The Mediatization of Religion: When Faith Rocks

The MediaTizaTion of Religion

This book is dedicated to the people of Norwich in the U.K., and to the colleagues and friends at the University of East Anglia, from whom I had the best welcome a foreigner could ever hope to have

The Mediatization of Religion When faith Rocks luis MauRo sa MaRTino Casper Libero Faculty of Media and Communication, Sao Paulo, Brazil

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2013 luis Mauro sa Martino luis Mauro sa Martino has asserted his right under the Copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Martino, luis Mauro sa The mediatization of religion: when faith rocks. 1. Mass media in religion. i. Title 261.5’2-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Martino, luis Mauro sa The mediatization of religion : when faith rocks/by luis Mauro sa Martino. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-1-4094-3628-7 (hardback:alk. paper) 1. Mass media in religion. 2. Mass media—Religious aspects. 3. Religion and politics. i. Title. Bl638.M37 2013 201’.7—dc23 2012038189 isBn 9781409436287 (hbk) isBn 9781315555652 (ebk)

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Addressing the Questions 1 Part I DImensIons of meDIateD relIgIon anD the PublIc sPace 1 Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 11 2 What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? 29 3 Mediated Religion in a Mediatized Society: The Public Visibility of Religion 43 Part II meDIateD relIgIon, relIgIous PractIces anD culture 4 High-Mediated, Low-Mediated, and Some Differences among Denominations 61 5 The Politics of the Body, Appearance and Aesthetics in Mediated Religion 73 6 Borrowing Styles from the Media 89 Conclusions: “Social networking? Yeah, we do that. Jump in and join us!” 105 Bibliography 113 Index 127

This page has been left blank intentionally

Preface and Acknowledgments In the early hours of Thursday, December 27, 2007, I landed at London’s Heathrow Airport having boarded the plane about 12 hours earlier. I had crossed half the planet to start a year of full-time research at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. A connection problem on the Anglia One train between London and Colchester delayed me in the capital for some time, and I only reached my final destination after nearly 22 hours travelling. I had high expectations of what was to come, but never did I suspect that it would be the most remarkable experience of my life thus far. Living in a different country is a peculiar challenge. You are the alien and hardly sure of anything. Numerous questions cross your mind, from the practical (will the people understand my pronunciation? Should I shake hands or just say “hello” when I meet people? What will I find in the supermarket?) to the academic (is my research project good enough? Will my arguments stand up to scrutiny?). Intellectual doubts and everyday concerns about life in a foreign land thus walked hand in hand. Up to that point in my life, I had lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s economic nervous system, a gargantuan metropolis of 16 million souls trying to live with each other. Suddenly I found myself in a city 20 times smaller, with different living standards, different lifestyles, traditions and weather. Would I ever get accustomed to it? Within two days I felt completely at home. This rapid acclimatization was entirely down to the kindness and warmth of the welcome I received, both by the academic staff, professors and colleagues at the University and by the people of Norwich. As a foreigner, I was unsure what to expect from the local people, and everything went far better than I could have ever imagined. The result was that I felt comfortable enough to direct all my energies to academic life—and to enjoy thoroughly the life in the city. It is perhaps a cliché to say that the weather is a source of endless fascination for the British people, but I quickly found myself able to discuss its limitless variations with the same enthusiasm as my hosts. I was also a devotee of that other great British institution: tea. Having been a tea lover since the age of 5, I was excited at the prospect of the traditional cup of afternoon tea. I soon discovered, however, that this is a myth as tea is drunk throughout the day, much to my delight. And of course, I have to mention both the food (British cuisine is far better than it is often portrayed) and drink—the British pub really is a magical place that bears a remarkable similarity to its Sao Paulo equivalent. I assume the reader is familiar with the routines of academic life. It can be summarized quite simply: reading, writing, researching, teaching, listening, speaking—to which some would also add “drinking” and (occasionally) “partying.” For me, this meant working about 12 hours a day, reading and writing in the library, meeting with my supervisors and other members of faculty in the

viii The Mediatization of Religion School of Political, Social and International Studies where I was based, and participating in any of the available seminars or workshops related to my work or other interesting subject. Every now and then I escaped to the city to walk around and enjoy the experience of being in another country, browsing in the shops, observing the people, eating and drinking new things—in a word, living. Every evening I continued to work at home where my wife, a former UEA student herself, worked as a freelance journalist for various Brazilian magazines and tried to broaden her already impressive cooking repertoire with some British recipes. (I should add that this division is not due to any sexism: my specialities are drinks and sandwiches.) My reason for writing all of this is to provide some flavor of the time I spent in Norwich and the freedom it afforded me to focus on my research as well as broaden my cultural horizons. It was a splendid time for me, and this book is the third to be published as a result of this, although the first in English. In that sense, I owe a debt of gratitude to the place as much as anything else for what follows. I feel fortunate to have had this opportunity. But first and foremost it is the people I encountered in my time there to whom I must offer my particular thanks. I am deeply indebted to Professor John Street and Dr Lee Marsden, at the University of East Anglia, for all their intellectual support and personal encouragement during the writing of this text. They provided me with a stimulating learning environment that went far beyond an academic work. At the School of Political, Social and International Studies, I would like to thank Dr Sanna Inthorn for her comments on early drafts of this text, Dr Heather Savigny, for her suggestions and insights, Dr Nicola Pratt for her support, and also to my colleagues Salman Ali Karim, Vanessa Buth and Ratnaria Wahid. I am particularly indebted to Nick Wright, who not only proofread the book, but also helped me with insightful ideas to improve it. At Ashgate Publishing, I would not forget the help, encouragement and support from Margaret Younger, Natalja Mortensen, Dymphna Evans, Rob Sorsby, Bethan Dixon and all the team. Thank you very much. I am grateful to Peter Stafford for his careful copyediting of the manuscript. At Stratford University, Dr Mick Temple for his precious comments on the early version of this work. To the UEA Learning and Enhancing team, led by Dr Anna Magyar and Dr Anna Grant. To the multi-faith UEA chaplaincy team, the Reverend Neil Walker, the Reverend Darren Thornton, Father John Shannon and Mrs Marion Houssart, for all their encouragement and support on so many occasions. And in Brazil, I owe a great deal to Dr Clovis de Barros Filho, Dr Beatriz Muniz de Souza and Dr Luiz E. W. Wanderley, whose support and encouragement where decisive in early paths of my career. To my academic colleagues in Brazil, if I am to choose between the risk of forgetting someone and the impoliteness of a general acknowledgement, I will stick to the latter. So, thanks to my friends, colleagues and students at Casper Libero Faculty of Media and Communication,

Preface and Acknowledgments ix at the Catholic Pontifical University, Methodist University, ESPM, Saint Jude University, Cantareira Faculty of Music and São Paulo State University for the moments of dialogue and insightful ideas. To my parents Antonio and Vera, who have supported me throughout, not only during my time in Norwich. (I gave them some British tea when I came back and consequently can add two more to the fold of tea lovers.) And finally to my wife Anna Carolina, for all her support, patience and help— and for her love and companionship. Without her, none of this would be possible.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Introduction Addressing the Questions During the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, Jeremiah Wright, the minister of a Baptist church in the south of the country, preached a sermon peppered with some strong concerns about race that some interpreted as “racist.” Although it was intended to be just another sermon without further consequences, his church was not an ordinary one, for a former member of his congregation was none other than the then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Given the status of his former congregant, Wright’s sermon quickly became a global sensation thanks to YouTube, and as its notoriety spread, so too did concerns about how candidate Obama would respond, and indeed he was forced to declare shortly after that he did not share the preacher’s view (Zeleny and Nagourney 2008). Meanwhile, in the final days of Brazilian general elections in 2010, campaigners raised the argument that, if elected to the presidency, Dilma Roussef from the Worker’s Party would change the law that considers abortion a crime. Immediately, Catholic and Evangelical leaders started to protest against Ms Roussef through mainly church-owned radio and television stations. In a few hours, her TV advertising had been reshaped to quell public anxiety, declaring that the “right to live” was “sacred.” Two months later Ms Roussef was elected. While distant from each other in time and place, all two stories share an important feature: they bind together media, politics and religion. And in recent years there have been a growing number of issues concerning this narrow triple interface of political actions, religious concerns and media broadcasts. Witness, for example, the campaigning of the U2 front-man and global superstar Bono at the turn of the Millennium to persuade rich nations to pardon Third World debts because of the Jubileum, a Catholic celebration. Meanwhile, in Latin America, a single church—the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God—owns the second most popular TV station in Brazil, and has elected several members of its clergy as MPs in the last two decades. But why does all this matter to politics? Traditionally, by “politics” we understand the range of actions and ideas that deals with government and governing, elections and political campaigning, deliberation and law-making, Parliament and so on. The political métier includes all those who are directly involved with the government and the decision-making process in the society, while the participation of the general population remains largely sporadic and essentially limited. However, in recent times a new meaning for the word has developed. Within a research tradition sometimes related to Cultural Studies, “politics” is understood

