Conversations About Communication Theology – Theories of Media and Religion: An Evolution Over 150 Years
By Robert A. White, S.J.
[White has served as Professor at the Institute of Social Transformation at Tangaza University, Kenya.]
I would like to review briefly the evolution of some of the major theoretical positions and lines of research on religion and the media. I see four major stages in this evolution which parallel the general evolution of the social and human sciences. To these four I would like to suggest a fifth stage that may well emerge in the coming years. It is not possible to give detailed mention of all of the major studies and research programs, but I will sketch the broad lines of debate and change.
Theories of media and religion have been influenced most directly by current theories of sociology of religion and theories of media. Underlying theories of both religion and society and media and society are the dominant public conceptions—a kind of “world view” of the role of religion and the role of media in society. Public policies of media and religion emerge from these shifting world views and from the more theoretical conceptions of media, religion and society. And these policies regarding the role that religion and media should have, tend to come back to influence our world view and our theories of media, religion and society. Methodologically, all of these questions enter into the following analysis of the evolution of theories of media and religion in each particular stage of evolution.
A First Stage: The 19th Century Origins of Foundational Theories of Religion and Media
The science of sociology began in the nineteenth century as a means of understanding how to guide societies into the new industrial era. The great founding theorists such as Durkheim, Weber, Toennies, Simmel and Marx elaborated general theories to understand the fundamental “laws” of social progress. For Durkheim, for example, social progress was structured around the increased differentiation and specialization that came from the division of labor. For Weber progress depended on increased instrumental rationalization.
Some sociologists, especially those in the Marxist tradition, were unabashed utopians and were convinced that just as the physical sciences were a factor for systematic elimination of the problems of society, so sociology could bring about a perfect society, if the fundamental laws of social progress could be understood.
All theorists were acutely aware that industrial progress was bringing with it serious human and social problems. The science of sociology could be helpful in understanding the fundamental laws of social development so every institution could be “designed” to contribute to that. But sociology was also a means for understanding the causes of the social and personal “dysfunctions” and how these might be understood and eliminated.
Virtually all of the great theorists viewed secularization as part of the inevitable path of progress, but all considered religion a powerful motivation in society and likely to be such a motivation for some time. Thus, the motivations of religion had to be harnessed to the development of society. For Durkheim, religion was a powerful factor for the social integration and unity in a society which was tending toward differentiation and fragmentation. Industrialization was bringing great personal stress, and religion, in some form, could be a factor in alleviating this. Weber saw religion, at least the Protestant ethic, as a major factor in introducing instrumental rationality, and this dimension of religion could be used to promote social progress (Beckford, 1989).
Thus all the founding theorists took the religious phenomenon of their time—the great Victorian religious revival (after the extreme rationalism and destructive anti-religiosity of the eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars) – as evidence that religion would be a major social institution and an institution that had to be dealt with in some way for progress in society.
Public policy viewed religion as a positive factor and, in general, governments attempted to promote religion or at least the ethical and rationalizing influence of religion in society. Although it was considered important to keep clerical influence out of government and public decisions, religious education was encouraged and governments, by and large, helped the churches to respond to the religious needs by favoring religion wherever possible. In the late nineteenth century many of the churches in the industrializing nations began to use the media of the time—especially popular magazines and books – to educate the working classes to adapt to a rapidly urbanizing and modernizing society.
At the time of this first stage, media-related studies had not emerged as a separate scientific discipline. Some universities in the United States were beginning to establish schools of journalism, but this had only begun to generate the apparatus of doctoral programs, scientific research and publications. But most of the social theories of the time did indicate some role for the media, although the attitude was quite ambivalent. On the whole, media were viewed as important for social progress to distribute information and for the social integration of society (McQuail, 1994: 34-35). On the other hand, there was widespread fear of the unlettered and uncultured masses as an irrational, destructive force. There was a general view that media, especially popular media, could be a factor to excite the masses to irrational destruction (Martin-Barbero, 1993: 6-32). The view that popular media and popular entertainment could distract the masses from political action was slow to develop. Thus, in Britain, we have the so-called knowledge taxes to prevent access to newspapers until the mid 1850s. The attempts of the churches to educate and inform the masses was viewed as a more controlled and positive influence.
