I really appreciate being invited to serve on this evening's panel on communication theology. It's a pleasure to finally meet Bill Cain (head writer and creator for the ABC television program, "Nothing Sacred.") It's also a pleasure to have an opportunity to speak with theologians, as several of you in this room have been influential in my own thinking and I look forward to learning a lot from my time with you in the next few days.

Although I have a seminary degree, my research work in media studies is largely sociological in its theory, methods and research questions, with a particular emphasis in contemporary religion.

Specifically, I'm interested in how people find - or make - religious and spiritual meanings from mass mediated texts, as I'll discuss in a moment.

This is a central focus of the research project I work on with Stewart Hoover at the University of Colorado. The project is called, "Symbolism, Media, and the Lifecourse," and is a four-year endeavor funded by the Lilly endowment to look at questions of meaning-making in peoples' homes and in their everyday lives.

So, I recognize that I'm an outsider on several fronts here. Not only am I not a theologian, I'm not even Catholic. But I believe that it is because of these facts, rather than in spite of them, that I have been asked to speak to you tonight. I hope to contribute a different perspective to contribute to mutual understanding and bridge-building between your field of theology and my field of media studies, within what's come to be known as communication theology.

I'd like to begin with what seems to me to be an obvious and foundational question:

Do studies of the media have any relevance for contemporary theology?

I think there are actually three reasons why theologians might be interested in media, and three things media studies can learn from theologians. I'd like to talk about these first, and then lead the discussion toward exploring the implications and further questions concerning the mediated portrayal of the Catholic church in "Nothing Sacred," or in any other mediated context.

So, why might studies of the media be relevant for contemporary theology?

The first reason is this: Theologians are concerned about culture, and about the distribution of power in society. And, the media are an important location for the expression of the dominant, or hegemonic, views of society.

Theologically oriented people might care about the media, therefore, because of their commitment to justice.

It seems to me that some of the most exciting turns in theology recently have been toward a recognition of culture, as Roberto Goizueta writes, as "a privileged locus of divine revelation." Theology, as he, James Cone, and numerous others in Latino, as well as in black, feminist, mujerista, and other theologies have noted, must be rooted in a people's own historical praxis. These theologians direct their primary attention to the context of the text of religion, or the experiences and perspectives of people, as well as both the artifacts and the ideas of culture.
Goizueta, for instance, expands David Tracy's notion of the classic texts of the faith so as to include not only the written materials, but the stuff of faith as well - like the Via Crucis and Our Lady of Guadalupe, both of which embody aspects of significant cultural practices of the faith. Goizueta expands our notion of classic texts of religion to include cultural practices of religion, or what we might call the text in context. In fact, in a critique of theology's tendency to overemphasize written texts at the expense of other practices that equally contribute to theology, Goizueta wrote in a recent e-mail exchange: "I wish we had the same fear of reducing God to a concept that we have of reducing God to a statue!"

There is a similar focus on culture in Orlando Espin's work on popular Catholicism. Espin notes that all perception and learning are determined and mediated by culture.

To Goizueta's and Espin's constructive approach to theology, I would simply add that the media participate in that cultural determination. Of course this happens in ways that we don't usually like. But it's important to emphasize: In any context in the world today, it is impossible to be interested in culture and ignore the media. The media inform and reinforce shared beliefs - or at least, the beliefs that have hegemonic, status in Western culture. We need to know these beliefs so that we can think about how they might be redefined, challenged, or employed for our own purposes, in the context of our religious organizations and in our efforts toward justice.

The second reason studies of the media are relevant for contemporary theology is related to the first: The media provide a primary language of shared, cultural experience through stories, images, and ideas.

Whether we like it or not, the electronic and print media provide the common language, usually mediated through capitalism and consumerism, that is shared the world over. Here's an example of this. One of the young people I interviewed during my dissertation research, a young Arab-African who is a devout Muslim, told me of his journey to Libya. He was anxious to talk about Muslim traditions with his relatives, but his cousins didn't want to talk about traditional rituals or ceremonial garb. What did they want to talk about? They asked him, "You like Michael Jackson?"