2 The Mediatization of Religion to be an activity closer to everyday life, as the power to control the discourses, meanings, practices and representations of a person or group in society (Young 1990; Spivak 2008; Sardar and Van Loon 2001). The definition of a personal or collective identity, for example, is a strong political concern since it is related to the person’s place in society and his or her relation to other people and groups. The “politics of identity” (Street 2001) deals with it. Couldry, Livingstone and Markham (2009: 28) explain that is important “not to assume that a decline in attention to ‘politics’ in the traditional sense means lack of attention in ‘politics’ in general, let alone apathy.” They argue that people understanding of “what constitute politics may be changing.” According to this view, even the simplest practices of everyday life can be understood as “political” in its reference to a broader sense of representation. Thus, whilst choosing to have a pint of beer rather than a glass of wine is not a political action in itself, the meaning ascribed to it can be framed in the broader sense of “Britishness,” a representation that opposes itself, for example, to the “Frenchness” of wine (Inthorn 2007; Martino 2010). To choose a particular way of life is consequently also a political act, and so those who have any sort of influence in setting lifestyles may be understood as actors in the political game. The relationship between media, politics and religion varies greatly depending on where in the world it is being considered. In the United States, for example, it seems to be more important than in Western Europe. Many scholars (Diamond 1989; Connolly 2005; Marsden 2008) argue that media are an important element in the North American Christian Right. Meanwhile, other studies have highlighted the relationship between media and religion in Latin America (Assman 1986; Frigerio 1987; Silleta 1991; Sierra 2008), particularly in Brazil (Rocha 1998; Martino 2003, 2010; Birman and Lehmann 1999; Klein 2005). An article by James Poniewozik, published on January 17, 2008 in Time magazine, offers an detailed example of the triple relationship: Jesus Christ’s Superstar In the popular and political mind, pop culture and conservative Christianity are separated like church and state. Britney, The Da Vinci Code and MTV are here; homeschooling, Left Behind and praise music are there. What God hath put asunder, let not man attempt to join. So it’s surprising—yet for reasons we’ll get into, entirely sensible—that the candidate who has made the most effective use of pop culture in campaign 2008 is the former president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. Mike Huckabee, the bass-playing, weight-loss-book-writing, late-night-quipping, Chuck Norris—befriending pastor, has turned an easy facility with pop culture into free media for his underfunded -underdog campaign. (http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1704662,00.html)

Introduction 3 In this book, “Politics” is understood in this broad sense. It is seen as more than “state and government affairs,” and instead includes the everyday relationships among different people, and their beliefs, identities and values, as they struggle and strive to coexist in a globalizing world. This broad view claims that politics is not far from us. It is not only what politicians do in a political party, in Parliament and so on—the activities of an elite in a place distant from the concerns of lesser mortals. Politics, in a broad sense, is related to the way we do things in everyday life, and, more importantly, to the systems of ideas that support this. Human actions are commonly grounded on certain assumptions, ideas, beliefs, memories and traditions that work as guidelines to our practices and attitudes towards other people, to the economy and to the country as a whole. So, returning to the earlier question of why this matters to politics, this kind of “politics” encapsulates citizens’ rights and attitudes towards one another and it is here that the media have increased the presence of religion in matters of everyday life, from body care and beauty to professional success. Thus, the mediated relationship between religion and politics goes well beyond the reach of politics understood as merely the state and government affairs. We should be careful not to draw a sharp line between these two conceptions of politics. This border is frequently blurred when the sense of one’s identity is challenged and becomes a public concern. Thus, in many of the most important social movements of the twentieth century, notably European Feminism or AfroAmerican affirmative action in the United States, key questions of identity and lifestyle were bound up with concerns over parliamentary representation and civil rights. As Cogel and Minkler (2004: 343) argue: Once an individual has decided upon a religious identity, there is often the need to communicate that choice. Although one could hypothetically express the identity through one to one interactions with others, the feasibility of such a process is constrained severely by the availability of time and other resources. We need to be able to communicate in social settings and interact with anonymous others in uncertain environments. The communication of an identity in such settings, however, can be a difficult undertaking because of the problem of knowledge. In social interactions, an individual typically lacks knowledge of the perceptions of others or the religious relevance of the surrounding circumstances. (Cogel and Minkler 2004: 343) What makes religion of such interest is that it deals with politics in both senses. Firstly, religious arguments and concerns have been explicitly at stake in many recent political debates in many countries: for example, the “Christian Right” and its role in the “Culture Wars” (Romanovski 2006) in the United States; or the bitter debates in France about the right of French Muslim women to wear the burka, a cloth that covers the person’s face, in public places.

4 The Mediatization of Religion Even when it is not directly related to what might be considered governmental or political concerns, religion can still be a powerful source of direction to the believer’s everyday life, and therefore have a “political” impact. Most Western Christian churches, for example, teach their members about what is right and what is forbidden. They recommend certain practices while discouraging others. They tell people who they are, where they belong and what to expect from the future. They even suggest what to wear, how to behave in public and towards each other. In other words, they attempt to define the way of life and the way people should behave in public. It is this that binds religion so closely to the broader definition of politics: its claims to influence people’s way of life. It is my goal with this book to describe how mediation of religion has been articulated with politics, particularly in this broader sense. I am not going to deal with the relationship between religion and parliaments or governments. I am interested to outline how religion, particularly some Christian Western denominations, adapt itself to mediatization and how mediation interferes in some of their public actions, that is, those actions that are publicized. I believe that mediation may interfere in the way some churches define their own rules, practices, even liturgy—in other words, mediatization sometimes may change the way churches addresses issues to their worshipers and to the general public. Research Questions and Methodological Issues A key theoretical and methodological point, meanwhile, is how to highlight the mediation of religion as a relevant aspect of change. In Part I, I address the problems of mediation of religion from a theoretical point of view. First, I discuss some of the meanings of the terms “mediation” and “mediatization,” and the relationship with religion. The discussion focuses on three points: what does it means to a denomination to become “mediated”? How does mediated religion appear in the public space? Finally, what is the political— in the broad sense of “politics”—place of mediated churches in the public sphere? In Part II, I outline those questions through the identification of differences between denominations that have fully adopted the media as part of its everyday actions, which I call “high-mediated,” and those that have done so parsimoniously, the “low-mediated” ones. By examining the differences, it is possible to identify, at least partially, the extent to which mediation is related to changes in the churches’ practices, participation in public affairs and rules concerning their members’ lives. In order to verify this claim, the required research environment is a scene of religious change where we can outline the extent to which media use can be an agent of change in religion—in other words, through a sample of different denominations, each with its own doctrines, rituals and beliefs, share the same social conditions. It is therefore necessary to select a particular object at which to direct the question and which will therefore be the corpus of this research. In this book, I focus on the Pentecostal denominations, both Roman Catholic and Evangelical.

Introduction 5 The sample of churches and denominations that appears in this book has been picked up from the many ones I have found in field research or Internet-based research since the year 2000. As I will stress later, it would be too risky to draw a sharp line between high-mediated and low-mediated denominations; even inside a church—for example, the Roman Catholic Church—it is possible to find different levels of mediation. However, it is possible to infer, from the institutional point of view, how much a denomination is willing or resistant to the use of media. It would be better to think of a continuum from the complete rejection of media use, that is, denominations which simply reject the idea of employing mass and/or digital media, to the full use of all sorts of media. In this book, instead of drawing a line—or writing a table of “high-mediated” and “low-mediated” churches—I will rather, in each particular case, explain why a mentioned church may be said to belong to one of these categories. Since the focus of this book is the mediatization of religion, I shall concentrate on the particular conditions of it. This is intended to highlight two key aspects: the differentiation between low-mediated and high-mediated denominations; and the similarities within this second group. These two terms, differentiation and homogenization, might be taken as a complex process involving many contradictions, is uneven and goes back and forth. At the same time, as previously mentioned, the highlighting of mediation does not mean the demise of other social, political and economic influences on change in religious denominations. What is so interesting regarding media use specifically is that it is possible to identify a process by which the extent of media use implies a split inside a similar group of churches, the Pentecostals, and, afterwards, a homogenization among churches of one group. The comparison is intended to highlight media elements inside high-mediated churches practices, codes and values and, at the same time, to stress the existence of a sort of resistance to the media among the low-mediated denominations. I am not going to describe or compare religious doctrines and practices per se except where they provide evidence of the presence of elements that could be understood as part of a “media culture” or “media values”—that is, values and practices alien to what has been considered “religious” in Western Christianity. The contrast between the denominations suggests that within the high-mediated the presence of these media elements is bigger and stronger than in the low-mediated. Focusing especially on the high-mediated, I will show that, through mediation and mediatization, these churches have become similar in many aspects. Indeed, it is as if media use has framed some different religious practices and values within the same media references and as a result, a common way of framing the message has overcome theological differences. Media use thus seems to create a sort of homogenization among those high-mediated churches: in spite of their theological and institutional differences, all seem to stick to the same group of practices and values that are related to media and popular culture. In terms of mediation, a singing Roman Catholic priest and a singing Evangelical televangelist are very alike: they use the same codes and references to convey a