This positive view of the churches’ educational and cultural role was the foundation of the general view that religion represents a type of public service which merits privileges such as exemption from taxes, reduced postage costs on religious publications, etc. When broadcasting began in the 1920s, this perception of religion as a public service provided the basis for giving religious broadcasts a place in the public service systems of Europe, and mandating that radio in the US provide time to religious organizations gratis, as part of a public service obligations.
A Second Stage: The Emergence of Empirical Sociology
In the early part of the twentieth century, sociologists began to argue it was not enough to elaborate grand theories of social evolution; rather there was need for detailed factual analysis of social problems. Underlying much of this analysis of problems was a conception of society that viewed urbanization as a corruption of an earlier idyllic rural past – thus causing a general “decline of civilization”. This entailed a concrete description of the nature and extent of the problem, an analysis of the causes of the problems, and, finally, a proposal for the amelioration of the problems based on a cumulative theoretical model of causality. The Webbs in Britain and the Chicago School in the United States are two examples of this. This trend encouraged the development of social survey methods, the use of statistical analysis, and the development of measures of individual behavior, especially psychological dimensions of behavior, such as attitudes and other social psychological concepts.
What emerged was the conception of practical, “administrative” research – the gathering of information so administrators would have a better idea of how to design their programs. Many institutions, including churches, began to see the need to employ research personnel or even to have their own research department. As radio broadcasting developed in the 1920s and 1930s, survey research methods to analyze audience needs were brought in and broadcasting organizations opened research departments or contracted parallel private research enterprises. Commercial research institutes, such as that of Lazarfeld in New York, were the major early influences on the formulation of media research methods and media theory.
The great social theorists were located in Europe until the 1930s. However, sociological research and the incipient communication sciences in Europe were almost impossible because of the totalitarian regimes, the state of war, and the massive migration of so many social scientists from Europe to the US. Thus, in this period from the 1920s to the mid 1950s, the social sciences (especially the sociology of religion) and the creation of communication sciences, tended to be more of an American enterprise. The American social theorist, Talcott Parsons, played a crucial role in this period because he was able to provide a general functionalist theory for American sociologists based on Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and the other classical founders of social theory.
All this offered a basis for the empirical theoretical methods of the American sociologists. Parsons had studied in Germany but he returned to America in the 1930s just at a time when American sociologists needed a theoretical framework to avoid bringing in the personal voluntarism that the positivism of the period abhorred but which would give sociologists some theoretical legitimacy in American universities and help them avoid the accusation that they were just piling up useless data.
Parson’s functionalist “self-adapting systems theory” kept the person and personal values out but seemed to provide a unifying explanatory theory for interrelating the new sciences of sociology (the social system), psychology (the personality system), cultural anthropology (the cultural system), political science, economics and other emerging human and social sciences. Social systems theory also seemed to provide a good framework for policy in the new Keynesian liberal, democratic welfare states: by just making a few structural adjustments in one part of the system, all could be kept in evolving equilibrium. Resources moved from one part of the system to other parts without a great deal of internal conflict and the whole system would benefit. With his strong Congregationalist Protestant background and his belief in Weber’s Protestant ethic rationality, Parsons made religious values and institutions the integrating, rationalistic guidance factor for the whole set of systems.
The emphasis on the social problems of poverty led to an increasingly critical view of the large, capitalistic enterprise that treated the working classes as simply an anonymous factor of production to be exploited. Since the media had transformed itself in one of these types of exploitative enterprises, there was increasing concern regarding the harmful manipulation of the public by the media. In the 1920s, the churches in many parts of the world began a campaign on the negative influence of the cinema. In the US, the film industry introduced a self-censorship system to avoid the actions of the local censorship boards that represented the direct influence of religious bodies. In Europe, the churches had less influence on the industry, but they attempted to educate the public to use the cinema more critically.
