Popular Culture and the Study of Religion
By Lynn Schofield Clark and Seth M. Walker
[Clark is Professor and Chair of the Media, Film & Journalism Studies Department and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver, Colorado, USA. Walker has done doctoral studies at the University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion.]
Summary
Popular culture is a term that usually refers to those commercially produced items specifically associated with leisure, media, and lifestyle choices. To study religions in popular culture, then, is to explore religion’s appearance in the commercially produced artifacts and texts of a culture. The study of popular culture has been a catalyst of sorts in the context of studying religion. Some have speculated that with the increasing presence of religion in commercially produced products and specifically in the entertainment media, religion may be reduced to mere forms of entertainment. Others, however, have argued that religion has always been expressed and experienced through contemporary forms of culture, and thus its manifestation in popular culture can be interpreted as a sign of the vitality, rather than the demise or superficiality, of contemporary religions.
Popular culture is worthy of study given its role in cultural reproduction. The study of popular culture and religion encourages us to consider the extent to which popular cultural representations limit broader critical considerations of religion by depicting and reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions of what religion is, who practices it and where, and how religions endure as powerful societal institutions. Alternately, popular culture has been explored as a site for public imaginings of how religious practices and identities might be different and more inclusive than they have been in the past, pointing toward the artistic and playful ways in which popular religious expression can comment upon dominant religion, dominant culture, and the power relations between them.
With the rise of a ubiquitous media culture in which people are increasingly creators and distributors as well as consumers and modifiers of popular culture, popular culture has come to encompass a wide variety of products and artifacts, including those both commercially produced and those that are generated outside of both traditional commercial and religious contexts. Studies might include explorations of religion in such popular television programs as Orange is the New Black or in novels such as The Secret Life of Bees but might also include considerations of how religion and popular culture intersect in practices of Buddhism in the virtual gaming site Second Life, in the critical expressions of Chicana art, in the commercial experiments of Islamic punk rock groups, and in hashtag justice movements.
Keywords: popular culture, cultural studies, critical theory, religion, myth
This essay on religion and popular culture explores the study of popular culture in relation to religions. We identify two major strands to the study of religion and popular culture, both of which are rooted in what is known as the culture and civilization tradition. These two strands focus on, first, the study of popular culture, myth, and cultural cohesion or continuity, and second, the critical tradition with its study of popular culture in relation to religion, power, and cultural tensions. We also identify several critiques of the study of religion and popular culture, notably the continued absence of Frankfurt School influence within religious studies approaches. We begin by considering definitions of the popular and the religious.
Defining “The Popular”
The word “popular” comes from the Latin populus, which means “the people.” Popular therefore refers to something that is enjoyed by many people or is common to most people in a society or group. The term popular culture therefore can encompass folk culture, which refers to cultural artifacts created by and for a particular group of people, as well as mass culture, which refers to cultural artifacts that are created and consumed by a large number of people. The latter term is associated with commercial culture as well, since popular culture often refers to products that are made available for purchase.
Because culture is a concept that denotes a particular way of life for a specific group of people during a certain period in history, popular culture is a term that makes reference to location. Often popular culture is categorically related to national identity, as historically, commercial marketplaces cohered in relation to regionally and linguistically defined cultures. One can speak of U.S. popular culture, for instance, or of southeast Asian or Latin American popular culture. The popular culture associated with differing locations is recognizable by the particular style and substance found in its artifacts, narratives, aesthetics, habits, and products. With the globalization of the commercial marketplace, some have suggested the rise of a global popular culture. However, the artifacts and products that have been most successfully distributed worldwide are generally those developed by large-scale industries and other multinational entertainment conglomerates, many of which are based in the U.S. and Europe, in India, or more recently in Korea. In other words, popular culture and its distribution remains tightly bound to the commercial marketplace.
The longstanding relationship between commercial marketplaces and the distribution of popular cultural artifacts has been a subject of a great deal of research. The term “popular culture” first entered the English language in the early nineteenth century, when for the first time, it was possible to manufacture and widely distribute cultural products with relative ease and speed. Prior to the emergence of a capitalist market economy with industrialization, “the popular” was a term with legal and political meaning. Thus, the earliest uses of the term “popular culture” referenced folk traditions that took place at some remove from the oversight and regulation of authorities. Today, some historians still use the term in this way when exploring the practices and products that were in existence prior to the commercially dominated marketplace.
The Evolving Nature of “The Religious”
One of the issues scholars encounter when examining “religion” in relation to popular culture is that the term itself is conceptually elusive and ambiguous. Much time, energy, and ink has been exerted over the past few hundred years trying to arrive at some sort of universal definitional understanding. Indeed, most of these efforts have been fueled by Western – largely Christian – colonial contact with indigenous groups throughout the Americas and Africa, along with cultures across Asia and the Pacific. Societies encountered by various explorers, traders, anthropologists, and slavers, among others, were noticeably doing something that seemingly resembled practices and belief systems associated with Western Christendom, albeit with their own, contextual differences and ideological content. Comparative analysis, then, was at the heart of these early attempts to reconcile differing modes of being into a world in which monotheistic systems of the Abrahamic lineage reigned. The problem, however, was that scholars and analysts were attempting to make sense of these groups of people using concepts and methodologies from without as opposed to within – the so-called “emic” and “etic” dynamic made famous in cultural anthropology circles during the second half of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, early studies of popular culture and religion were, actually, studies of popular culture and its relationship to Christianity.