6 The Mediatization of Religion message that otherwise would be different—the “traditional” rituals and messages of Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism are quite different (Hanson 1969). However, once they have been mediated, the same style overcomes the differences and both use the same references and frames of popular media shows. Structure of the Book The book is divided in two parts, each one comprising three chapters. Part I explores some theoretical and conceptual aspects of the mediatization of religion. In Chapter 1, I primarily focus on the concept of “mediation” and “mediated religion,” highlighting the idea of “mediation” as a cultural, not technology-driven, process. It frames the mediatization of religion in the broader picture of the mediatization of society. Chapter 2 addresses the question of what characteristics of religion make it particularly suitable to be mediatized, and the specific forms of mediatization. Chapter 3 focuses on the visibility of mediatized religion in the public space, and how mediated religious arguments must be adapted to a secular form if they are to thrive in the public debate. Data for Part I has been gathered and borrowed from a wide variety of places in order to best illustrate the particular theories and points of view, and all such material is available from newspapers and broadcast websites, or from Internet video-player sites such as YouTube or Google Video. Consequently, rather than focusing specifically on a single country, the range of sources are geographically diverse—an article taken from The Times may be sit side by side with a leaflet found in Sao Paulo, a U.S. movie or pictures taken in Paris. This is not a deliberate effort to achieve a sense of “cosmopolitanism,” but instead to highlight the range and breadth of central argument: mediation has changed religion into a kind of media spectacle, mixing entertainment, consumption of goods, self-help slogans, marketing and advertising to convey a religious meaning. Part II deals with some particular aspects of mediated religion concerning the practice of religion. The goal is to stress that mediation of religion is not an even process, and different levels of mediation may lead to denominations to adopt different approaches to their policies concerning their worshippers, along with their wordview, and political relations. Evidence for this second part has been gathered from the churches websites, but a considerable number of examples have come from field research mainly in Latin American churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant and, to a lesser extent, from British and French denominations. Field research has been conducted, not always in a systematic way, from 2006 to 2010. In the second part, the chapters address particular questions to these denominations. Chapter 4 explains the process of differentiation between high- and low-mediated churches. Although they are all Pentecostal, high-mediated denominations seem to be more likely to stick to “secular” practices, while low-mediated churches seems to have maintained their resistance to it. I compare the beliefs, doctrines and theories of high- and low-mediated churches to show that in the former rules are more sympathetic, and frankly even encouraging, to some practices and codes

Introduction 7 commonly associated with the media or aspects of popular culture, while lowmediated churches remain more distant from these practices. Chapter 5 addresses the question of the differences between high- and lowmediated denominations in regard to the specific subject of the body. Several sociologists of religion, particularly Bryan Turner (2006a, 2006b) have shown that body control is a major concern among religious denominations, and in this chapter I compare these churches’ attitudes towards the worshipper’s body. Chapter 6 focuses on how high-mediated churches have evolved since they have been drawing on the same aspects of media culture for their practices and codes. The chapter deals only with these denominations to show that they have adopted some practices that have made them similar to each other. The key point being made is that the reference point for these similarities is not religious doctrine or belief, but media communication codes. I suggest this by identifying in the religious practices and actions elements that could previously have been found in the media. Finally, in the conclusion I argue that media use has pushed some aspects of religious beliefs, ethics and rituals closer to popular culture, including the adoption of practices that have been commonly regarded as the “opposite” of religious values (Clark 2006). More generally, the main argument is that the more a religious denomination adopts media communication as a device, the more its own practices—services, beliefs, doctrines, rituals—become closer to media culture style. Religion, in those denominations that have fully adopted media, has thus become a media-orchestrated show.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Part I Dimensions of Mediated religion and the Public Space

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1 Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue A couple of years ago the British singer, songwriter and living legend Paul McCartney came to Sao Paulo for a show. I went to watch him with a group of friends in one of the biggest football stadiums in the city. It was to begin at 9: p.m., and we arrived quite early to avoid long queuing. Late in the afternoon, inside the crowded stadium, one of my friends, a committed Jew, suddenly said to us, “If you excuse me, I would go say the evening prayers. I’ll be back in a moment.” Immediately he got his iPhone, connected to the Internet, downloaded the set of prayers for that specific day and, with earphones, he prayed. The mediated living experience of faith—this is what mediatization of religion is about. In this chapter, I would like to explore some dimensions of the concept, trying to show how it is possible to think about the relationship between media and religion in terms of “mediated” and “mediatized” religion. The title is partially drawn on Canclini (1999). A researcher willingly to explore the concept of mediatization will find the name itself as the first difficult to deal with. It is a relatively new word, and it is not universally employed by academics to define the same phenomenon. More to the point, the relation between “mediatization” and “mediation” is not as clear as could be expected from a concept. This ambiguity requires some preliminary remarks about the word itself prior to any further development. As many other theoretical concepts in media and communication studies, there seems to be little consensus on the meaning of “mediatization.” It is not my goal to write a full genealogy of the concept of mediatization, and there have been many well-grounded attempts to do it (see Hjarvard 2008a; Lundby 2009; Livingstone 2009a; see also Sodré 2004, Fausto Neto, Gomes, Braga and Ferreira 2008). I would only like to stress some of its characteristics, as it may be helpful to understand contemporary relationship between media and religion—actually, in the case of religion, its mediatization cannot be understood without a further reference to the mediatization of society. The word itself may sound a little bit odd—in fact, most text processors would not recognize it. Moreover, only from 2000 onward has the concept become widely discussed in academia, and it was only towards the end of the decade that researchers started to relate mediatization to religion (Hjarvard 2008a; Gomes 2008, Gasparetto 2011; Martino 2012). The roots of mediatization may be found in several thinkers. In what follows, I will briefly discuss some of them, drawing mainly on Livingstone (2009a) and

12 The Mediatization of Religion Hjarvard (2008a). Next I will discuss some aspects of mediatization of society and religion, and, finally, the differences between “mediation” and “mediatization.” For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1992: 205), media communication has little to do with the “mediatization” process. He refers to “mediatization” in his Theory of Communicative Action, in the context of the “colonization” of the life-world by the system. The progressive rationalization of the life-world, colonized by the imperatives of a rational, bureaucratic and capitalist environment, detaches it from (but also makes it dependent on) the administrative system. Human activities have increasingly become “mediatized” by system imperatives, which lead to their “colonization.” “Mediatization” is related to the bureaucratic control of social action and interactions. The media play only a negative role in this process by contributing to undermine and erode the public sphere (Habermas 1992: 325). British sociologist John B. Thompson (1995, 2005) claims that the development of media communication, from the printing press onwards, helped to shape the face of modern Western society by altering the way people, institutions and governments communicate. It has altered the social information flow, and the very way people understand their lives and culture, and has forced other institutions, as governments and churches, to face the public exposure and debate of ideas and concepts, which is an important issue in the modernization process. Further development of media industries has sharpened this process, and it has become a crucial factor of modernization in Western society. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1998, 1996: 85) has attempted a radical approach to mediatization. He states that the omnipresence of images, particularly those produced and spread by electronic media, destroys reality itself into a hyperreality, the realm of the “simulacra,” that is, a place where the boundaries between real and non-real are not blurred, they simply do not matter anymore. The culture of image is also a culture of simulacra, where pervasive make-believe is the rule. In Plato’s Phaedrus (261e–262b), Socrates argues that it is easier to deceive people with elements that look similar to each other than with those which are dissimilar. For Baudrillard, the logic of simulacra is alike: it looks real, but it makes reality appears “more real” than it is. These approaches, however insightful they may be, are not entirely related to the contemporary use of “mediatization.” One of the main difficulties is that the word has been employed to define a wide range of sometimes contradictory, phenomena, subjects and issues. The word itself has been subject to debate. Sonia Livingstone (2009a: 2) points out the “semantic confusion” that envelops the whole discussion: “mediatization” is sometimes replaced, or contrasted, with “mediation,” “medialization,” “mediazation” and “remediation.” In many languages, she explains, the concept of “mediation,” particularly, has been related to the idea of “negotiation,” “getting in between.” Actually, “media,” from the Latin, refers to something that “stands in the middle” of two or more elements. A critical approach to mediatization is also the point of Finnemann (2011). He argues that there has been many attempts to conceptualize it without a single