One of the first large empirical studies of the media was an analysis, in the late 1920s in the US, of the degree of harmful effects of the media, particularly film and especially the impact on adolescents. The Payne study, named after the foundation that financed much of it, was a classical model of administrative research . This was also one of the first of a long line of studies of the effects of media violence, set in motion by churches and other institutions, that felt the media were having a harmful effect on the morals of the public (Rowland, 1983). The logic of these studies was similar to much of the sociological research of the day; they attempted to analyze the harmful effects of large institutions, including media, on society.
One of the results of the concern of the churches was the sponsorship of a study of the relative responsibility and irresponsibility of the media, sponsored by National Council of Churches in the United States; this was carried out by the media scholar Wilbur Schramm (Nerone, 1995: 8). This study contributed to the thinking that resulted in the Hutchins Commission which, in turn, contributed to the definition of the social responsibility ethic of public media. The study was also the background for the thinking that produced the famous Four Theories of the Press (1956).
This period is characterized by the founding of journals, such The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, for reporting empirical studies of every aspect of religion from conversion experience to degrees of religiosity. Systems theory kept issues of personal faith out of the analysis and maintained the premise that religion continues because it can be important for maintaining the personality system and other social systems. Characteristic are the multiplication of descriptive studies of parishes and other religious organizations (Michonneau, 1949; Fichter, 1951, 1954; Schuyler, 1960) carried out by the churches in order to have accurate data on how people practice their religion or to obtain accurate data on priests, pastors or other religious functionaries. Indirectly, these studies were proof that religion could be dealt with in an objective, value-free manner that provided data in an impersonal fashion to all scientific minds regardless of their personal beliefs.
Typical of the large scale studies describing religious behavior later in this period are Lenski’s The Religious Factor (1961) and Stark and Glock’s American Piety: the Nature of Religious Commitment (1968). Underlying all of these studies is a certain skepticism about the degree of religious practice in an increasingly secular world, especially a skepticism about the claims of the churches and a skepticism about the continuing importance of religion in public life. This was the basis of the relatively privileged public service position of the churches.
The research style of this period inspired the first major study of the “effects of religious programs broadcast over radio and television” (Parker, Barry, Smythe, 1955: xiii). It was conceived and financed by the National Council of Churches in the US, but it was carried out in cooperation with major sociologists and guided by major sociological theories of the day. The underlying premise was skepticism about the effects of the media, but also an attempt to understand the factors that condition the interpretation of religious messages of radio and television. The study includes an analysis of the views and messages of religious broadcasters, attitudes of clergy toward broadcasts, the general use of media, and the degree of use of religious programs in the city studied (New Haven, Connecticut).
The most significant part of the study was a uses and gratifications analysis of religious programming, especially of Bishop Sheen, who was the most popular religious television personality at the time. For example, the study has a quite elaborate analysis of the personality characteristics of the followers of Bishop Sheen. This study, like all major sociological research of the time, thinks of religion largely in terms of psychological characteristics of people. The study concludes (like all good analyses of “problems”) with proposals for a strategy of religious broadcasting and some suggestions for policy in religious programming. The recommendations follow the typical administrative audience research regarding how programming can “target” certain audiences better and how the broadcasts can be made more significant in the lives of people.
Third Stage: The Analysis of the Social Construction of Cultural Reality
In the 1960s, the social sciences, especially the sociology of religion and communication sciences, began to move away from the notion that societies are self-changing and self-sustaining systems that operate regardless of what the humans within them do, or how humans are affected. No book may be more symbolic of this shift than Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966). It cannot be by chance, I think, that both Berger and Luckmann are sociologists of religion. Berger had already signaled in his book, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (1963) that sociological analysis should be an act of human understanding and interpretation of socio-cultural reality, in order to be able to shape this, through public debate, according to the demands of our human existence in a cosmos.