Jonathan Z. Smith has been bemoaning the inherent issues in defining “religion” since the early 1980s. For Smith, the term is simply a concept created by scholars to use for their own analytical and comparative purposes. This rather blunt assessment is rooted in post-Enlightenment classificatory systems of thought amid colonial engagement of non-Christians. That is, the term has an historical legacy of being used to describe and classify groups and practices with terminology that is not native to those being qualified. In other words, as he has been apt to say, it is “theirs to define” and “has no independent existence apart from the academy,” a perspective that becomes central as scholars move toward an anthropological study of religion and popular culture as noted below.[1]
Brent Nongrbi continues the critical stance Smith made in his recent Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (2013), paying particular attention to the way in which the term “religion” is used to describe ancient cultures that had no conceivable corresponding category.[2] Demonstrating the one-sidedness of the scholarly perspective Smith critiques, such cultures are often understood to have “religion,” just not as neatly demarcated in social life as groups do today. It was diffused and dispersed, or “embedded,” throughout all aspects of life. One of the resultant issues in such situations is the prevalence of re-descriptive accounts (use of observer’s own analytical tools and categorical systems foreign to those under investigation) framed under the guise of being descriptive (observer accounts meant to maintain the perspective of those being studied), which wrongly implies the existence of a conceptual classification that is both seemingly universal and historically transcendent. This, of course, hinders scholars’ ability to adequately study those who differ from their own culture groups – resulting in a “well-polished mirror,” Nongbri states – and perpetuates the application of a term that has no real universal significance.[3] Such a stance can mean scholars of popular culture and religion can make assumptions that incorrectly inform their analyses.
Scholars have a responsibility to dwell on terms and concepts within their disciplines – problematizing and negotiating them amid evolving circumstances and contexts – especially when they do not have a once-and-for-all definition. If terms like “religion” – and “popular culture” – are being employed by scholars for their own purposes, being defined as they see fit, then it is their duty to reflect on that usage and debate the meaningfulness and resourcefulness of chosen applications and analyses surrounding them. In addition to Smith, scholars who have advanced this school of thought include Thomas Tweed and Robert Orsi, each having explored popular practices of religion and the role of material cultural artifacts in those practices (see Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Religion entry).[4]
Studying Religions in Popular Culture
The study of religions in popular culture today tend to follow one of two prominent approaches emphasizing either social continuity and the mythic, or tensions, conflict, and the phenomenological. Both schools of thought originate in the work of social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who were interested in the role of religion in industrializing society.
Culture and Civilization Tradition
By the late nineteenth century with the rise of industrialization in Europe, elites in urban areas had begun to view the popular or folk culture of the rural areas with disdain. Coupling concerns about the inferiority of folk and rural culture with the rapid influx of people from the country into the city, English poet and cultural theorist Matthew Arnold contrasted “culture” (what we would call “high culture” today) with what he viewed as the anarchic and disruptive nature of working-class or popular culture in his influential work, Culture and Anarchy (1869).
Matthew Arnold regarded culture as “the best which has been thought and said” and defined culture as “the study of perfection.” He contrasted culture with the newly democratic “anarchy” of England, which he saw as lacking direction and authority. He believed in the importance of intellectual pursuit combined with a moral passion for doing good. Dividing English society into three realms of the “Barbarians” (the wealthy with their distinguished manners but indifference to new ideas), the “Philistines” (the middle classes with their zeal but lack of “sweetness and light”), and the “Populace” (the new working and lower classes that were, in Arnold’s view, in need of guidance), Arnold posited the middle classes must be educated in and must strive for “culture” as a means by which to attain greater unity across differences.[5] His view of culture as an ideal emerged at around the same time, and in contrast to, English anthropologist Edward B. Tylor’s approach to culture as a whole way of life. But Arnold’s idealist view was particularly influential among educators and religious leaders, for whom Arnold’s discussion of culture as “perfection” presented a justification for the imposition of an elite perspective on the content of what was to be taught to the emergent middle and working classes of England.
The “culture and civilization” tradition associated with Arnold found renewed expression in the writings of British literary critics F.R. and Q.D. Leavis. In the 1930s, the Leavises utilized their quarterly publication Scrutiny as a forum for identifying a British literary canon and argued for discriminating standards by which an intellectual elite could be judged and then charged with the education in the best of English life and literature. The Leavises promoted the idea of a mythic “golden age” of England’s rural past, in which they believed a “common culture” (or “folk” culture) had flourished. Their many treatises aimed to keep the expansion of popular mass culture’s influence under control to maintain what they believed were the truly valuable aspects of England’s cultural tradition.[6]
A similar strand of thought has long been a part of U.S. approaches to popular mass culture. In 1957, Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White published Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, a collection of essays that bemoaned the supposed dehumanizing impact of popular culture.[7] Other popular culture critics such as Dwight Macdonald and later Daniel Boorstin, Stuart Ewen, and Neil Postman voiced similar concerns about popular culture’s ill effects on society.[8] In the shadow of the Cold War, the contributors to the Rosenberg and White volume feared that a passive audience in the sway of popular culture could be easily brought under the influence of a totalitarian government.
By the 1980s, a tradition had emerged in which religious and theological leaders viewed popular culture, and specifically television, within the “culture and civilization” tradition. Gregor Goethals, William F. Fore, Malcolm Muggeridge, Quentin Schultze, and Bill Romanowski, among others, argued that religion was in competition with entertainment media and thus discernment was needed in the approach to faith formation and development.[9]
In response to the culture and civilization tradition’s cautious viewpoint combined with the mounting critiques of secularization and religion’s expected disappearance from public life, some scholars in religious studies began to explore continuities between religion and popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than looking at religion and popular culture as in competition with one another, they considered how religions and popular culture adapted to one another as religious practices and representations extended into new contemporary forms.