In this example, we see the medium of popular music becomes a common and shared language for young people around the world. But of course, this is not limited to young people. When any of us write, for example, we draw on the cultural experiences that speak to us. Usually, if we admit it to ourselves, academics are moved by elite culture. We use sources like scholarly books, but also classic novels and poetry. We think of our experience in the art gallery, or perhaps of a recent critically acclaimed film. These speak to us, meaning that not only do they serve as illustrations for our ideas, but they capture something of the emotional experience of the theological moment.

Yet this relates to one of the challenges that Paulo Friere puts forth to educators. He writes: "Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the men they address...In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed."

And how is the thought and language of the people framed? What is the language of the people? It's the language of the popular media.

Peter Horsfield, a respected theologian in Australia, dialogued with me a bit about this presentation. He reminded me that many academics find popular media distasteful because of its commercial nature, and because of its vague and amorphous spirituality. But high culture is certainly not uncommercial, as were reminded whenever we pay high ticket prices to see Dawn Upshaw or "Rent." Mozart, when asked why he had never written a concerto, replied, "Because nobody has ever commissioned me to." There is also a long history of the commercial connections between religion and commercial media. Take Martin Luther, for example. His ideas were spread largely because the commercial printers in Europe found Luther to be a profitable author for them.

Popular culture is not the location of the latest version of Christianity, but it is a context of culture. It is a primary language of the majority of people. So it seems to me that theology must take it seriously if theologians are to be taken seriously, as being truly interested in people.

One of the obvious bridges between theology and media studies, therefore, is through this concern for the meaningful experiences of the people. Thus one thing that media studies can offer to theologians, I believe, is a better understanding of how these shared, largely hegemonic, worldwide, and highly problematic stories communicated in the various media become meaningful, even in terms of *religious* understandings, in peoples' everyday lives.

Religiously meaningful? The media? You'd be surprised. I certainly have been.

One of the interesting things I found in my dissertation research about adolescents, the media, and religious identity was a process of interaction with the media that I call "regeneration." This is illustrated in the case of Jodie, a 20-year-old who didn't accept the beliefs of her Protestant upbringing anymore because there were, as she said, "too many facts against the Bible." When I asked her what television show was most like her own beliefs, she said:

"It would have to be X-Files...There's no doubt in my mind that we are not the only intelligent life...God was a higher being, how do we know he wasn't an alien? On X-Files, Mulder, he would say something like that, how do we know God's not an alien?"

In this example, we can see a process whereby the media text - or Jodie's reading into the media text - helps to inform and reinforce what she says are her religious beliefs. In fact, they provide a framework for understanding her beliefs and a language by which she communicates those beliefs to others. She looks at the character of Mulder as the doubter of institutions and projects that he might say something about God that she herself holds as a belief. This is what I call regeneration: taking a media text and then from it, egenerating a meaning that in turn reinforces and informs a religious understanding.

This has important implications for the religious context, as Mary Hess, a Catholic religious educator, recently reminded me. "The X-Files" becomes a way for this young woman to talk about her beliefs and what's important to her. This demonstrates not only that popular culture can serve as a resource with which young people think about religion. It can also be a jumping-off point for dialogues in churches, seminaries, or in related contexts.

But the media are not only a source of meaning and religious understanding for kids with no religious background. And this is the third reason why theology might be interested in media studies. The media are also a primary language for meaning through which *religion* is experienced, understood, and made meaningful for those in traditional religious contexts.

A priest once told me of a Baptism that he was performing. The family of the baby were gathered around him, including the child's 5-year-old brother. As the priest blessed the baby and lifted her up out of the water, the 5-year-old's eyes lit up with recognition and he shouted excitedly, "The Lion King!"

The point of this story is that the baptism became a meaningful religious experience for the child because "The Lion King" was meaningful; not the other way around.