This shift in the social sciences moved sociology away from a preoccupation with psychology to links with cultural studies. This was exemplified in the Frankfurt school, in structuralist cultural anthropology and, later, with British and American traditions of cultural studies. Most important, the shift brought back into the center of sociological study, the issue of social power and the problematic of cultural hegemony and ideology. The Gramscian type of analysis became important – how injustices persist even in a self-adapting Keynesian welfare state. Parsonian functionalism, according to many, tends to assume that issues of power and injustice will disappear automatically without any hard decisions regarding redistribution of wealth, prestige and cultural privileges.
Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1966) and Luckmann’s The Invisible Religion (1967) provided what many consider the major theoretical framework for the sociological analysis of religion over the past thirty years (Wuthnow, 1992; Beckford, 1989). Berger tended to define the religious as the concern with the outer limits of human construction of cultural reality – those areas of cultural conception near the limits of human invention and where there begin the givens of existence that humans cannot change. For Berger religion is a kind of the overarching “canopy”, or dividing line, between the rationally understandable and the unexplainable “givens” under which, and from which, hangs a logically, rationally consistent explanation of human affairs.
The cultural conceptions that lie beyond the line of rational construction form the area of expertise of the theologian. The ultimate cultural constructions just inside the line or canopy are more the area of expertise of the myth maker – the storyteller, the rhetorician, the dramatist, the poet and, sometimes, the great political leader, and the creators of cultural ideology.
The line of ultimate explanations remains a very fine, and constantly-moving, line. The theologians and the myth makers are constantly moving in and out of each other’s territory and there are constant struggles over the ground of expertise. For example, Martin and Oswalt‘s book, Screening the Sacred, argues that contemporary film provides the major context for people (especially the young) to explore religious issues. These authors see three major types of religious films: the theological, the mythic and the ideological – depending on which side of the line of ultimate cultural explanation the film defines itself.
Thus, much of the conflict between theologians and myth makers and the desire of religious reformers to disentangle the realms of and ideology and theology, goes back to the fact that they occupy similar cultural expertise. This dispute over territory helps to explain why theologians have been so suspicious of the media which, today, are widely regarding as the main cultural myth-makers and the vendors of cultural ideology (Silverstone, 1981).
Berger tended to define the institutions and specialists dealing with the areas of ultimate cultural explanation in terms of what popular opinion considers religious -- the churches and other self-declared religious specialists. Luckmann (1967), on the other hand, suggests that any form of institution can be religious if it functions as a form of relation with ultimate explanation and limit realities.
The social construction of reality perspective has been of great importance for new developments in communication theories and in theories of media and religion. This has helped to link media studies with cultural studies both in the European cultural studies tradition (which is much more concerned with issues of cultural hegemony and ideology) and in the American cultural studies tradition (which tends to be more concerned with cultural dialogue and social responsibility in a radically pluralist, libertarian society).
British cultural studies tended to see religion in a classical Marxist perspective as an ideological formation upholding the dominant cultural hegemonies. Only the occasional article sees classical Marxist approaches as too rationalistic, needing the complement of studies of the role of “re-enchantment” that comes especially from popular religiosities (Murdock, 1997: Martin-Barbero, 1993; 1997).
Gramsci, himself, and his students in the Italian context, have become much more aware of the contradictions within religious organizations between official and popular religiosity. Latin American communication scholars have been much more aware of this line of thought of Gramsci and have analyzed the role of popular religiosity in the media as an emancipatory factor in Latin American society (Martin-Barbero, 1993). Latin American studies of comunicacion popular have carried out extensive studies of how important popular religiosity can be in the development of alternative and popular media in Latin America and in other parts of the world (Festa, 1986; Martinez-de-Toda, 1986; Mata, 1985 ; Gonzalez, 1994).
In the US, there exists a very strong current of research on popular culture and this has been echoed in the study of media and religion by studies of material culture. David Morgan’s studies of the uses of popular imagery among both Catholics and Protestants represents a very significant line of this research (Morgan, 1998).