Popular Culture and the Myth and Cultural Cohesion Tradition
This approach to popular culture and religious continuity built on the earlier work of James Frazer, Rudolf Otto, and Carl Jung, and in particular the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade.[10] With his attention to the mythic, Eliade explored the enduring power of myth and the search for universal human experiences with the sacred.
When Eliade moved to the U.S. in 1956, he was offered a position in the history of religions at the University of Chicago and achieved commercial success with his book The Myth of the Eternal Return.[11] A key aspect of Eliade’s thought related to the sacred and the profane. Events occurring in profane time became meaningful only when they conformed to the patterns established by the sacred at the origin of time. He argued so-called traditional societies long for origins, and they enact rituals and share myths expressing this desire to return to a mythical age. Rather than operating in a linear progression, time is experienced cyclically, as people seek to renew the world through ritual and myth. Eliade was interested in what he believed were the timeless truths embedded in religious myths, symbols, images, and stories, particularly those referencing magical, psychical, and paranormal phenomena. He argued that some myths were universal and pointed to the mythical motifs and themes he saw emerging in contemporary fiction of the time. His concern was with the denial of the sacred in modernity, and thus he advocated exploring traditional ritual and myth to access timeless truths.
Scholar of myth and lecturer, Joseph Campbell, also approached myths as sacred, arguing for the concept of the “monomyth” that viewed all mythic narratives as aspects of a singular great story. Campbell believed myths fulfill a need for an understanding of the relationship between humans and God, or of the natural and supernatural worlds.[12] When making the Star Wars films in the 1970s and 1980s, filmmaker George Lucas took inspiration from Campbell’s work. Campbell’s Jungian and Eliadean influence is also evident in films such as The Matrix, the Batman series, the Indiana Jones series, and in The DaVinci Code.
In the 1970s, Communication scholar James Carey’s interest in the mythic dimensions of media led him to synthesize the work of Eliade, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who had argued humans are “animal symbolicum,” or symbol-creators.[13] Myth, as media studies scholar Roger Silverstone later elaborated in the 1980s, is not logical or rational, but holds often-inexplicable but emotionally satisfying deep meaning for people. Silverstone drew upon three of Eliade’s observations regarding myths: that myths persist in the contemporary world through content (such as stories of Superman), form (narrative storytelling), and belief (although Silverstone’s emphasis in this regard is largely limited to the suspension of disbelief that occurs while reading or watching a film). Silverstone highlighted not only the particular content that guided the stories told, but also the more general similarities in the narrative structure of both ancient and mediated myths. Myths have always been communicated through dramatic storytelling, and thus their importance in the study of film and television. Breaking somewhat from Eliade, Silverstone argued that despite television and film’s reliance upon recognizable genres and narratives, neither older myths nor the stories of contemporary media are static and unchanging. Older myths develop unique characteristics depending upon the setting in which they are told and the purpose for the telling, Silverstone argued, noting each television program and popular film, while new in the sense they introduce differing plots and characters, must subscribe to a structure dictated by its particular genre. Both myths and contemporary mediated stories therefore have two important and complementary dimensions, according to Silverstone: they are collective, and they are constraining. They are collective in the sense the stories must be consensually accepted, and hence must reinforce the views most central to at least a large segment of a viewing community. They are constraining because in their need to conform to the community’s expectations, their codes tend to reinforce the inevitable hierarchy within social relationships. Silverstone thus built upon Eliade’s interest in mythology, but, drawing upon the reader-response theories of media and literature popular in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the growing influence of both Marxist analysis in semiotics and secularization theory, also recognized the cultural contexts that constrained a community’s expectations and shaped a myth’s reception.[14]
Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, religious studies scholar Ninian Smart initially shared Eliade’s interest in Rudolf Otto’s concept of the Holy, but his studies in Buddhism demonstrated the concept was too restrictive to be applicable across all religious traditions. Smart consciously sought to break out of Western modes of thought through his work, which extended into the late 1990s. He advocated the discipline of religious studies as non-confessional and secular, and sought to draw methodologically from anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and archaeology in theorizing the experiences of religions in differing cultural contexts, thus exploring discontinuities between cultures and religious expressions. He rejected the secularization thesis as well as a concept of a unitary religious or sacred experience, arguing instead for the importance of finding value in the contributions of differing traditions. Avoiding a definition of religion, Smart proposed a still-influential framework with seven dimensions for the study of religion: doctrinal, mythological, ethical, ritual, experiential, institutional, and material.[15] Jonathan Z. Smith and others questioning the definition of religion built upon this framework. This approach challenged those in religious studies to consider practices that took place outside the formal bounds of institutional religion and paved a way for some scholars to begin reconceptualizing where religion and the sacred might be found. In the field of religious studies, scholars such as David Chidester and Edward Linnenthal (1995) took up the study of the cultural continuities and contestations occurring in relation to the sacred as it was negotiated in popular cultural spaces, and others began exploring the ways certain cultural practices took on characteristics previously associated with “religion,” often in ways that assisted in maintaining a culture’s coherence (see, e.g., Chidester, 2005; Mazur and McCarthy, 2000/2011; Lynch, 2005; Forbes and Mahan, 2000/2005).[16]
A number of texts rooted in the mythic traditions of religion and popular culture were published in the early 2000s, exploring areas such as American sports, popular music, film, and the religious dimensions of consumerism. Joseph L. Price’s examination of the relationship between religion and baseball through the latter’s mythic qualities and elements of civil religion in Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America (2006), and an edited volume incorporating treatments of other popular sports, From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (2001), remain classics in this area (see Religion and Sports in America entry).[17] Robin Sylvan explored the similarities between popular music subcultures (like the Deadheads) and religious communities in Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music (2002).[18] He redirected his focus towards an ethnographic study of rave cultures in his 2005 follow-up: Trance Formation: The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture.[19] John C. Lyden’s Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (2003) examined the ways in which films function religiously for viewers, and Dell deChant’s The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture (2002) offered a unique analysis of consumer culture’s rituals, myths, and liturgical “high holy days” – culminating in the celebration of a postmodern deity of sorts: Santa Claus.[20]