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 13 definition. However, he also identifies a common feature, since “they are all related to a specific set of media, characterizing a specific historical epoch” (Finnemann 2011:74). She argues, with Hjarvard (2008a), that “mediation” is a broader concept than “mediatization,” which allows research to include the idea of symbolic interactions shaped by media communication. She offers an example of it: an 8-year-old boy, after playing an online multimedia and multiplayer game with other online people, started to play the same game with his brother and sisters: each one chose a character and they re-enacted, in “real life,” what had been played online. The children defined it as “playing the Internet” (Livingstone 2009a: 8). The Concept of Mediatization The presence and interference of media communication in important human activities seems to be at the core of a definition of “mediatization.” Generally, mediatization refers to the set of transformations that have been taking place in contemporary society and are, in at least a very general level, to the development of media communication, particularly digital and virtual media. A preliminary definition, taken from a dictionary of media studies (Chandler and Munday 2011: 270), refers to the influence of the “logic” and the “form” of media, especially electronic media, in the communication process. The concept stresses the ubiquitous presence of media communication, from mobile phones to the broadcasts and the Internet, as a fundamental aspect of contemporary life. The media are not only tools to convey a message, but they may also interfere in the way people communicate in everyday life. From the start, it is necessary to state that the idea of “mediatization” does not seems to be a new name for the old “mediacentered” theories as stated by McLuhan (2001) or Meyrowitz (1993, 1999). Particularly, as Hjarvard (2008b) argues, the studies of Joshua Meyrowitz are particularly useful to better understand of the concept of “mediatization.” In his attempt to explain what are “media,” Meyrowitz (1993, 1999) develops three metaphors to explain their multi-dimensional aspects. In the first metaphor, the media are a “channel” or a “conduit” through which a sender will pass a message to a receiver. This metaphor seems to highlight the message as free from the constraints of the medium, since this one would simply carry information from one point to another. The media are also a “language,” that is, they have their own “grammar” to frame any particular message. This second perspective stresses the fact that media may transmit and share information accordingly to their own form and/or structure, and there is hardly any dichotomy in form/content as long as each medium frames the message in a particular way. Finally, the media are also an “environment,” the surroundings of any contemporary human activity. This notion of environment reminds us that being

14 The Mediatization of Religion “mediated” means that media are all around us. At the very moment when I write this words, I am not only looking at a digital screen, but also my mobile phone is right in front of me, there is an electronic musical keyboard in the room and all around the place there are communication media. The notion of mediatization does not exclusively refer to any power of the media themselves, as technological devices or broadcast companies, but it focuses on how people actually articulate them in their life experiences. It is not the media themselves, but how people include the media in the broader frame of their interpersonal relationships, working life, emotional relations and so one that matters. In other words, how human life, in all its social and cultural aspects, can be lived in a world filled by messages, meanings and signs exchanged by people using technological gadgets. The process of mediatization, and the practice of religion in a mediatized environment, goes well beyond the borders of institutionalized religion itself, as churches and denominations. As Hoover and Clark (2001: 87) claims, “religion as it is expressed is often quite different from religion as we see it when it is associated with formal institutions.” Mediatization takes the media not only as a technological element, but as a social issue that goes beyond technology itself to reach the sphere of culture, economy and personal relationships (Gomes 2010: 111). It asks for new ways of community engagement, particularly the development of networks (Castells 2010: 51). It understands media and communication as a cultural process that cannot be understood without a permanent reference to the main aspects of the society where it takes place. Media technology articulates with other elements of individual and collective life; they articulate themselves with people’s perceptions, senses and world vision—media technology is integrated in the “ecology” of communication (Clark 2009). In another media dictionary, Abercrombie and Longhurst (2007: 220) define mediatization as the way people have incorporated into their own perceptions, sensations and affects the way media communication represents reality. It is close to what Goffman (1974) defines as “frames,” that is, the cognitive and perceptual structures that individuals use to encompass reality. The public shares the media frames. Since the 1950s, most people, at least in the West, have been raised in an environment filled with media communication, especially radio, telephone, cinema and television. It is part of the individual’s cultural and social environment; it is a component of how people frame reality, the otherness and themselves—a component among others, of course, not even the main one, but always present. As Livingstone (2009b: ix) points out, our society is “moving towards” an environment filled by “multimodal, interactive, networked forms of communication,” and this whole environment must be analyzed in order to understand it. The mediatization, finally, may be described as the articulations between this “media logic” and other instances of everyday life. If we consider some of the arguments by Krotz (2009), Livingstone (2009b) and Hjarvard (2008a), then “mediation” is a sort of core of the mediatization, which is a “meta-process.”

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 15 Mediation would be the changes in particular social institutions caused by the adoption of media communication as part of its structure. The mediatization of an institution, practice or any other human activity would be a further step, mainly a consequence—hence a meta-process—of mediation, when mostly all practices become indelibly mediated. Table 1.1 shows some particularities of the concepts of “mediation” and “mediatization,” a distinction that have been drawn by some researchers. It is important to point out that it is far from a conclusive—even less normative— set of concepts; as Schrott (2009: 43) explains, “definitions of mediatization are manifold,” and his arguments, for example, would hardly fit on this table. Actually, this is an attempt to outline some of the features attributed by some scholars to each of the concepts, since they are particularly relevant to this study. Moreover, it seems that “mediation” and “mediatization” are two related processes, and sometimes the borders between them seem to be blurred. That said, it is possible to draw a first outline of some elements of each concept. From this point of view, it would be hard to talk “media and society” or “media and religion,” since these elements are effectively mixed in everyday life. The concept of mediatization seems to be an attempt to overcome the dualities about the media (as, for example, “media/society,” “media/religion” and “media/culture”) and to take into the account that no social process may be fully understood without a reference to the media communication, but, on the other side, the media cannot be understood outside the broader frame of society. As Livingstone (2009b: x) argues, in the past two decades the title of books about media usually took the form Mediation Mediatization Level of occurrence Micro (individuals, institutions, organizations) Macro (society, states, social practices) Indicates The use of media by an individual or institution The individual and social articulations with the media Question The relationship between an individual, or institution, and the media How people and institutions articulate their everyday practices with the media Concept of media Channel/Language Environment Focus The constraints of a particular medium on the message The process by which social activities draws on the media Characteristic Individuals and institutions use of media to share a message Individual and social practices adopt the “logic of the media” Time frame Short-term action Long-term process Table 1.1 Mediation and mediatization as analytical concepts Sources: Couldry (2008), Hjarvard (2008a), Livingstone (2009b) Krotz (2009) and Schutz (2004).

16 The Mediatization of Religion “Media and …,” as “Media and Politics” or “Media and Aesthetics,” while today this have changed to “Mediated politics” or “Mediated Aesthetics,” for example. Mediatization, Medium Theory and Media Effects Theory The epistemological roots of the concept of mediatization might be partially placed on two different traditions in media research, the “medium theory” and the studies of “media effects.” Although it is not my goal to provide a full discussion of the concept, it is important to briefly outline some of its origins since it would provide a better understanding of the process of mediation and mediatization of religion. Commonly, “medium theory” (Meyrowitz 1994) refers to a group of concepts and theories that focus primarily on the “medium” as the central element of the communication process—as developed by Harold Innis (2006), Walter Ong (1991) and Marshall McLuhan (2001). Broadly, its general claim is that the changes in the media are linked (some would claim “responsible”) for some changes in the society. People interact with each other is always through a medium, and this medium is determinant to shape the form and the content of a message. Social interactions, some theorists claim, are deeply influenced by the media employed in the process. All sorts of personal and institutional relations are subject to the possibilities and constraints of the media employed to communication; in other words, all fields of the human experience are transformed accordingly to the media used by people to communicate with one another; the whole realm of experience is shaped conforming to the available media in each age. That is why is possible, medium theorists claim, to talk about a more traditional “oral culture” replaced or changed by a “print culture” in the fifteenth century and by a “digital culture” in the twentieth. From the medium theory point of view, the media are not “channels” to convey a message, but they are responsible for a good deal of the shape and characteristics of contemporary society. Some critics call this perspective “mediacentric” as long as it places the media as amongst the most important social agencies, which sometimes means the diminishing of other economic, political and social factors of social change. From medium theory, the concept of mediatization seems to borrow the idea that media communication is a central element in contemporary society, and no social process might take place outside the media realm. However, this is not saying that the media are the unique or even the main cause for social changes: the medium itself could not be important if it is not articulated with society as a whole. It is the uses of media, not the medium itself, that matter. This difference between mediatization and medium theory refers to the way people experience the media in their everyday lives, which take us to the second concept: “media effects.” In communication studies, the idea that the media have some “effects” on individuals or on the society has been cherished since the pioneering studies by Walter Lippmann in the 1920s. Basically, as the name suggests, the “media effects” theories focuses on the alterations and changes provoked by the media. It claims that the media—mainly the “mass media”—would have the power to frame