American cultural studies have been open to the wealth of the cultural anthropology of religion in studies of mythic construction of meaning by Levi-Strauss, studies of ritual and performance by Victor Turner, the methods of thick description and religious symbolism in Clifford Geertz, and in de Certeau’s conceptions of bricolage. Particularly influential in the study of religion and media has been Victor Turner’s conceptions of theater and television as a form of ritual and its contrast with the more pragmatic, power-related aspects of life. This conception of religion may be closer to that of Luckmann than the identification of the religious with church-related activities. Turner’s conception of the liminal, quasi-religious experience has been extremely important in understanding the experience of popular music (Martin, 1981; Cohen, 1991), television programming (Newcomb, 1983), fans of science-fiction programs (Jenkins,1992) and televangelists (Hoover, 1988).
The social construction of reality perspective is also linked with the tradition of studies that sees literature, the deep structure of language, oral and literate expression, and the media, as fundamental factors in the development of cultures. McLuhan (1964)and his followers popularized the view that the way media affect the senses of sight and hearing influences the development of cultures. Ong (1992; 1967) used this method of analysis of how orality or literacy influence the development of cultures to explain how a purely oral culture, for example, will influence the development of religious thought.
James Carey (1977), drawing on the method of analysis of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, has questioned the validity of the linear “effects” model in communication and has proposed that a more pertinent question deals with what kind of cultures are being constructed in the context of the media. Instead of a preoccupation with effects, Carey proposes a ritual or communion model in which the key question points to the context of dialogue and complex interaction among the various actors of the media. Carey’s ritual model of communication has been widely applied in studies of religion and media (Hoover and Lundby, 1997: passim). For example, Hoover describes the electronic church as a form of religious revitalization movement in which the key question is the kind of religious and secular culture that is being constructed in the media (Hoover, 1988: 26).
The social construction of reality perspective in the American cultural studies tradition has been particularly influenced by rhetorical analysis in which the focus is on the text as a means of constructing consensual cultural meaning (Gronbeck, 1991). While the research on the evangelical electronic church has tended to focus on audience research, research on Catholic media presence has used methods of rhetorical analysis with particular effectiveness to determine how the Pope’s speeches, bishop’s statements, or major Catholic media personalities are constructing a pattern of religious meaning that will potentially evoke the identification of an audience. This approach comes very close to the method of Berger in The Sacred Canopy and exemplifies particularly well what Berger and Luckmann are proposing in The Social Construction of Reality.
A particularly good example of this analysis is Margaret Melady’s study of how the contemporary meaning patterns of a “rhetorical papacy” are being constructed, using as a case study the four papal visits every year in response to the invitations of the local episcopal conferences. Her book, The Rhetoric of Pope John Paul II: The Pastoral Visit as a New Vocabulary of the Sacred, is based on the analysis of Pope John Paul II’s visit to the United States in 1987. Her study illustrates how thousands of actors are involved in the construction of the pattern of meaning which is, finally, “orchestrated” by the Pope himself.
Melady shows how the papacy is configuring a much more popular and populist language of the sacred in the context of the turbulent post-Vatican II era. One is the choice of symbols (moving away from an imperial papacy to a papacy that kisses babies), the choice of language, and the choice of theological metaphors to refer to the unity of the Church. This also includes the choice of places that will ensure an image of massive support with the continual debate about “how many” people really came to this or that staged ritual event. Melady’s study is also an example of how this research constructs a theoretical framework by pulling together all of the major figures of a cultural studies, social construction perspective: Berger and Luckmann, Victor Turner, Robert Wuthnow, David Martin and Kenneth Burke.
In addition to Melady’s analysis of papal rhetoric, there are studies of: Bishop Sheen, the Catholic television personality of the 1950s (Lynch, 1998); the controversial 1930s American radio priest Father Charles Coughlin (Carpenter, 1998); an analysis of the pastoral letters of the bishops of the United States (Cheney, 1991); and an analysis of the papal document, Humanae Vitae (Jamison, 1980).