While studies of the mythic continued to highlight the ways popular culture functioned religiously, another tradition that emphasized tensions rather than continuities was beginning to emerge. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s research in the 1960s and 1970s shared common ground with some of Ninian Smart’s perspectives. Highlighting cultural tensions and the construction of meaning, rather than a search for universals, Geertz’s work further broke from Eliade and became influential in the anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, and religious studies and was also influential in media studies for its focus on culture as a set of texts to be interpreted. In his analysis of the Balinese cockfight, Geertz explored the ways people employed popular cultural rituals such as the cockfight to work out social tensions through symbolic engagement.[21] Thus in addition to laying the groundwork for studying actual practices and the meanings people attached to them, Geertz also provided a means for considering the tensions rather than the continuities in myth, ritual, and religious practices. Geertz thus became influential within the second strand of religion and popular cultural studies: that of the critical tradition.
Popular Culture and the Critical Tradition: Religion, Power, and Cultural Tensions
While the Leavises were concerned about the loss of English nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s, in Germany the fear of totalitarianism animated the writings of scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School. Ex-patriates from Hitler’s Germany and rooted in the tradition of Marxism, scholars in the Frankfurt School feared the manipulative potential of popular culture through the workings of what they called the “culture industries.”[22] Bringing to their work a perspective informed by Hegelian philosophy, they articulated a critique of popular culture known as critical theory. Particularly influential have been the ideas of critical theorist Walter Benjamin. In his essay “The Work of Art in Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argued that the original work of art must be understood as authentic and thus as distinct from its copy; the copy is missing the “aura” of the original, and the fact the artwork can be copied changes the original, making it ephemeral and reducing its value.[23]
Scholars in the critical tradition have argued popular culture reinforces ideological positions and perspectives, both consciously and unconsciously, as exemplified in popular comics-based superhero films and the ethical codes and moral imperatives they tend to emphasize in their narratives. Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the “culture industries” points to the fact that all cultural productions are, in fact, congruent in their ideological construction.[24]
Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony – the consensus and social stability achieved by dominant groups – scholars explored both how the worldviews of the elite come to be accepted as taken-for-granted by everyone, and how the artifacts and practices associated with popular culture play a role in securing the status quo as natural and inevitable. Those in power are able to achieve and sustain their positions through a unique form of negotiation with those who are subordinate to them. This negotiation necessarily involves both a resistance to dominant cultural and political forms and an incorporation of subordinate forms, which results in the negotiated products and industries – what Gramsci calls a “compromise equilibrium” on part of the dominant groups and classes – to achieve the consent of the masses.[25]
Louis Althusser, an Algerian-born French Marxist known for his structuralist distinction between what he called Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), advanced these ideas in his 1969 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” RSAs comprise various governmental institutions that rely on force, coercion, and threats of violence, which include the army, police, courts, prisons, and administration. ISAs, however, operate without the threat of violence by taking ideology as its modus operandi: the educational system, religion and corresponding institutions, family units, communication outlets and media, and, of course, popular cultural forms. For Althusser, ideology is more than just a certain view of the way things are or should be. Ideology is first and foremost the function of the ISA in that it is the source of the action elicited by subjects as a result of the apparatus. In other words, it is both used and produced by the apparatus to construct and condition subjects to live and act in accordance with its aims.[26]
Building on Benjamin’s idea of the reproduced art form with its lost aura, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) argued in the mid-twentieth century that the quality of life is impoverished as images and spectacle decenter authentic experiences. The SI was a group of French revolutionaries bent on reforming the commodity-driven, post-Industrial milieu in which they lived – a context they perceived to be synonymous with representational imagery rather than authenticity. Much of the SI critique of everyday life also bears some similarities to postmodern thinkers like Jean Baudrillard and his notion of “hyperreality,” wherein signs lack referents and are taken be more real than the real itself.[27] While Baudrillard’s analysis may seem more bleak than Debord and the SI, the latter advocated subversive strategies – known as detournement – to construct situations in order to poke holes in this spectacle and dismantle its hold. Methods of detournement or, “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble,” find their contemporary manifestation today in “remix” and culture jamming, and popular détourning strategies often involved the manipulation of artwork and photographs – pornography was a popular target – by either adding additional artistic elements or critical speech bubbles, producing films and comic strips, and hijacking radio broadcasts.[28]
By the 1970s, the cultural studies school of thought regarding popular culture had taken root in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Influenced by cultural anthropology, feminist theory, and ethnic studies, the interdisciplinary work of cultural studies drew upon Marxism, semiotics, postcolonialism, new historical criticism, art history and criticism, and reader-response theory in literary criticism and spread globally through the 1980s and 1990s. Key to the cultural studies approach is an understanding of culture not as a set of fixed artifacts but rather as a set of practices constantly undergoing negotiation and change. Much of the work of the early cultural studies school, following Stuart Hall’s leadership at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s, focused on examining how the popular cultural practices of fashion, music preference, and television in the everyday lives of people worked to secure cultural hegemony in relation to societal systems of power. Scholars in this approach also call into question the presumed distinctions between high and low culture, foregrounding meanings made by the viewer or consumer rather than by the creator or the art critic and discussing what is known as middlebrow culture.