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 17 political opinions (Lipmann 1946, Lasswell 2009 [1927], McCombs and Shaw 1972) and change the way people see the surrounding reality (Gerbner 1998). There is a hidden assumption that the media actually “does” something with society, and people are often portrayed as more or less vulnerable targets to be reached by powerful media. The “effects” vary widely, from manipulation of consciences to the setting of personal conversations in everyday life. Approaches also vary from the philosophy of culture to empirically oriented studies. Media effects theories have attracted criticism since the 1960s mainly because of the “passive” image of the audience, which would be almost unable to resist the media. The concept of mediatization keeps from the theories of media effects the assumption that the media are not neutral agents in society. The media might influence the way people live, since it is through the media that most people gather information about the world outside the realm of direct experience. However, this is not saying that media may have any “effect” in the way a remedy would have; this somehow mechanical point of view is objected to by the theories of mediatization, which claim that people actually articulate their everyday lives with the surrounding media environment. Moreover, the “media effects” perspective seems to draw a line between “the media” and “the society,” as mediatization claims that the media are actually a constitutive part of society, and pervasive to every social process (Livingstone 2009a: x). Mediatization as a Social Process Danish researcher Stig Hjarvard (2008a: 113) defines mediatization as “the process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic.” He argues that this process “is characterized by a duality in that the media have become integrated into operations of other social institutions” and, at the same time, they have acquired the status of social institutions themselves. This is not saying that the media necessarily have any power to substantially alter the whole logic of other social institutions. As Mazzoleni and Schutz (1999: 250) argue, politics “is still practiced away from media spotlights, behind the scenes, in the discrete rooms of parliament and government,” and I could add that religion is still at home in mosques, shrines and temples, as trade and business belong to the stock markets and family life is still related to a dwelling place. However, all these social institutions—politics, business, religion, even family—have been learning to deal with the ubiquitous presence of media communication. Media, Hjarvard (2008a: 106) argues, are not devices or technologies that institutions, people and organizations may choose to employ or not; media have been integrally articulated with the operations of social institutions. The public visibility of organizations relies on their relationship with media communication— not only broadcast communication, but also digital interpersonal communication as social networks and the Internet.

18 The Mediatization of Religion Livingstone (2009a: 2) goes further and argues that the processes of mediation have actually changed “all influential institutions in society.” Going public, in many aspects, means going through the media. A church or a denomination become “mediatized” not only by the ownership of a television station, the development of a website or the presence in digital social networks, but by when the engagement with the worshippers and the general public occurs through and with the media. Hjarvard (2008a: 114) states a crucial distinction between direct and indirect mediatization. Direct mediation occurs when non-mediated situations and practices are changed into mediated activities, that is, “the activity is performed through interaction with a medium—he uses the example of a chess game, from the real chessboard to the computer screen. In the case of religion, televangelism would be a first example, especially when the preacher invites the “public at home” to pray with him or her. The religious community bond is built through the medium. Indirect mediatization occurs when media-generated symbols, forms or contents influence a practice or activity. He mentions “the burgeoning merchandising industry that surrounds hamburger restaurants”: a visit to Burger King or McDonald’s means the overwhelmingly exposure to cartoon animations, movie characters, and television stars everywhere. In the case of religion, mediatization means to be aware of what happens with the worshipper’s life outside the church. The religious realm can hardly be media proof in contemporary society. In a mediatized society, the worshipper’s perception, attention and understanding are also linked to the media codes. In other words, it means to talk in a language that can be recognized by people who spend a good deal of their life in front a television, or a virtual display, or using their mobile smartphones to interact with a social network. The mediatization of religion does not refers only to the adoption of media communication by a particular church, but how the use of media are related to religious practices in a social and cultural background. As Rosa, Severo and Borelli (2012: 64) explain, the internal logic of the religious field articulates with the logic of the media and technology. Or, in Lundby’s (2009: 17) words, “it becomes visible that religion in the media are extensively formatted according to genres of popular culture.” It is a dense and multilayer articulation that occurs at many levels—personal, institutional, political and social. Mediatization has been changing the practice of religion in everyday life. It has altered the dynamics of what Bourdieu (1998) would call the “religious field” and its relation with the broader society. This process is not media-driven, and should not be taken as even and linear—mediatization, is worth noting, seems to refuse any media determinism. The mediatization of religion is an element in a multifactor process of social transformation, and it cannot be reduced to the use of media and electronic communication by a church or a denomination. On the contrary, the mediatization of religion may be a process filled with contradictions and paradoxes. It means that the way people feel, practice and experience religion in their lives cannot be understood outside the reference to a broader social process

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 19 of mediatization of the whole society (Martelli and Capello 2005, Meyers and Moors 2006, Hoover 2009). The study of mediatized religion is not concerned exclusively with the use of media by denominations, but how the worshippers experience their religious faith in a media environment. “The mediatization of religion,” argues Hoover (2009: 135), is rooted in the articulation of a range of sensibilities, contexts and audiences that make up the complex “glocal” cultural landscape of today. As a consequence, some of the boundaries between “secular” and “religious” are “increasingly problematic.” It takes into the account that the relationship between a denomination and its believers is also mediated by the symbolic environment within they are. Both church and believers live in a media-saturated world; believers have mobile phones, as churches have websites, and both may have profiles in digital social networks. Mediatization is a process primarily concerned with experiences, not with devices. It also interferes in the experience of “material culture” (Clark 2002: 6) of religion. Clark also observes (2009: 87) that mediatization is related to “the process by which genres of popular culture become central to the narratives of social phenomena,” among which can be included religion. The living experience of religion is also mediatized. Apart from the “old” forms of material engagement with religion, mainly books and religious symbols, it is possible to find plenty of options for the believer to buy, from DVDs and CDs to age-targeted Bibles, t-shirts with church logos and so on—a religious market. These gadgets are also “media.” As Hoover (2006: 23) points out, “traditionally, and in common discourse, media are thought primarily in technological terms,” as “devices, services, publications, and channels.” Instead, he suggests that “we begin to think of media as practices, not just as institutions, texts or objects.” As examples, he mentions “public performances of various kinds, as well as sacred spaces, rituals, encounter groups, classes, seminars, objects such as paintings, sculptures, and what have been called ‘religious kitsch’ items” that are religiously significant for people—these elements share a meaning (Hoover 2006: 23). The mediatization of religion also means that the production and consumption of the religious “material culture” takes place in a capitalist society, and it cannot escape its constraints. It does not mean that religion has become only a “commodity”: on the contrary, in a multifactor perspective, there is little contradiction between “industry” and “religion” in a mediatized society (Babb 1995; Forbes and Mahan 2005). Consumption is not only a capitalist action, but it plays an important role in the formation of identities. Wearing the t-shirt of a rock band, a television series or of a church means something beyond the cloth itself—it is a message that tells something about the person wearing it and how the person sees the world (see also Clark 2007). In Hoover’s (2006: 3) words, “media and commodity culture are now integrated into practices of meaning and identity in profound and irreversible ways.” Meyer (2012: 162) claims that religion is a practice of mediation itself. Religious symbols, images and other elements are attached to a sense of the

20 The Mediatization of Religion transcendental that somehow blurs the boundaries between sacred and profane. For a Protestant, she mentions, the Bible is not only a book, but a medium to contact a transcendental realm. The experience of the religious has been adapted to the needs and demands of our age. Worshippers are also exposed to a myriad of lay messages. Most of them watch television, have Internet connection, use mobile phones not only to talk but also to check emails and keep up to date with their virtual lives. If a person is to be targeted by a church, it has to take into the account this mediatized environment. This requires, from the churches, new ways to engage with potential and actual worshippers to provide them a religious experience that does not ignore the surrounding media environment. An example may clarify the question. There are a lot of religious smartphone applications, with online versions of the Bible and the Torah. These apps are not simple transpositions of a text to digital media. These apps offer several resources, from keyword searches to the opportunity of highlighting favorite verses or even the possibility of writing comments to some parts. For the faithful, it is a different way to experience religion. Mediation as a Cultural Process: The Latin American Research There have been several attempts to distinguish between “mediation” and “mediatization.” Sometimes the former concept is defined as somehow broader than the latter (Hjarvard 2008b, Krotz 2009). I would like to introduce another perspective that relates the media performance to social and political issues in a wider process of “mediation” developed by Latin American scholars Guillermo Orozco Gomes, Nestor Garcia Canclini and, mainly, Jesus Martin-Barbero. Martin-Barbero’s concept of mediation, as Lundby (2009: 3) notes, stresses the link between the mediatization and the social issues of everyday life. If in the Anglo-Saxon academic world there has been a general debate about the meaning of “mediatization” and the correlate use of “mediation,” scholars in some traditions of Latin American media research would have no problem defining the latter word. Among many Latin American researchers, the concept of “mediation” is indelibly linked to the work of philosopher Jesus Martin-Barbero, particularly his seminal book Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, originally published in 1987. A Spanish thinker long-established in Colombia, Martin-Barbero has been developing his concept of “mediation” as a perspective for the study of the media as part of a broader symbolic process of dialectical articulation between the messages broadcast by the media and the cultural, social and political environment—roughly, the “mediations”—where the reception actually takes place. The title of the book indicates a methodological move from the study of the “media” themselves to the articulation between media, individuals and society as a cultural, economic and political process, the “mediation.”

