as many) and Islamic issues (approximately 11 times as many). The publication of the cartoons portraying the Prophet Mohammed by the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten left no doubt that the media do indeed play a prominent role in the public circulation of religious representations, and in the framing of religious controversy (Kunelius et al. 2007; Hjarvard 2010a). Last but not least, the Internet and other digital media have become a prominent platform for the dissemination and discussion of religious issues, allowing many individuals and religious movements to express religious ideas and sentiments outside the traditional framework of the Church, and changing the ways in which religious institutions interact with their communities (Højsgaard and Warburg 2005; Campbell 2010). The increased presence of religious themes in the media may at first appear to be a negation of the idea that secularization is the hallmark of high modernity, and that the media are agents of enlightenment. Consequently, we could interpret the development as an increased tendency towards the de-secularization (Berger et al. 1999) or re-sacralization (Demerath 2003) of modern society, in which secular tendencies are gradually replaced, or at least challenged, by the resurgence of Christianity, Islam, and newer mediatized forms of religion. However, despite the reappearance of religion on the media agenda, there are nevertheless also tendencies towards a secularization of society. Norris and Inglehart (2004) and Inglehart and Welzel (2005) have provided the most comprehensive comparative analyses concerning the relationship between modernization and various dimensions of secularization. Based on the available statistical data from 74 countries, covering the period 1981-2001, Norris and Inglehart (2004) report a clear correlation between the modernization of society and the decline in traditional religious behavior and beliefs. At the same time, Inglehart and Welzel (2005) also point out that the spread of self-expression values in late modern society may increase sensitivity toward various forms of subjectivized spirituality and non-material concerns. Secularization thus does not entail the total disappearance of religion, but denotes a series of structural transformations of religion in the modern world, including a decline in the authority of religious institutions in society, together with the development of more individualized forms of religious beliefs and practices (Bruce 2002; Dobbelaere 2002; Taylor 2007). From this perspective, the mediatization of religion may be considered part of a gradual process of secularization in late modern society: it is the historical process by which the media have adopted many of the social functions that were previously performed by religious institutions. Rituals, worship, mourning, and celebration are all social activities that used to be part of institutionalized religion, but have now partly been taken over by the media and transformed into more or less secular activities serving other purposes than those of religious institutions. Studying how religion interconnects with the media provides evidence of secularization, as well as re-sacralization, tendencies. It may certainly be possible that both tendencies are at work at the same time – although in different areas and aspects of the interface between religion and the media. For instance, some media genres, like news and documentaries, may generally subscribe to a secular world view, while fantasy and horror genres are more inclined to evoke metaphysical or supernatural imaginations. For a sociological understanding of the role that the modern media play in religion, it is important to stress that they not only represent or report on religious issues, but also change the very ideas and authority of religious institutions, and affect how people interact with each other when dealing with religious issues. For instance, some strands of faith were previously considered to be superstition and denounced as low culture. The increased presence of such types of faith on international and national television has increased the legitimacy of “superstition” and challenged the cultural prestige of the institutionalized Church. As expressed by a Danish bishop after the screening of the ghost hunter television series The Power of the Spirits, “Danish culture will never be the same after this series” (Lindhardt 2004). Similarly, we have witnessed how Dan Brown’s bestseller novels and movies The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons acquired a global audience though a mixture of spiritual sensibility, conspiracy theories, and criticism of traditional orthodoxy (Partridge 2008). This success was so immense that the Roman Catholic Church, and other Christian communities, felt threatened by Dan Brown’s alternative interpretation of the Gospel and produced numerous media outlets to counter his arguments. As a result, the publication and screening of the Dan Brown novels and films became spectacular media events that spurred news coverage, television debates, and public protests. The aim of this chapter is to develop a theoretical framework for an under- standing of how the media work as agents of religious change. Through the process of mediatization, the media come to influence and change religion at several levels, including the authority of the religious institution, the symbolic content of religious narratives, and religious faith and practices. A theory of the interface between media and religion must consider the media and religion in the proper cultural and historical contexts, since the mediatization of religion is neither historically, culturally, nor geographically a universal phenomenon. As stipulated in Chapter 2, mediatization as a general process is a late modern phenomenon, in which the media have become semi-independent institutions, at the same time as the media have become integrated into various cultural and social institutions. Also, within highly modernized societies, there are many differences in terms of both media and religion, and the theoretical framework and analytical outline presented in this chapter may be more suitable to describe developments in north-western Europe than elsewhere in the world. The studies conducted by Clark (2005) and Hoover (2006) clearly indicate that the evangelical movement in the United States provides an important cultural context for the interplay between media and religion. This differs from the Nordic experience, which has a far more limited public presence of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, with lower attendance levels. The empirical findings from a Danish context that are presented at the end of this chapter may therefore very well differ from the US experience. As Lynch (2011) has observed, the mediatization of religion in the Nordic countries may be dependent on four characteristics that dominate the relationship between media and religion: (1) mainstream media institutions have a non-confessional orientation and there is limited use of media with a strong confessional orientation; (2) when the population has little direct engagement with religious institutions mainstream public media become the access