Despite the burgeoning interest in mediated popular culture across several fields of study in the 1970s and 1980s, however, aside from the Christian theological critiques noted earlier, a pall of scholarly indifference fell over studies of religion and popular culture. This was in part due to feminist critiques of religion as patriarchal and the critique among critical and Marxist scholars that religion was regressive and inherently conservative. Extending Frazer’s argument that humans progress and religion becomes increasingly irrelevant as scientific knowledge and cultural and religious pluralism expands, Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (1967) was understood by these scholars as the death knell in the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies, rendering interest in religion irrelevant in the minds of many communication and popular cultural scholars from the 1970s to 1990s.[29]
Popular Culture and Religion Scholarship
In spite of the indifference toward religion within much of the cultural studies school, the study of material culture within religious studies, first emerging from the influence of anthropological approaches to religious practices, was beginning to emerge in the 1990s and would play a key role in shaping the study of religion and mediated popular culture. An early and foundational work in the studies of religion and popular culture is religious historian Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (1995). Rather than studying elite expressions of religion, McDannell explored the material objects people invested with religious meaning in their everyday lives.[30] A similarly influential work that emerged in the same time frame was art historian David Morgan’s Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (1997), which explored the popular devotional images that have assumed central roles in U.S. churches and communities.[31] Both of these works considered the history and meaning of the material culture of Christianity from the nineteenth century to the present.
Studies of the popular in contrast to high culture were also taking place in media and anthropological studies in the mid-1990s. Influential volumes included Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (1995), in which media sociologist Marie Gillespie argued against a common perception at the time regarding the popular television epic the Mahabharata, as many were concerned this program that fictionalized the history of India exacerbated trends toward Hindu fundamentalism among its audiences. Rather than supporting political positions, Gillespie argued most Hindu families found the program useful in communicating traditional religious values and beliefs.[32] Like Gillespie, in Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (1999), media anthropologist Purnima Mankekar also drew upon media cultural studies and the work of Stuart Hall, who argued people are shaped by multiple, contesting and unstable discourses of gender, religion, nation, and family within broader structures of power and inequality. Mankekar claimed audience resistance and compliance are not mutually exclusive, analyzing how the extremely popular state-television epics Doordarshan produced or effaced differences as women negotiated their positions in the family, religious community, and nation.[33] In Translating the Devil, Anthropologist Birgit Meyer (1999) similarly drew upon ethnographic and cultural studies traditions in her exploration of how modern filmic representations of Christianity’s devil assisted in a reenchantment that brought Ghana’s traditional Ewe religion into conversation with Christianity.[34] Each of these works played a role in shaping research agendas in the U.S. and around the world that would focus on contemporary practices of religion in addition to analyses of representations of religion, and on tensions made manifest between popular cultural representations and the religions of the U.S. in particular. In Religion in the Media Age (2006), Stewart Hoover explored links between the U.S. tradition of individual religious “seekers” and the popular cultural forms they drew upon in the construction of religious identity.[35] Applying this framework to U.S. teens and drawing upon cultural studies approaches to ideology and hegemony in popular culture, in From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (2003), Lynn Schofield Clark (co-author of this essay) explored how U.S. young people of both varied and no religious backgrounds constructed understandings of religion in relation to U.S. popular cultural texts and the evangelical Christian themes and tropes often embedded within those texts.[36] Also drawing upon a cultural studies critique of religion, commercial culture, and power relations, Heather Hendershot’s Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (2004) explored the ways that, once commercialized, even religious forms of culture considered oppositional to the mainstream are hegemonically absorbed and repurposed into dominant culture.[37]
Gender relations have been an important theme in studies of religion and popular culture. In Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1999), anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod argued that sentiments expressed in popular and folk cultural forms play a role in maintaining a system of gender-based hierarchies of culture and religion.[38] Angela Zito (2006, 2007) similarly focused her study of women’s bodies and their containment in relation to religion and material culture in her research on foot-binding in China.[39] Themes of cultural tension around gendered relations, the body, religion, and popular culture are also foregrounded in Rebecca Sullivan’s Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture (2005) and in Diane Winston’s study of women and media in the Salvation Army movement in Red-Hot and Righteous (2000).[40] This cultural studies approach to religion and popular culture is further elaborated with attention to religion, gender, and race in Kathryn Lofton’s study of the religious dimensions within Oprah Winfrey’s empire titled, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011), Laura E. Pérez’s Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Alterities (2007), Jonathan Walton’s Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (2009), and in Judith Weisenfeld’s Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (2007).[41]
How religious communities negotiate challenges related to popular culture has continued to be of interest to scholars. Heidi Campbell has explored religious communities’ negotiations with new technologies in a number of works including When Religion Meets New Media (2010), while Jeremy Stolow has explored the ways religion and technology are implicated in relation to one another in Deus in Machina (2012), and Mara Einstein has considered the ways that religious communities negotiate the logics of marketing and commercial culture in Brands of Faith (2007).[42]
Critiques of the Study of Religion and Popular Culture
Curiously, in the writings on popular culture that come from those within religious studies, the Frankfurt School and related critical theorists have not been as explicitly influential in the study of religion and popular culture as they have been in the interdisciplinary tradition of cultural studies. Indeed, this school of thought is noticeably absent in two of the edited volumes that have been foundational in this area: God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (2000/2011) and Religion and Popular Culture in America (2000/2005/2017).[43] The former’s typographical treatment is much more anthropological in scope, taking Horace Miner’s famous “Nacirema” essay and Clifford Geertz’s largely functional understanding of religion as its starting point; Victor Turner, Emile Durkheim, and the phenomenological strain of thought in Mircea Eliade’s and Rudolf Otto’s work are also drawn on for methodological frameworks throughout the volume.[44] The latter relies on expanded notions of religiosity as it locates and engages “religion” in places one might not typically find it; Catherine Albanese’s influential breakdown of substantive, functional, and formal definitional approaches serves as a model of sorts for the analyses in this volume.[45] Neither, however, draw on the work of Frankfurt school critical theorists noted above.