Robert Wuthnow, a major American sociologist of culture and religious institutions, has argued strongly that the sociology of religion must move away from its preoccupation with religion as psychological attitudes, to the ways that religious institutions are constructing religious meaning. Wuthnow suggests that the more central questions for the sociology of religion are not “the meaning of symbolism, but the symbolization of meaning” (Wuthnow, 1992: 53). Following this suggestion, Marsha Witten, a student of Wuthnow, carried out a comparative analysis of Sunday sermons in a sample of Protestant Churches (Witten, 1993).
Another line of research in this social construction of reality perspective are studies which are much closer to the Durkheimian concern with religion as collective representations of a society in a particular historical cultural moment. Particularly good examples of this are Knut Lundby’s study of how Norwegians chose to symbolize the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway with the mythic Norwegian deity of the vetter as a way to “sacralize” the Olympic games and emphasize its link with the mythic gods of Ancient Greece residing on Mount Olympus (Lundby, 1997).
Dayan and Katz, with their series of studies of television ritual events, have argued that the televising of events such as presidential inaugurations or coronations, great sports events, and funerals of public figures, are national public rituals which can be understood only in terms of the conceptions of the sociology of religion regarding ritual, Durkheimian collective representations, and the sacralization of major historical turning points (Dayan and Katz, 1992).
Virtually all major theoretical analyses of the significance of religious media conclude the importance of religious broadcasting does not lie in the presumed effects on attitudes or values broadcasting may have; few people are converted through broadcasting. Rather, the importance of the religious television personality – and virtually all such religious broadcasting is centered about a particular strong personality – is to provide a symbol of identity for a particular religious movement and give real solidarity to that movement. The evidence shows that the movement tends to create a central figure and to shape the message of the major figure (Horsfield, 1984; Hoover, 1988). The central figure tends to objectify the “text” which the movement wants to create and to define the collective identity of the movement.
A Fourth Stage: Analysis of the Individual Construction of Meaning of Media Texts
In the late 1960s and in the1970,s there began, world-wide, a major shift in the meaning of religion in the lives of people in industrialized countries. Before this shift most persons tended to identify with the beliefs and practices of a particular religious group; if a person were a Catholic, for example, the beliefs and practices were fairly predictable. Talcott Parsons and most of the empirical studies of religious practices in the functionalist tradition, such as that of Stark and Glock cited above, were studies of commitments to particular institutional systems.
In the 1970s a series of studies began to reveal a new religious consciousness that emphasized strong personal ecstatic experience and discovery of identity as a better criterion of religiosity than adherence to institutional belief systems and practices (Bellah and Glock, 1976). By the 1980s the criterion of religiosity had shifted away from the exotic to a more externally acceptable, but much more individualistic, system of beliefs. Major studies discovered that each person was tending to construct a system of beliefs and practices from a large repertoire according to their personal life history and identity (Bellah et al, 1985; Roof and McKinney, 1987). The sociology of religion quickly began to abandon a series of presumptions: that abandonment of institutional churches does not necessarily mean secularization; that religion can be a factor for social change; that practices once freed from their institutional moorings can have a great variety of meanings for the persons involved; that the path toward religiosity can be immensely varied (Beckford, 1989: 166-172).
Parallel with this shift in the premises in the sociology of religion was a similar major shift in media studies. Cultural studies had introduced a study of how groups construct the meaning of life, particularly through the use of media and, in part, in resistance to the media. A more Marxist tradition in cultural studies tended to see individuals as largely seduced into a preferred ideological interpretation; a more ritual communion tradition of cultural studies tended to see publics as solidly identified with their favorite genres. A number of studies revealed a much more varied and personalistic construction of meaning of the media or, at least, a far more complex process of construction of meaning than the effects tradition and even the social construction of reality tradition had indicated.