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 21 The “Mediations,” metaphorically, are the multilayer group of material and symbolic conditions that “stand in the middle” of any communication process. There is no communication, argues Martin-Barbero, outside the cultural realm where both the sender and the receiver stand. In other words, instead of “sender” and “receiver,” the author speaks of “subjects,” that is, individuals linked to a community, to a specific social and historical background, and to particular economic conditions. From this point of view, it would be difficult to speak of “reception” of a message, but, instead, it would be better to think the whole process as the “reconstruction” of a message by individuals. As Hoover (2009: 151) argues, “media based social relations are important conditions for the construction of religious identities.” In Latin America, for example, the mediatization of religion cannot be understood outside the political conflicts and instabilities of the region. The influence of the United States in the region, especially after the Second Word War, was also accompanied by the increasing presence of Protestant churches in the continent. Although there had been Protestant missionaries in the centuries before, the massive presence of American Protestant churches happened in the context of the assertive presence of mediatized non-Catholic faiths—particularly the presence of “televangelism.” As Silleta (1991) argues, the “multinationals of faith” arrived mainly through the television screen. This presence, however, was culturally mediated by the conflicts inside the Roman Catholic Church itself. It had been a long-term ally of hegemonic powers in the continent, intricately related to the region elite in helping the Portuguese and Spanish conquerors, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, to suffocate native and popular cultures. However, by the end of twentieth century, the Marxist-oriented Liberation Theology arose from the same cultural background, as a form of resistance of part of the clergy and oppressed people. Martin-Barbero has developed the concept of mediation from a dialogue with two previous theories, the Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies. Each one of these theories has provided the author the arguments to build the notion that it is not possible to split the media and the receptor from the social and cultural environment. It is important to briefly mention these roots. In Communication, Culture, and Hegemony Martin-Barbero (2003) argues that the “culture industry,” as conceptualized by Adorno and Horkheimer, is not a new phenomenon; actually, it draws back to the invention of the printing press. It was consolidated in the nineteenth century, well before the advent of modern mass media, as the radio, television and cinema, as part of a broader social process of modernization, and the products of “culture industries” have always drawn on popular culture, in particular popular drama and comedy. The “culture industry” cannot be split from the rest of the society. Culture itself may assume a myriad of forms—it is a product, but also is a symbol, and also is part of a lifestyle. It would be somehow a very narrow point of view to consider it only a product. British Cultural Studies provided Martin-Barbero this notion of “culture” and the importance of the receptor to assign meaning to a message. The notion of

22 The Mediatization of Religion “culture,” in “cultural studies,” usually blurs the old boundaries between “high/ low” layers—actually, Cultural Studies perspective sees the very meaning of these qualifications as an attempt to build, establish and guarantee the hegemony of a particular class over other ones. The Spanish author has also linked his ideas with the notion that culture is not only something one has, but also what one does, the food one eats, the clothes one wears. Finally, the idea stated by Stuart Hall (1981) that “meaning” is constructed in an unequal relationship between the media and the audience would be one of the main points of the concept of mediation. The notion of “mediation” is anchored on a particular concept of the receptor. To Martin-Barbero, the many cultural layers that form the individual’s personality are mediations that continually redefine the meaning of messages—not only media messages, but also interpersonal ones. The same message may have a radically different meaning to individuals according to the mediations of each one. Each one of the individuals exposed to a message—a television show, a televised football match, a website, this book—will reconstruct it accordingly to the weight of each mediation. In other words, mediations are symbolic elements that not only frame a message, but also give it a new and particular meaning. As Hoover (2006: 34) sums up, Martin-Barbero has offered a “persuasive alternative to ‘medium theories” is the idea that, rather than being objectifiable resources and influences on the culture, the media play a role of mediating between the individual and her culture. In fact, a series of “mediations” enables individuals to locate themselves in social and cultural space and time. Mediations are both individual and collective. I can hardly ignore the cultural, social and economic background where I have been raised, and I share these elements with a number of people: in broad terms, we roughly share the same mediations; however, each one of us will unconsciously assign a particular weight to each one of these conditions, and the result of this interaction between collective and particular are the mediations I automatically make use of to understand any message I get. The “meaning” of a message, therefore, is not entirely defined by the sender, the medium or the message itself; the “meaning” is not a fixed point, but an interactive flux between the message and the individual’s mediations. Any single message will only have a meaning when confronted with a mix of the receptor’s personal characteristics, as age, life story, and gender, and socialpolitical elements, as class, region, level of employment, education, welfare and so on. These elements do not peacefully stand side by side; on the contrary, they are a source of contradictions, personal and social struggles to configure the meaning of a message—and this is one of the debts Martin-Barbero owns to Gramsci: meaning, in particular, and culture, in general, is a place of struggle concerning hegemony. If the media have been thought as an instrument of domination, the mediations are the places of resistance, where individuals and communities might assign other and unexpected meanings to a message. A couple of years ago, in Brazil, a television beer advertisement showed an actor, dressed as the devil, saying that “beer, as the carnival, should be enjoyed as the devil himself would like to.” The advert was subject to heavy criticism by

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 23 Catholics and Protestants and quickly cancelled. Some years later, another beer advert on television displayed erotic star Paris Hilton in sensual shots; it attracted criticism from both feminist and religious groups—the former arguing that the advert treated women as “objects,” the latter claiming that a porn movie star was not adequate to any audience. Each of these examples shows the mediations in action: the advert hit some particularly sensitive points of the audience—the religious mediation, in one case, the mediation of gender, in others. Several Latin American researchers have been paying attention to the concept (see Jacks & Escosteguy 2003; Baccega 2004; Lopes, Borelli and Resende 2004). Jacks (1999: 48) defines “mediations” as the element that takes place in the structure, organization and reorganization of the receptor’s perception of reality. The study of the media, argues Martin-Barbero (1997: 304), should start from the mediations instead of the “logic of production” or the “logic of reception” as if those were different realms. The concept of mediation focuses on what is “in the middle” of the communication process. The opening story of this chapter, a Jew praying online in a crowded football stadium, is an example of what Hoover (2009: 133) claims, that “the mediatization of religion and spirituality is becoming increasingly user generated and user defined.” Although it may be frequently placed as part of “media reception” studies, the concept of “mediation” seems to refer to the whole process of communication, since the media creative producers—journalists, editors, screenwriters, moviemakers and so on—are also part of society and are subjected to the same “mediations.” From this point of view, there is no dichotomy between the media and the receptor since they asymmetrically share the social mediations that take place in any cultural process. Instead of a split between “the media makers” and “the reception,” MartinBarbero asks for an approach that takes into the account that both producers and receptors live in the same society, share some cultural, historical and social background and, as a consequence, they cannot be understood without mentioning the other. The process of communication does not stop when the message hits the public: each member of the audience will understand and reconstruct the message from his or her own social and cultural background. The “meaning” of a message is not given, but constructed as the result of the struggle between the meaning suggested by the message itself and the way people will actually understand the message according to their own categories. Mediation, Mediatization and Religious Changes It is important to bear in mind that mediatization does not mean the instrumental use of a technology (Krotz 2009). Rather, as Horsfield (2008: 114) argues, it is an articulation of denominations in a multiple and non-linear media environment. This public visibility helps the engagement in public affairs by the number of individuals potentially linked to the denomination. As stated by Sierra Gutierrez

24 The Mediatization of Religion (2008: 3), as the field of media has become fully rationalized, religion had to stick to this reason in order to fit the mediatization. In the words of Stout and Buddenbaum (2008: 227): Religion is increasingly mediated, and examples are ubiquitous: televangelism, religious radio, mega-churches, emergent churches, church-sponsored advertising campaigns, religious magazines, spiritual films, and faith blogs to name a few. Secular genres are also blending with religion to produce hybrid media forms such as religious rock music, contemporary religious novels, and faith-based video games. When one thinks of religion in its relation to the media, one of the common perspectives is to focus on the use of media, especially the electronic ones, as tools employed by religious institutions to put their messages in a public space. This way of understanding the relation between media and religion commonly stresses an instrumental use of technology as a way of sending the religious message to a wider audience. By electing the media as a model to be followed and as an environment in which it is intended to be, some religious denominations have found a way to put their particular values in the public space from the creation of a new type of link, the mediated one, with its followers and potential followers. They are understood not only as followers of a particular religion, but as “followers-receivers” of a discourse in which their particular beliefs are linked to the public space from the media presence. In this sense, Gouveia (1998) analyzes the participation of women in evangelical cults stimulated by television programs of churches that encouraged their presence in the celebrations, while Borelli (2010) shows the integration between the message of the media and the religious practice in pilgrimages in the country side of Rio Grande do Sul and Gasparetto (2011) adressses the question on how the mediatization of religion may create new social contacts . In all three cases, the media link is linked with the religious one. Accordingly, it is necessary to briefly highlight another dimension to the mediatization of religion: the mediation by the worshipper sometimes turned into a “consumer” (Galindo 2004). In general it is to see how religious media practices are articulated with the everyday life of the follower and in some cases how they are presented in the public space as a constitutive element of their identity and therefore endowed with considerable importance for the establishment of community links (Gouveia 2005). Stout and Buddenbaum (2008: 227), for example, emphasize the proliferation of religious media and the emergence of audiences as interpretative communities, while Martin-Barbero (1995, 1997) outlines the “mediations” that interfere in the individual reception of mediated religious messages. The mediatization of religion is noticeable also in products and consumer goods linked to religious denominations, produced according to current design standards and sold in accordance with contemporary marketing techniques. For Lynch and Mitchell (2012: 8), in the current context of production and