Studies in religion and popular culture, however, may benefit from including some of the work from this school of thought, as they might offer new and additional perspectives to the discipline – especially in an ever-evolving and increasingly fast-paced technological milieu. Althusser’s understanding of “ideology,” for instance, both alludes to real-world conditions and produces an illusionary construction of those conditions. This allusion-illusion dynamic is also what makes ideology particularly difficult to critique: as a result of ideological persuasions, conditions and phenomena are accepted as the way they are because they cannot be imagined to be any other way. This notion carries obvious implications for the study of religion – especially in its ISA, institutional form – and the way in which it functions. Marx’s oft-quoted “opiate” analogy, that religion is “the opium of the people,” should come to mind here. The intersection such implications have with popular cultural manifestations is also noteworthy. As media scholars such as Jason Mittell have pointed out, viewers know how a story should end, or how it is supposed to end, simply based on the characteristics of the genre.[46] Themes of “good” versus “bad” characters follow Western religious constructs of light versus dark, righteous versus evil, and Heaven versus Hell.
Although popular culture, from the perspective of hegemony, can be understood as maintaining the authority of dominant groups and social conformity, which was a main concern of the cultural studies theorists noted above, there is always the risk – and likelihood – of opposition to negotiated products and industries, which results in further negotiation at a subversive level. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) famously engaged this phenomenon through an examination of youth subcultures in Britain; so-called punks, rockers, skinheads, and others are explored.[47]
Hegemony allows us to think about popular culture as something that is not just given by dominant powers to subordinate groups to consume, concealed or otherwise. It is the result of what has been negotiated among active consumers of cultural artifacts. Scholars such as Henry Jenkins have considered the ways that in a digital age, these negotiations can play a role in shaping mediated popular cultural forms themselves in what he identifies as the “convergence culture” between industries and audiences.[48] Transmedia storytelling can blur the boundaries between intended, subversive, and negotiated readings in the reception of television shows like Lost (2004–2010) or The Walking Dead (2010–), as viewers use online platforms and social media to reflect much deeper concerns related to ethical dilemmas, moral action, and existential modes of being. Music and arts festivals around the world such as Bonnaroo, Sonic Bloom, and Burning Man in the U.S. have not only catered to the types of sentiments growing out of subcultures associated with the performative works one finds at their venues but have made such spiritual sorts of awakenings of connectivity and transformative experiences the hallmarks of their events as they repackage and market themselves for subsequent years.
Just as religion can be used by those in power to silence opposition, secure consent, and protect certain interests, so too can religion come to represent the abuse of power in popular cultural narratives. This can be seen in the film The Book of Eli (2010), wherein the antagonist seeks out the last known copy of the Christian Bible so that he can further secure his totalitarian and authoritarian position in a post-nuclear society with the powerful and poetic words contained therein.[49] Religion’s relationship to power can be analyzed in political campaigns as well as in the popular cultural narratives representing struggles for political power. The television show The Americans (2013–), for instance, depicts this interplay, as the main characters exploit a pastor’s religious sentiment and utopian desires in order to secure his tacit acceptance of their work as Soviet spies.
Further, Debord noted the enthusiasm for consumer products of popular culture is similar to the ecstasies once associated with religious fetishism. As a spectacular social institution, “religion” did not escape the attention of the French Situationists and their cultural critique. Recalling Marx’s famed assessment, Debord argued that religion “justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver.”[50] Hegemonic dynamics of power and ideological appropriation and use were equally part of the SI’s dissatisfaction with the world as well.
Future Directions
Such critiques of religion from a perspective of hegemony are already in existence in several mediated popular cultural venues and are worthy of greater attention. Like the format of the Canadian magazine Adbusters – and founded by one of its former managing editors – Geez is also a Canadian-based magazine engaged in the same sort of culture jamming made famous by the former, though in an explicitly Christian context. Their aim? To “put the ‘geez’ into Jesus,” as they “untangle the narrative of faith from the fundamentalists, pious self-helpers and religio-profiteers” through “holy mischief rather than ideological firepower.”[51] Geez, however, is certainly not the only venue for such creative public engagement and critique of contemporary religiosity. Similarly, online magazines associated with the non-jargony “popular press” rather than with peer-reviewed academic publications have increased in popularity. Religion Dispatches, The Immanent Frame, Killing the Buddha, and The Revealer are some of the more prominent examples of this genre that includes popular cultural critique, as are the philosophy (broadly including “religion”) and popular culture books series by Open Court and Wiley-Blackwell.