To understand the varied ways of interpreting media, survey methods of studying audiences were expanded (or even abandoned), in order to incorporate what has been called “audience ethnography” – asking respondents to indicate the meaning of a program or type of program in a completely subjective way. The method evolved so the roles of a program, or of the media in general, were analysed in the context of a great variety of life interests and activities. Thus it would be possible to see how media interpretation is related to other life activities. Interviewers also used life history methods to place the current meaning of the media in the context of a whole lifetime. Media were gradually seen within the life-context of participation of a social movement. At the same time studies began to reveal the trend toward “channelization” of media interests and the formation of intense fan groups around particular media genres, particular programs, or particular media personalities. The central factor in the construction of meaning was not so much the text as the identity and life development of the individual.
This trend in the sociology of religion and in media studies has been applied and further developed in one of the most comprehensive studies of media use so far – the study of Pat Robertson’s televangelist movement – by Stewart Hoover (1988). Hoover largely used the interview method, but he studied the subjective interpretation of the Pat Robertson television programs in terms of the development of religious identity over a lifetime and in the context of involvement with the wide-ranging activities of respondents within the evangelical movement. Virtually all of the people interviewed, from different religious backgrounds, had had a different life history and a different kind of religious life crisis. They also differed in their interpretation of the meaning of what Pat Robertson was saying. A major conclusion was that for these more dedicated followers of Pat Robertson, this televangelist was a very important factor in reintegrating life after a period of crisis, but this could vary considerably among the individuals.
Studies such as Hoover’s have been able to relate the social context of personal life crisis to a much broader crisis of meaning in society and the revitalization movements that emerge out of these major crises of meaning (McLoughlin, 1978). The drama of the lives of the twenty people studied in depth by Hoover is part of the drama of the neo-evangelical movements in the United States – a reaction against the postmodern world. The evangelical movements probably have different meanings in different parts of the world. It is likely that different people are involved with different religious revitalization movements at different levels of generality (White, 1997).
Broadcasting media play a different role in each of these types of revitalization of cultural meaning. We can only see the full meaning of such reorganizations of meaning if we look at the individual lives and how individuals use not just religious media, but all media, to construct the meaning of their lives (White, 2000). In this respect, audience ethnography methods have ushered in a new era in theories of media and religion in the construction of cultures (White, 1997).
Hoover’s base for the study of media, religion and culture is at the University of Colorado in Boulder. One of the most significant recent studies – on how teen-agers construct the meaning of their lives – has been carried out under the immediate direction of the scholar Lynn Schofield Clark (Clark, 1998; 2003). Her research is a significant development of audience ethnography because it is based not just on interviews, but on participant observation of the life-context of families. Not only is there the element of the life histories of individuals, but the religious practices and uses of media are observed over a period of several years. The focus is on the way teen-agers pick out the repertoire of symbols to construct their world of meaning.
A further line of study (which I would like to pursue), is the religious interpretation of secular media, largely through extended interviews with individuals. A general premise of much comment on religious film is that people do construct a religious meaning when viewing secular media. My general hypothesis is that people draw on a repertoire of religious symbols available to them through their cultural context, and the closer these frameworks are to what they see in the media, the more likely it is they will see a religious meaning in a film , TV or popular music.
According to the research available so far the repertoires of symbols which will be called upon are as follows, listed in order of importance:
their identification with the institutional religion in their lives and their knowledge of this imagery;
the importance of a need to construct religious meaning at a given moment;
the ritual group experience of media which provides a profound “religious” experience;
their familiarity with the religious language associated with a particular genre such as the religious imagery in horror films; and
the very personal system of religious meaning they have constructed around their personal identity (especially if the person has little religious affiliation).
A Fifth Stage: The Interaction of Authors, Individuals and Groups, in the Construction of Media Meaning
Perhaps this fifth stage in the evolution of theoretical positions and lines of research exists in the sociology of religion, in the studies of new religious movements, where there is:
an analysis of the founder’s message
the personal life histories of individuals who have entered the movement
the individual interpretations of the author of the messages
the construction of a discourse out of individual interpretations when the group comes together, and
the reformulation of the author’s text as he or she becomes aware of the new discourses that are emerging in the audience.
Media studies are not yet this complete and thorough, but the need for this kind of research is much talked about. No study of this type has been carried out about religious media, so this stage remains hypothetical.
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