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 25 consumption, religious groups seek to articulate their brands with the market, developing products that underscore its specific ethos and aesthetic, using contemporary technologies to position their products in a crowded market of goods and services. It should be noted, in this sense, the links with the market and “material culture” identified by Clark (2006) or, incisively, by Galindo (2007: 8) for whom the neo-Pentecostal churches: deliberately using marketing strategies, fight a battle in the media, vying for the attention of the followers in the face of the fantastic and diversified content offer, including their action in local churches here taken as a point of sale/ exchange or a location where it is closed the circle started by the massive outcry mediated by the media …. The mediated visibility of religion, as Hoover (2006) notes, cannot be confined to electronic platforms as television, radio and Internet. It multiplies in other “media,” in the broadest sense. The very constitution of religious identities takes place with the adding of particular elements that act as symbols of faith in the public space, as argued by Cogel and Minkler (2004: 343): Each religion typically provides a distinct set of consumption norms that become the blueprint for its followers. For example, Muslim women wear headscarves to cover their hair, and Jewish men similarly wear yarmulke for religious expression. Other examples of religious expression include distinctive styles in clothing and grooming, necklaces with the cross, household decorations, and items like candles and ornaments that mark religious holidays. Understanding the consumption of these items invites an analysis based not on the preferences or incentives of individuals but one based on identity, commitment, and expression. For example, in the case of Snowball Church, a Sao Paulo based-church, there are stickers and key chains with the logo of the religious name, as well as the brand “Gospel.” A sticker of a stylized fish, the symbol of Reborn in Christ Church, can be purchased and placed in vehicles. The Catholic Church, in turn, offers stickers for car windows with the slogan “I’m glad to be Catholic” or small silhouettes of a rosary to be placed in the bodywork. Ultimately, such as recall Cogel and Minkler (2004), the daily practices of the follower as to the use of certain types of clothing, attendance at certain places or obedience to dietary restrictions can be considered as media elements—not electronic ones, but also communicational ones as, for example, the ways of body control—which also provide the visibility of religion in the public space. Browsing through the so-called “prime time” of many channels of broadcast and cable television shows in a few minutes the omnipresence of religious programs. The term “electronic church” was created in 1980 to refer particularly to the use of radio and television. Although it might still have an explanatory potential, it does encompasses the current dimensions of the relations between

26 The Mediatization of Religion media and religion, especially when the idea of two related but separated realms, “media” and “religion,” have been replaced by the notion of mediatization. If we take into account the growth of these churches, this same public finds in the mediated way of religion not only the ethical and moral comfort that can be provided by Western religions, but also an adequacy of the message to their references and cognitive mediation. In the words of Martelli and Capello (2005: 254): “nowadays, religion is interpreted, especially by the young people, through the cognitive and expressive schemes moulded by television and the media.” The mediatization of religion is a long-term process that relies, in the short term, on the mediation of religious institutions (especially, but not only, churches and other religious forms of communities). As long as churches have become mediated by adopting the channels of media communication, they have also started a broader process of mediatization of religion. The mediation of churches and other religious groups, as much as the mediatization of religion, seems to be an uneven process. Not all religions and churches are equally willingly to become mediated by using media technologies to spread their messages, and not all churches and groups feel actually comfortable in the mediatized environment of today. This inequality between religious groups concerning mediation and mediatization offers to the researcher a colorful panorama: as some churches highly value mediation as the core of its activities, other churches do not share the same enthusiasm about the contemporary media environment, and there are religious groups that are openly anti-media. As Hjarvard (2008b) points out, the concept of mediation refers to the changes in a message related to the use of media technology. Particularly, it refers to the use of electronic and, more recently, digital/virtual media to send a message to a receiver; since every channel has its own characteristics, particularities and constraints, a message will always have to be formatted to fit the medium by which it is sent. The most common result of it is that, to be broadcast by, for example, television, the message—and, of course, the sender—must adapt to the medium. As long as a church uses any sort of medium to communicate its message, it has become mediated. However, it is important to say that mediation varies among the churches and denominations. There are many economic, historical and even theological reasons why a church would be more willing to adopt media communication than others. It would be hard to describe all the forms that mediation might take, from the use of a data show to screen the lyrics of a religious hymn to the ownership of a television channel, radio stations and Internet sites exclusively to broadcast their services. Being mediated is not only a matter of free choice: a denomination may well be strongly interested in using media technology without having the financial resources to acquire the technical equipment and support. Moreover, a church may simply hold to a deeply critical view concerning the media, and have little interest in using them. What is more, however, is that becoming mediated is also related to the way a denomination will allocate its resources—a church may be more interested in support missionaries in foreign countries than acquiring a television channel.

Mediation and Mediatization of Religion, a North–South Dialogue 27 So, it is possible to say that each church and denomination seems to have found its own way of dealing with media communication. Even inside a church it is possible to find contrasting views concerning the demands of media use. In Brazil, for example, the Pentecostal groups of the Roman Catholic Church are considerably more interested in the media than the left-wing Liberation Theology, another branch of the same church. I would like to propose that religious denominations, which rely hard on the media communication, both as a channel to send a message and as a model to draw on, could be called “high-mediated” ones. On the other end of the scale, churches that have only moderately adopted media communication as a priority will be called “low-mediated.” It would be useless to draw a sharp line between high- and low-mediated churches. This division is a methodological one, and is intended only to mark some differences concerning mediation, since this distinction may shed some light on the relationship between media and religion. Basically, these concepts refers more to a methodological “ideal type” than to a theoretical distinction hired from a tested hypothesis. As an analysis element, however, it makes a distinction between two approaches to the media. In high-mediated churches, media communication is at the very core of the religious experience. Services are structured as television shows, the preacher as a “showman” that must capture the audience; the worshippers are understood not only as churchgoers but also as consumers of mediated symbols and material goods—the material culture of high-mediated churches resembles the non-religious ones. These churches are deeply involved in the media “environment,” and are not afraid of being part of it. On the contrary, they are happy to adopt dressing styles sanctioned by the media, television show’s catchphrases, popular music—sometimes with new lyrics—and anything that has been developed by the media. In the highmediated denominations, the media are not at all a simple device; they are the very environment that surrounds it and are a part of the church’s core structure. Low-mediated churches, on the contrary, are more parsimonious in what concerns the media use. It would be good to explain that “low-mediated” does not refer to religious groups that have a completely negative attitude towards the media—for example, by forbidding their worshippers to watch television—or simply do not employ any modern media technology. These are “non-mediated” churches, and would have little to contribute in a book about the mediatization of religion. Communication technologies, the fruits of modernity, are becoming part of a process that assure media visibility of religion in the public space. The articulation and incorporation of the media environment have allowed religion to leave the border and occupy an important part of discussions of public affairs—even in that case, as noted before, it can no longer claim the respect to its metaphysical and theological conceptions a priori. Rather, it seems to be a necessary adaptation to the rules of the game. The visibility of religion in the public space has consequences beyond the fields of media and religion themselves.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2 What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? It has been more than 70 years since one of the first religious television programs were broadcast in the United States. While there are very few records of it, the consensus is that one of the pioneers of this type of programming was the Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living, broadcast in the U.S. from 1951 to 1957. The program was very simple—indeed, to modern young eyes it might look terribly boring. There was no soundtrack, unlike the TV shows hosted by televangelists Rex Humbart and Jimmy Swaggart in the 1970s and 1980s. There were no MTV-style vignettes or rock music, as you would see in the Clip Gospel, a Brazilian religious musical TV show. It was just the bishop, a blackboard and some chalk. And yet despite this, the program was not only a success, it inspired a whole new genre. It seems, though, that this development has rather passed academia by. Few, if any, researchers realized at that time that the link between media and religion would get stronger in the following years, and throughout the twentieth century, media communication researchers were largely indifferent to the relationship between religion and their field of study. At the same time, as Hoover (2003) mentions, sociologists of religion showed little interest in the media—a classic, Bryan R. Wilson’s Religion in Sociological Perspective (1982), does not even mention it. Thus, in the classic studies of mass communication and sociology of religion there are strikingly few references, in spite of the presence of religious messages in the media. In general, media and religion can be termed a “crossroads” study area and thus, while it allows scholars to combine the best of both kinds of research, it also forces them to confront the epistemological problems of both areas. In the humanities and social sciences, there have been many attempts to define religion. Since the first efforts by the so-called “founding fathers,” Marx, Durkheim and Weber, there has been a long list of scholars who have sought to do the same thing, including some of the most important names in sociology and anthropology, from Simmel (1905) and to Geertz (2000), and Berger and Luckmann (1991). In spite of their differences, all have tried to develop an adequate definition of religion. Each came from a different research tradition that in turn had appropriated religion in its own way and so, as Pals (1996) says, attempted to achieve an interpretation of religion that fits its own epistemological goals. However, as Stout and Buddenbaum (2002) note, despite this there have been few studies of religion from the particular point of view of media use.

