Religious meanings and religious understandings in ...

2 downloads 0 Views 236KB Size Report
One of the most enduring challenges of modernity is the persistence of religion. Against expected secularization in the North Atlantic West, we have seen ...
Religious meanings and religious understandings in the media age Stewart M. Hoover, PhD Professor of Media Studies and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, University of Colorado Boulder, USA Keynote Address to the Colloquium “Religious Facts and Media” Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (École Pratique des Hautes Études / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris, 23-24 March, 2016 Abstract One of the most enduring challenges of modernity is the persistence of religion. Against expected secularization in the North Atlantic West, we have seen religion continue to play an important, even portentous role in contemporary life. Scholarship has struggled to understand and interpret this fact. Part of the reason for this struggle is that scholars of media have failed to sufficiently understand religion, and scholars of religion have failed to develop substantive theories of media. These scholarships need to come together. They also need to understand that it is not a simple matter of understanding how religions use media or how media influence, mediate, or “mediatize” religion. Contemporary media environments make possible the formation of entirely new forms of religion that are materially both “media” and “religion” and new scholarships need to emerge to account for this reality. The theoretical and methodological tools to develop such new scholarships are among the most promising modern ones. These include ethnomethodology, materiality, and historicist case studies. We are already learning much from such work, which itself can also be present in media. New forms of “public scholarship” can do much to bring valuable scholarship to bear on critical and pressing issues of religious and inter-religious knowledge and understanding.

Text:

Religion persists in the twenty-first Century. This is less surprising to us today than it was a decade or more ago when most intellectual and social elites still believed in the tenets of secularization. Religion was supposed to have faded away, particularly in the North-Atlantic West, where increasing levels of social, educational, and economic development were to have made religion less attractive and less necessary. The world was to have become disenchanted as technical and scientific knowledge became more and more commonplace through the circulation of knowledge and information. The withdrawal of religion was even thought to be likely in the most “religious” of the Western nations, with my own country the central example. Religion might persist, it was thought, but it would do so only as it became more private, less public.

2

But, religion did not go away, and there were important signals to that effect, even far back into the last Century. In my own country, the rise of religious politics in the 1970s and 1980s signaled a new role for conservative religion and at the same moment, the Islamic Revolution in Iran signaled that Islam could no longer be thought of in modernity as a thing of the past. Each of these threads has only grown in significance in the years since. The Events of “9/11,” the Bali, London, Madrid, and Paris attacks have built shock upon tragedy. Our current political season in the U.S. is marked by new forms of religious activism. There are, further echoes of religious pasts in current political and economic turmoil across Europe. No, religion has not left us, it remains in new forms. Secularization has not meant that we face a modernity without religion, rather that we have modernity with religion, in an everexpanding array of forms and meanings. The persistence of religion poses a particular challenge to scholarship. The intellectual traditions that have defined the fields closest to these trends have struggled to account for them. In particular, scholarship on contemporary religion has failed to fully understand the role of contemporary media in making and remaking religion. All religions, of course, have always been “mediated.” All have depended on media such as poetry, dance, painting, and storytelling. These traditional “media” have been amplified through history as new forms and channels of mediation and communication have emerged. The problem for scholarship is that communication or mediation has been seen instrumentally, with various forms of mediation merely transmitting knowledge or value rather than contributing something to the process. So, mediation *within* religion has not been a focus of analysis or criticism. In this traditional view, “media” *do* exist and play a role, but only as “*the* media,” meaning the commercial, secular, “modern,” public media. By this formulation, the important questions have been only “how religions use modern media?” or “how do the media frame or treat religion?” In the former, the narratives have been about the encounter of religion with modernity, and in particular with modernity’s lived environment: “the media.” In the latter, the narratives have been about the ways that secular, national, and culturally-situated media