The legacies of satire and irony have also thrived in these new spaces. Popular films such as Dogma (1999), for example, offer criticisms of the reluctance to embrace change and adaptation in the Catholic Church; the smiling, cartoon-ish statue of “Buddy Christ” is humorously juxtaposed against the Catholic Church’s Jesus-in-agony-crucifix to illustrate this conservative-progressive dynamic. Consistent in many ways with the détourning strategies of the French Situationists, a number of subversive “parody” religions have been created over the past several decades in order to critique certain aspects of particular traditions or “religion,” as a spectacular institution, in general. Some of the more famous include: the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (founded, initially, as a critical response to the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools), the satirical Church of the SubGenius, the Invisible Pink Unicorn (invoking the same sort of “celestial teapot” analogy put forth by Bertrand Russell, albeit in a newer, flashier context), and even performative groups such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and their theatrical critiques of Christian dogmatism and intolerance.
In addition to the ways in which popular cultural forms are now locations for critiques of religion, at least two other directions for the future are worth noting: explorations related to the digital realm, and work that explicitly considers popular culture beyond the boundaries of Christianity.
As mediated popular culture has extended into the digital realm since before the turn of the millennium, scholars have turned their attention to the role of religious expression in user-generated content as well as in commercial forms such as gaming. Scholars such as Heidi Campbell, Mia Lovheim, Rachel Wagner, Gregory Grieve and others regularly contribute to this area and have established a scholarly network online for those interested in the study of new media, religion, and digital culture studies.[52]
Another important avenue in the study of religion and popular culture is the move away from Christianity toward an exploration of encounters between other religions and mediated popular cultures. Religious studies scholar S. Brent Plate has been a leader in this regard, editing volumes such as Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2002), Representing Religion in World Cinema (2004), and, with Jolyon Mitchell, The Religion and Film Reader (2007).[53] In addition to bridging religious studies and the Frankfurt School in his book Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts (2004), Plate is also a contributor to the study of material religious culture (see Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Religion entry).[54] J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler offered important cultural insights in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (2003).[55] A number of scholars have begun to focus on Islam and its negotiations within and through popular culture, such as Charles Hirschkind, Gary Bunt, and Karin Van Nieuwkerk and her colleagues.[56] Jane Iwamura has offered an interesting exploration of Buddhism and the “oriental” in relation to popular culture in Virtual Orientalism (2011).[57] In a rare turn to practices outside the U.S., Anna Shternshis (2006) considered Jewish popular culture in the early years of the Soviet Union.[58]
Musical artists in the “taqwacore” Islamic punk scene, Buddhist practitioners involved with the digital and virtual technology-embracing group Buddhist Geeks, Bhangra and Punjabi pop music, Jon Stewart’s review of his “Jewish moments” on The Daily Show, Larry David’s Bernie Sanders impersonation on Saturday Night Live: these are all equally Islams, Buddhisms, Hinduisms, Judaisms, and so on – just adaptive in their own, unique ways. As popular culture and the practices, representations, and experiences of religion will continue to evolve, so too with the studies that occur at their intersections.
Review of the Literature
As noted above, studies of culture within the traditions of critical theory and cultural studies, laid the groundwork in the late 19th and early 20th century for the development of the subfield of religion and popular culture. By the mid-1980s, theologians and others were writing on the dialogue between Christianity and popular culture in books such as Gregor Goethals’ (1981) TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar and Malcolm Muggeridge’s (1977) Christ and the Media. By the mid-1990s, several scholars in religious studies, media, and anthropology were drawing attention to this intersection, particularly with the publication of Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, David Morgan’s (1997) Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images and David Chidester and Edward Linnenthal’s (1995) American Sacred Space as well as Birgit Meyer’s (1999) Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana, Marie Gillespie’s (1995) Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, and work later published in Stewart Hoover’s (2006) Religion in the Media Age. By the early 2000s, several edited collections and volumes explored religion, entertainment, and popular cultural practices, such as Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey Mahan’s (2000/2005/2017) Religion and Popular Culture in America, Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy’s (2000/2011) God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, Gordon Lynch’s (2005) Understanding Theology and Popular Culture,[59] and David Chidester’s (2005) Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Several monographs then focused on particular aspects of popular culture, such as Robin Sylvan’s (2002) focus on music in Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music, Tona Hangen’s (2002) focus on radio in Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion and Popular Culture in America, Lynn Schofield Clark’s (2003) focus on adolescents and television in From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural, Jeffrey Shandler’s (1999) exploration of television’s role in constructing the Holocaust in While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, Brenda Brasher’s (2001) focus on online practices in Give Me That Online Religion and Heidi Campbell’s (2005) examination of popular practices online among religious communities in Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One in the Network. By the first decade in the 21st century, scholars of religion had turned to incorporating cultural studies theories of commercial culture and hegemony into their explorations, including Jonathan Walton’s (2009) Watch This: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism and Kathryn Lofton’s (2011) Oprah: Gospel of an Icon. Scholars also turned to gaming, such as in Rachel Wagner’s (2012) Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality and Heidi Campbell’s (2014) edited volume, Playing with Religion in Digital Games. Games as well as other forms of popular culture appear in Karin Van Nieuwkerk, Mark Levine, and Martin Stokes (2016) Islam and Popular Culture and in Gregory Grieves’ (2016) Cyber Zen: Imagining Authentic Buddhist Identity, Community and Practices in the Virtual World of Second Life. The Journal of Religion and Film, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, and the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture are sites where these conversations about religion and popular culture continue.
