Religion in the media age
Stewart M. Hoover

Sunday, November 16, 2003 - Op Ed Page, Denver Post

Religion and the media are today linked in powerful and profound ways. The sex-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, the consecration of a gay bishop in an Episcopal diocese, the Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Supreme Court building, and struggles over the constitutionality of" faith-based initiatives" are only the latest ways that religion has emerged into public debate.

Religion seems to be a subject that is vitally important and yet little understood. And the media, which are both the context of such conversations and the central source of our information about religions other than our own, seem often ill-prepared for the role they play.

In the media age, religion can no longer control its own story or its own symbols. In times past, clerical authority could more or less dictate where, when and how religious ideas, symbols and claims would surface.

Today, the pope can't control the way Madonna or Sinead O'Connor use or abuse religious symbols. Muslim clerics can't stop portrayals of Islam that it does not approve of. No one can control what the news media will cover and how they will cover it. What once was a bright line drawn around religion, shielding it from secular scrutiny, has long since been dissolved by universal, instantaneous and increasingly visual media experience.

As the Catholic and Episcopal churches have learned, it is not just a matter of controlling their own stories. It is no longer possible to have things remain private, either. In an era of global news on a 24-hour cycle, anything that happens "here" is known about "there" in real time, and vice versa. In another time, news of the consecration of a gay bishop here in the United States might eventually have filtered to Africa. Today, Anglicans in Africa feel that they are part of the story because the live pictures are there, instantly. The conversation is not limited to that church, either. Nigerian Anglicans are keenly aware of how things might be interpreted by their Muslim neighbors in a context where those two religions share an uneasy coexistence.

This local competition for the moral high ground is an important explanation for African opposition to the consecration, and is a microcosm of the emerging global confrontation between Islam and the West.

The various "fundamentalisms" worldwide have been described by scholars as modern movements. Christian, Hindu and Islamic traditionalists wish to realize, in the context of modern life, visions of an imagined past that was less complicated and more pure and authentic. For these movements, the media provide a prime source of information about other religions and about the sins of modernity and secularism that they hope to confront.

It is clear, for instance, that the Islamist critique of Western culture that provided part of the "justification" for the Sept. 11 attacks is rooted in ideas about the West derived from our own popular culture. The best and the worst of American film, television and popular music is readily available throughout the Middle East. Imagine your impression of the values of our culture if you had only those sources to rely on.

In this, and in more mundane ways, nearly all of what any of us knows about the values, spiritualities and religious beliefs of others comes from the media. We may have the time or interest to delve deeply into the tenets or practices of one or two other faiths or faith traditions, but can we do justice to more than just a few? In an era when immigration is shifting the American religious landscape, it is through the media that we will come to know our new neighbors.

The fact is that the media are moving to the center of American religious experience and at the same time religion is becoming a central part of media culture. Of course, the kind of religion we see there is varied and clearly not limited to what we think of as traditional. The CBS show "Joan of Arcadia," for example, portrays God, but does so in distinctly non-traditional ways.

But that is the reality of contemporary American religion. More and more of us are exploring a variety of spiritual and religious paths, and the media are happy to go along for the ride. At the same time, we should not forget that
the media are also sources of some very traditional representations of religion, as in Mel Gibson's controversial new film, "The Passion."

Religious groups and organizations also have realized that the media must be a central focus of their efforts in the social and political spheres.

Christians on the right and the left, as well as other religious traditions, are increasingly active in efforts to project their messages into the media.

Media are at the center of American religion in another important way. Our civil religion used to be something that was a homogeneous set of commonplace rituals and expressions such as prayers at football games, invocations of a generic God in political speeches, and so on. In the years since the Kennedy assassination, a newer, more authentic civil religion has emerged, one that centers the media as the place where we share common experiences of shock, grief, loss, and mourning. This reached a certain pinnacle on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, and we now expect that at such times we will gather in front of our television screens and that it will be more than just information that we are getting there.

This role at the center of contemporary American civil religion is not a comfortable place for journalists to find themselves. Religion has always been a difficult beat because of the expectation among journalists that it was both too soft and potentially too subjective. It has never been thought of as" hard"news.

However, it is becoming both increasingly "hard" and increasingly difficult for news people to ignore. We are all participating in the evolution of new forms of religion and new ways that it will be understood and experienced through the media. As a society and a culture, we need to take the resulting challenges seriously.

Stewart M. Hoover is a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado-Boulder.