3

frames have positioned religions and the category of “the religious.” The narratives have been about the effects of one of these spheres upon the other. Emerging scholarships of media and religion are beginning to focus more carefully on the interactive spaces where media and religion intersect in contemporary life. This scholarship has looked at the both the mediation of religion and at religious uses of the media, and is coming to understand that the traditional, “separate spheres” assumptions are too narrow and too limited. To start with, new forms of mediation have certainly changed the way religions are understood by their followers and the ways authorities within those religions exercise power. Such differences were obvious with the transition from print to visual culture, and are even more obvious in the digital age. New forms of mediation have also changed the capacities of “the media” to cover and frame religion. It is no longer the sole responsibility of journalists working for major media outlets. Today, diversified sources of information from and about the religious sphere circulate in more and more accessible ways and locations. Thus, it is clearly not adequate to simply say that religion and media are autonomous social structures or cultural spaces that stare at each other from afar, interacting only pragmatically. Media are obviously involved in the way religions evolve in modernity, and religion is clearly involved in setting thee extents and limits of what media can produce. But the relationship is actually deeper than that. Today we have to see that religion and media have come together in fundamental and vital ways. There are religions that are clearly so “mediatic” that they could not have existed in a less media-saturated time. And, there are media that are so involved in and invested in religious or spiritual “work” that it no longer makes sense to think of them as “secular.” For example, the global spread of Pentecostalism cannot be understood outside of its mediation, its embedment in capital cultural markets and its aggressive mediatic commodification of itself. In Islam, there are both forces of moderation (such as “televangelists” Amr Khaled and Sami Yussef) and forces of Salafist Islamism (including—even— the Islamic State) that are clearly mediatic both materially and symbolically. There are a myriad of examples of the so-called “secular” media becoming “religion” in important ways. Banal

4

examples include phenomena such as Mel Gibson’s controversial “The Passion of the Christ,” and the current film “Miracles from Heaven,” just being released in the US. Less banal—and probably more important examples include the many, many digital and social media websites, groups, “meetups” and fan-activist sites that are moving to the center of religious and spiritual exploration for the so-called “millennial” generation. So the mediated “religious facts” today exist well beyond the limits of what national and global public media and journalism “cover” and how they cover it. The fact is that the media and practices of mediation are re-making the facts of religion on the ground even as media attempt to generate and circulate knowledge about religion. Both happen in the same spaces and within the same circulations. Two dimensions of this situation are particularly important. First, the role that the “digital revolution” has played. It has extended and deepened the fundamental structural dimensions of media in modernity, dimensions that have existed throughout the mass media era, but have deepened in profound ways since. A least three such dimensions have drawn particular attention: speed, ubiquity, and autonomy. Life today seems to move faster than in the past, and seems also to be accelerating as we experience it. The construction and circulation of symbols and narrative seems today to move ahead without pause. There is no time for reflection. Along with speed is the reality of the ubiquity of media. They are everywhere and define everything in unprecedented ways. The so-called “social media revolution” is a revolution of access and circulation based in this assumption of ubiquity. Speed and ubiquity carry with them a very particular view of human subjectivity. In all of this, we are encouraged to value autonomy and to think of ourselves as autonomous actors in the construction and circulation of media. “Social media” absolutely depend on this. This idea is also at the root of what the neoliberal marketplace tells us our normative role should be. This is also confirmed when we talk with media audiences about how they prefer to think of media. While the fundamental modern subjectivity in relation to media is a sense of ambivalence, this ambivalence is resolved to the extent that we can think of ourselves as autonomous in our relations with media.

5

This all has profound implications for the second of the fundamental dimensions of the contemporary situation: the implications of all of this for religious authority. Authority has been under pressure since the dawn of the modern media age in the printing revolution of the 15h Century. Once an autonomous media sphere, supported outside the patronage of the church or the state through the commodity cultural marketplace, emerged, religious authorities of various kinds could no longer have monopoly power over the production and circulation of symbols. In the end, they have even lost control over their *own* symbols. They have also lost the ability to create defensible boundaries between “sacred” and “secular” things. The Catholic church has experienced this in its global sex-abuse scandal. Islam experiences this through the global circulation of media that arise outside the boundaries of traditional Islamic scholarship and learning. Amr Khaled and the Islamic State (which actually have nothing else in common) are each forces that can have a global reach and global effect through nothing more than their mediatic circulation. These implications for authority are obviously related to, even based in, the issue of subjective autonomy I discussed earlier. The relationship is not direct. I am not arguing that the media have led to the rise of individual and personal autonomy in relation to authority. The connection is obvious in that in the contemporary North Atlantic West, distrust of settled authority is on the rise. This can be seen in the circus that is the current Presidential election in my own country. It can also be seen in the emergence of fringe political elements across Europe. Simply put, people today feel newly emboldened to question what had once been unquestioned. The media are clearly involved in this. As the British sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued, the personal autonomy and quest for the self in modernity is rooted in experiences in media, where we are encouraged to think we have a greater mastery over the facts of the contemporary situation than we had in the past. And, as we all know, the whole mode of practice of the digital age is inflected with the market’s rhetorical claims that these digital and user-generated media are all about our social and cultural autonomy and efficacy. What does all of this mean for scholars who wish to understand contemporary relations between religion and media? The conceptual argument flows from what I have said here. We