When I told that story a few weeks ago in a workshop for Catholic religious educators, one of the women nodded excitedly. She said, "I struggled for a long time to try to find a resource for my young parent's class that would help them understand the current theological thinking about baptism." She had found that when people were asked why baptism was important, they tended to fall back on ideas they only half-believed in, like that baptism washes away original sin or qualifies a child for heaven. But, she said, showing a clip of "The Lion King" helped them to "get" the commitment made by the community to the child, on both an abstract, but perhaps more importantly, an emotional level. Again, it's the mediated story that provided a framework for understanding the significance of the religious event, not the other way around.

This is a significant turn of events. It calls upon us to recognize that the Church can no longer rely upon its historical moral authority and doctrine alone. Moreover, the Church's symbols can no longer be assumed to be inherently meaningful. They must be seen as *able to become meaningful*, given the right context for the text. Religious symbols, like any other symbols, are not considered by people to be meaningful in and of themselves. They must be *made* meaningful. In our research, we call this a flattening of religious symbols.

This has implications of what we look for when we think about media.

Instead of simply looking at the media's *stories*, then, we also want to explore how and when certain mediated stories and symbols become meaningful for their audiences. We need to pay more attention, again, to the people.

Because popular culture is the primary language of meaning for people, we can no longer dismiss it as superficial. If we look at, for example, television programs like "Touched by an Angel" as superficial, or if we dismiss contemporary Christian music as "cotton candy for the brain," we run the risk of dismissing what's meaningful in peoples' everyday practices. To me, this is very similar to the once widely-accepted practice of dismissing the Virgin of Guadalupe as an aberration because it's not in our canon of how we understand theology.

I've talked quite a bit about what media studies can offer to theologians, but I also want to quickly mention three things that I think media studies could learn from theologians.

1. Media studies is interested in meaning-making. But many times, we resist defining the word "meaning." Instead, we argue that meaning is what happens in the audience and therefore it is up to them to tell us what meaning is. Theology, with its interest in talking about meaning with reference to the Ultimate, can offer us some clues of the categories people normally are employing when *they're* using the term meaning. This can enrich our analysis.

2. Media studies needs some help discovering the links between peoples' stated systems of value (their morals, ethics, etc.) and historical institutions of religion. I found in my research that people are more comfortable talking about both media choices and religious identifications in terms of personal morality. Are morality and religion the same thing for people? If not, how can we get at how they differ for people?

3. Cultural media studies has an understanding of politics and justice largely informed by Marxist theory, which is in part why it's so easy to overlook religion in my field. How might an understanding of the liberatory role of religion (both popular and institutional) in grass roots movements inform and deepen our understanding of politics?

Now, I'd like to conclude with a few comments specifically about "Nothing Sacred":

I think the fact that "Nothing Sacred" aired at all speaks to the need for religion and theology to begin to take the media more seriously. It isn't just politics or money that make a show possible; it's also the sense among the entertainment industry that people want to see the product. And ultimately, it's the fact that people in the audience *do* want to see the product. As Martha Williamson, the executive producer for "Touched by an Angel" put it, religion is seen right now in the television industry as "the flavor of the month." But as these shows continue to draw audiences, controversy, and letter-writing campaigns, it's increasingly dawning on Hollywood that religion is "the flavor of peoples' lives."

In our research, we ask a lot of questions about the numerous explicitly religious programs that were on the television airwaves this past year, as well as the several movies with explicit religious themes. Not surprisingly, given the fact that at its height 6 million people had seen "Nothing Sacred" and then the audience quickly slipped to 3 million after the pilot episode, I didn't run into too many people who wanted to talk about that show. A few Catholics were familiar with the controversy. One Latino Catholic family thought it was probably something negative about Catholicism and thus wouldn't choose to watch it (and given their conservative position, they probably would've seen it as negative). One conservative evangelical Protestant mentioned it as an example of a television program he wouldn't watch because it was, as he said, "sacreligious." Interestingly, the other example of a sacreligious program he gave was "The Simpsons."