Further Reading
Heidi Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2012).
David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (California: University of California Press, 2005).
Terry Ray Clark and Dan W. Clanton, Jr., eds., Understanding Religion and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Lynn Schofield Clark, ed., Religion, Media, and the Marketplace (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2007).
Dell deChant, The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture (Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2002).
Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture in America (California: University of California Press, 2005).
Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural change (London: Routledge, 1995).
Stewart Hoover, Religion in the Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (California: University of California Press, 2011).
John C. Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
Gordon Lynch, Jolyon Mitchell, and Anna Strhan, eds., Religion, Media, and Culture: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2011).
Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
Jeffrey H. Mahan, Media, Religion, and Culture: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, eds., God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011).
Meyer, Birgit. (1999). Translating the Devil: Religion and Film among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinboro University Press.
Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1995).
David Morgan, ed., Key Words in Media, Religion, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Karin Van Nieuwkerk, Mark Levine, and Martin Stokes, eds., Islam and Popular Culture (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2016).
Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007).
S. Brent Plate and Jolyon Mitchell, The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Joseph L. Price, ed., From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2004).
Robin Sylvan, Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
Diane Winston, ed., Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion (Texas: Baylor University Press, 2009).
Footnotes
[1] Jonathan Z. Smith, “Introduction” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi; Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor (Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269, 281.
[2] Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2013).
[3] Ibid., 153.
[4] Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Make Them (Princeton University Press, 2006).
[5] Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[6] F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932); Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
[7] Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: The Free Press, 1957).
[8] Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (New York: Random House, 1962); Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1962); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985).
[9] Gregor Goethals, The TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar (New York: Beacon Press, 1981); William F. Fore, Mythmakers: Gospel, Culture, and the Media (New York: Friendship Press, 1990); Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); Quentin Schultze, Television: Manna from Hollywood? (Michigan: Zondervan, 1986); Bill Romanowski, Pop Culture Wars (Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 1996).
[10] James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (London: Macmillan Press, 1890); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923); Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1964); Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[11] Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[12] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (California: New World Library, 2008).
[13] James Carey, Communication as Culture (Massachusetts: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
[14] Roger Silverstone, The Message of Television: Myth and Narrative in Contemporary Culture (London: William Heinemann, 1981).
[15] Ninian Smart, The World’s Religions (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13-22.
[16] David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (California: University of California Press, 2005); Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, eds., God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011); Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture in America (California: University of California Press, 2005); Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005); David Chidester and Edward Linnenthal, American Sacred Space (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995).
[17] Joseph L. Price, Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2006); Joseph L. Price, ed., From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2004).
[18] Robin Sylvan, Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
[19] Robin Sylvan, Trance Formation: The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005).
[20] John C. Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Dell deChant, The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture (Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2002).
[21] Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 412-453 (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
[22] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Engagement: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 94-136 (California: Stanford University Press, 2002); Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon Press, 1964).
[23] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 217-252 (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
[24] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Engagement: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 94-136 (California: Stanford University Press, 2002).
[25] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffry Nowell-Smith (United Kingdom: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
[26] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 85-126 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
[27] Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, 1-42 (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
[28] Guy Debord, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, 55-56 (California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 55; René Viénet, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, 213-216 (California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 213-215.
[29] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1990).
[30] Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1995).
[31] David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (California: University of California Press, 1998).
[32] Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 2000).
[33] Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999).
[34] Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
[35] Stewart M. Hoover, Religion in the Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2006).
[36] Lynn Schofield Clark, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[37] Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[38] Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (California: University of California Press, 2000).
[39] Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
[40] Rebecca Sullivan, Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism, and American Postwar Popular Culture (Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Diane Winston, Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999).
[41] Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (California: University of California Press, 2011); Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007); Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This!: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California: University of California Press, 2007).
[42] Heidi Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010); Jeremy Stolow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Mara Einstein, Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age (New York: Routledge, 2008).
[43] Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, eds., God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011); Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture in America (California: University of California Press, 2005).
[44] See Horace Miner, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 503-507; Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 87-125 (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
[45] See Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1981), xxi.
[46] Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
[47] Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979).
[48] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
[49] Seth M. Walker, ‘It’s not a fucking book, it’s a weapon!’: Authority, power, and mediation in The Book of Eli. Journal of Religion and Film 20(3).
[50] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014), thesis 25; italics in original.
[51] See geezmagazine.org.
[52] Heidi Campbell, When Religion Meets New Media (New York: Routledge, 2010); Heidi Campbell, Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One in the Network (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Mia Lovheim, “Young People, Religious Identity, and the Internet,” in Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, eds., Lorne Dawson and Douglas Cowan, 59-73 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality (New York: Routledge, 2011); Gregory Grieve, Cyber Zen: Imagining Authentic Buddhist Identity, Community, and Practices in the World of Second Life (New York: Routledge, 2016).
[53] S. Brent Plate, ed., Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader (New York: Palgrave, 2002); S. Brent Plate, ed., Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making (New York: Palgrave, 2003); S. Brent Plate and Jolyon Mitchell, The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007).
[54] S. Brent Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2005).
[55] J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003)
[56] Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Gary Bunt, Virtually Islamic: Computer Mediated Communication and Cyber Islamic Environments (United Kingdom: University of Wales Press, 2002); Gary Bunt, iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Karin Van Nieuwkerk, Mark Levine, and Martin Stokes, eds., Islam and Popular Culture (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2016).
[57] Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[58] Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006).