6

can no longer assume that it is a simple fact of media instrumentally documenting or purveying, or materially enchanting the experience of religion. Instead, media today are generating entirely new forms and contexts for the circulation and reception of religious facts and religious knowledge. Among those dimensions of religion are those that are rooted in religious mediations. This situation demands some conceptual and methodological sophistication, and points in two directions: a renewed historicism and a continued emphasis on qualitative, interpretive, and ethnomethodological approaches to empiricism. Our received ways of studying media and religion were rooted in our received ideas about relations between the two. If it was all about the “effects” of one upon the other, then it might have made sense to apply the more traditional and culturally brittle methods of positivist empiricism. But since these relations are more nuanced and layered, other approaches are necessary. In fact, much of what I have said about emerging theory in media and religion has been possible only because scholars have begun to apply these more complex and layered methods, open to subtle and nuanced relations and effects. The focus has shifted from “what are the effects of media?” to “what is produced by mediated religion?” Trends in the field of religious studies away from essentialist categories to questions of practice and materiality have likewise opened up new avenues to us. My colleagues and I have learned a great deal from the fieldwork we have done. As a prominent example, our work we have called “the third spaces of digital religion” emerged directly out of such an interpretive practice. Historicism is also increasingly important. We can learn a great deal by applying a historicist lens to these relations. Where and how did mediatic religion emerge? What are its sources? What “cultural work” did it, and did discourses about it attempt to do? What were the public moral crises and even “panics” that produced the way we think about and talk about religion and about the mediation of religion? Let me mention two specific historicist projects that I am working on myself.

7

First, I have become interested in exploring how our understandings of religion in the west are in fact a legacy of the age of exploration and the colonial era. I do not mean this in the commonplace way we all understand it. Instead I intend a rethinking that “provincializes the North Atlantic West,” (with apologies to Chakrabarty) and sees our experience in this era as a project of world-making that depended as well on the emergence of systems of meaningmaking and circulation, specifically the media of modernity in the print era. These systems became central agents of the making and defining of worlds through their commodification of accounts of the explorations and encounters, and religion—and the definition of religion— became an important dimension of this world-making. Thus, the very idea of religion as a public matter, and the practice that circulates definitions (of religion, of good and bad religion, and of the meaning and value of religion both have been integrated into our Western consciousness by means of mediations. Thus the idea that media and religion are doubly articulated (meaning it is both about how religions are mediated and about how our circulation of knowledge about the mediation of religion itself becomes such a mediation) is nothing new. We simply need to understand it better. Historicism can also help us unpack the meaning and significance of the “American case.” For too long, scholars of media and religion have generalized the American case and American experience as normative. Important terms such as “fundamentalism” and “televangelism” and even “commodification” are not general but in fact specific to the American case. At the same time, there are ways in which the American case has been definitive, if for no other reason than its market power both in media and religion “markets.” A new historicism of media and religion can help us understand, and learn from, this case without having to treat it as normative. So, religion has not gone away and will not. Its mediation is an essential dimension of its persistence, and is deserving of scholarly attention both in its own terms and for the purpose of unpacking its implications across other structural and social locations, including politics. The facts of religion thus include its mediation, and it is a testament to the enduring value of academic traditions that an academic scholarship devoted to it has emerged and is growing.