"Nothing Sacred" did draw a specific audience of people who found it resonant with their experiences. As Bill mentioned, a lot of the vocal minority audience was well-educated and liberal, and many were not even necessarily Catholic but somehow disenfranchised from a religious institution. Yet, as pointed out in a "Commonweal" editorial, at the same time the show affirmed identity with the institution by providing sacramental moments. This, it seems to me, is quite significant for both the institution and those who feel disenfranchised from it. So, in terms of institutional support, an important implication of an audience-centered approach is to ask:

1. If it can be located in another entertainment media venue, how can "Nothing Sacred" find its audience? And how might the institutional church(es) help in this process? Also, how can the institution use "Nothing Sacred," along with other examples of popular culture, as resources with which to talk about faith, religious tradition, and religious experience?

What show do you think people wanted to talk about instead of "Nothing Sacred?" "Touched by an Angel." After all, some 22 million people in the U.S. tune into this show regularly. This is important to recognize, because the context of "Nothing Sacred" is not Catholic culture. The context is the competition between television programs for viewers. So a key question for me is why "Nothing Sacred" failed while "Touched by an Angel" succeeded.

Like most of you in this room if you're like most academics I know, "Touched by an Angel" is not a show I prefer. In fact, I've run across 5 main objections that are raised about the show by academics:

The Top Five Objections to Touched by an Angel:

5. There is usually no mention of institutional religion at all.

4. It reduces morality to the level of individual choice; there is no critique of structural and institutionalized inequities.

3. It suggests God's solution to personal and social problems is through supernatural intervention in the lives of individuals.

2. It sentimentalizes religion.

1. It provides superficial, pat answers to complicated issues of society.

So, taking a perspective of media audiences, what can we learn from this?

Maybe, stuff we don't want to hear. For example, maybe people don't necessarily want religion to be abstract and conflicted; maybe they want it to be accessible. Both "Nothing Sacred" and "Touched by an Angel" employ stories, after all, even though the former is widely accepted as more complex than the latter. But maybe even those watching "Nothing Sacred" were able to draw some meaning from it that made even its complex approach to problems, well, simpler. We can be sad about this, but if that's where people are, we have to look at not what's wrong with their approach but what is meaningful in it. This leads to another implication:

2. What is it in what we would call pat answers to complicated issues that contributes theological meaning to people? And on a related note,

3. If people construct their own religious meaning from various cultural sources, how are meaningful theological reflections being constructed among the people *in spite of* the institution? This suggests more examination of popular religious practices as well as those explored in Latino, black, mujerista, and other theologies of context. It also suggests that theologians examine how people are using media.

In conclusion, I want to point out that thinking about the media as constitutive of culture is not just a matter of our (Christian/Catholic/sacred) texts versus their (secular/mass mediated) texts. We might assume that the religious text prima facie has authority, but I'd like to see some research that could back that up in terms of how people live their lives. My experience has shown instead that people tend to see the religious text, in fact all things related to religious institutions, as relative in authority. What I keep finding is true in the work of a number of other scholars in religion as well, such as David Morgan's work on imagery, or Mary Hess's work on media in the context of religious education, or even in the work on popular Catholicism I've already talked about. Religious symbols, like any other symbols in culture, are not considered meaningful in and of themselves. This makes sense as we continue to recognize that we can't ever separate Christianity from its cultural context and isolate some "kernel" of truth there. The symbols, the stories, the practices, are related to their context. And stories are what help people understand; symbols become meaningful as they are encounted in story.

Religious symbols must be put into a context that makes them meaningful to people. This is why the media can make religious symbols meaningful: they're in the context of stories, and are viewed, usually, in peoples' homes. And this is why religious organizations and cultures can make religious stories - whether found in tradition and institution or in new mediated forms - meaningful, as well.

We need to remember that communication is always a two-way, dialogical process; it's not only important to understand what is sent but what is received. Thus reception, or the peoples' practices of meaning-making, is where theological meaning happens. To the extent that the media inform meaning-making, it becomes an important aspect of contemporary theology.