30 The Mediatization of Religion More generally, the final years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have seen a blossoming of academic interest in media and religion, and the time is long past when these two areas were completely set apart from one other. One can speculate about the reasons for this—the growth of religious television programs and websites, concerns about how the media should portray religion following 9/11, the ever-present challenge to understand American televangelists. Whatever the case, an area of study that was neglected for so long has now emerged as one full of potential for researchers. Of course, this is not to say that there was no research into media and religion before. On the contrary, some seminal work on the subject was published before the end of the twentieth century, and one of the goals of this chapter is to acknowledge how much contemporary researchers owe to those who pioneered this academic pathway. However, it is possible to argue empirically that the last 30 years have seen at least a quantitative growth in this sort of research. This growth enables us to identify several clear branches or paths in media and religion research. Thus, although “media and religion” still lacks the myriad of theoretical approaches, concepts or models that could be found in “media and politics” research; for example, a number of researchers from a variety of countries have been working to develop their own models and theories to frame their empirical studies. To contextualize this specific discussion, I will briefly consider the general state of media and religious studies, drawing on previous “state-of-the-art” reviews by Griffin (1998), Buddenbaum (2002) and Buddenbaum and Stout (2002). The use of a “media and religion” label could suggest a theoretical, conceptual and methodological unity underlining the studies in this field where in fact there seems to be no such thing. The relationship between media and religion presents itself in a myriad of aspects that could hardly be analyzed as a whole. Media and religion is a relatively new area of inquiry. Judith Buddenbaum (2002), one of the editors of the Journal of Media and Religion, suggests that research on this subject only really started in the 1990s, while Griffin (1998) points to the first issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion in 1987 is the real moment when this area of study was born. Both dates emphasize the relative newness of this area of inquiry (less than 30 years old), while there seems to be no specific academic literature available prior to the 1980s. Commenting on the research methods used in these studies, the researcher mourns the “lack of theoretical grounding” and the “absence of a research program” in studies of media and religion. In the intervening years, research into media and religion has focused on a number of problems from multiple perspectives. As the research field has developed, several divergent ways have been adopted to understand the various aspects of the phenomenon, with the main research tendencies identified in studies by Griffin (1998), Block (2000), Buddenbaum (2002) and Buddenbaum and Stout (2002). First, there is the study of religious elements in news media and popular culture. In this group it is possible to find research on the presence of religious symbols in Madonna’s Like a Prayer video (Freccero 1992; Hulsether 2005), or the movie Spider-Man (Richardson 2004). It also includes research about the way

What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? 31 religion is pictured in newspapers (Buddenbaum 1986; Stout and Buddenbaum, 2003). Meanwhile, in From Angels to Aliens, Clark (2003) argues that the way supernatural plots in television successes such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files and Touched by an Angel keep the idea of “something beyond” in American imagination, reinforces the idea of the “supernatural” in everyday life. The second kind of research deals with the use of media and popular culture by religion. For example, Fishwick (2004: 461) claims that Pope John Paul II was “the first pontiff to adopt televangelist strategies and outreach.” The same author argues that the pope created in 1983 the Vatican Broadcast Centre, which brought him “meteoric popularity among both Roman Catholics and non-Catholics.” Studies on rock gospel music (Street 1986; Joseph 2003; Romanowiski 2005) and televangelism are also included is this area. For example, Bruce (1990) describes the rise of “televangelism” in the United States as a change in religion caused by mass media use. Televangelists such as Morris Cerello, Billy Graham, and later Jimmy Swaggart, Rex Humbert and Pat Robertson, quickly became famous globally thanks to television broadcasts of their programs. In a study of Billy Graham’s “crusade” in Australia, Smart (1999: 187) claims that his success was “part of larger developments in popular culture and mass entertainment.” Research also includes also studies of how pop culture fans behave and how they understand their favorite TV series (Jindra 2005), pop musicians (Hulsether 2005; Chidester, 1996) or pop culture texts (Richardson 2004; Kolakowiski 1990). Besecke (2005) also includes self-help bestsellers such as Who Moved My Cheese? in the lists of religious mass literature. She believes that self-help literature, for example, draws on religious (or semi-religious) arguments. A good deal of the literature frames the discussion about media and religion in the context of the debate over secularization, questioning whether secularization is a “media effect” on religion. Sociologists of religion have dealt with secularization, understood as the progressive loss of social space occupied by religions in the modern West (Martin 1991; Berger 1971), mainly from a political, economic or social perspective (see Aston 2006; Hadden 1987; Dobellaere 1981; Martin 1991; Wilson 1982), but some scholars (for example, Habermas 1989; Iannaccone 1992; McKee 2005; Eder 2006) highlight the role of the mass media in the secularization process, contributing to the decline of religious values in contemporary Western society. Some scholars (Kolakowski 1982; Stolow 2005; Hoover 2006; Meyer and Moors 2006) claim that it was through mass media that religion became stronger and thrived in contemporary society—American researchers Staks and Salwen (1996: 63) go further to claim that there would have been no Protestant Reformation without the printing press. These studies suggest that there is actually a fixed agenda for research about media and religion. Yet, some scholars (Simonson 2000; Block 1990; Buddenbaum 2002; Stout and Buddenbaum 2002) point out that there is still a gap between the

32 The Mediatization of Religion increasing number of studies concerning media and religion and the few attempts to develop a conceptual or theoretical framework with which to analyze it. Given that most of what I have just said about religion could easily be applied to other sets of beliefs or doctrines about what is right or wrong in the world—and what should be done to make it a better place to live in—would it not make sense, therefore, simply to put religion side by side with these other set of ideas? In other words, what is the specificity of religion? To put it plainly, most religions deal with something that is claimed to go beyond the mere everyday reality. This may be termed supernatural, transcendental, spiritual or any other such word. The point is that religion frequently ties its worldview to something outside what most people accept as the “real world.” And, more importantly, the knowledge about this transcendent reality comes down to Earth only through revelation to some special people—whether an individual, a few people, a larger group, or a whole population. An important point to make is that at least the three largest monotheist religions deal with some revealed truth, while science and philosophy deal with the search for knowledge, not always truth. What is the difference? Basically, something allegedly presented as “the truth” can hardly be open to discussion. Religious truth is not the final result of the efforts of a moral philosopher or a scientist to state his or her hypothesis which can then be publicly disputed and put to test. Scientific knowledge is changeable—there is no final “right” or “wrong”—while in philosophy, a statement can be logically or empirically refused or refuted. The power of a scientific discovery or of a political philosophy is grounded on assumptions about the real world. Even a highly abstract equation in physics may have a correlation in reality. Some Marxists may claim to have discovered the “laws of History,” just as much as liberals would be astonished by the “laws of the free-market,” but both may support their arguments with “real” evidence— numbers, graphics, population samples and so on. It is not the same when we deal with religion. Religious beliefs, by contrast, claim not to be the elaboration of a person or group of individuals, but a “revelation”—that is, something that was “unveiled” to some enabling them to see “it” as “it” really is. And, for some believers, revealed truth cannot be disputed by human-created knowledge (which is seen, sometimes, as a form of “secular obscurantism”). The power of a religious truth comes, instead, from its very “other-worldliness.” Its authority rests on belief, not on reason or deliberation. It is grounded on the assumption that some people know how to connect with the supernatural and, because of that, they should be listened to and even obeyed— this is what Weber (1992) calls “hierocratic domination,” that is, founded on a particular “holy” power (from the Greek “hieros”) that legitimizes social practices and the rationalized arguments and reasons of it. One of the main debates about secularization has been the authority of scientific arguments—for example, Darwin’s theory of evolution—in the face of revealed truth. Theoretically, it would be impossible to confront both: they consist in different, if not entirely opposing, conceptions of what “knowledge” is. Someone

What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? 33 may argue, based on archaeological evidence, that there was no Garden of Eden or Noah’s Ark. However, for some believers, the authority of scientific findings could not shake that of revealed truth. Sociologically, it does not matter whether religious truth actually came from something transcendent: since some people act as if it is true, live their lives under these beliefs, and create social relationships grounded on these assumptions, it becomes more interesting for social scientists to examine the source and implications of these beliefs—for example by studying the institutional structure of the church or the influence of beliefs in the worshipper’s everyday life. That is why hierocratic domination matters: even if there is nothing transcendent, some people act as it there is. If I no longer agree with the ideas of the political party I voted for in the last election, I can simply vote for another one next time. Politics may sometimes be as dogmatic as religion, but it is expected that, at least in democratic societies, it is the place for deliberation and discussion. At worst, dissenters may get expelled from a party on the grounds of ideological disagreement and have to find an alternative one. In some religions, however, there is something more important at stake: the life “outside” this world. Symbolic domination draws its power from the prerogative that comes from needing to deal with something out of the reach of everyday life. To Bourdieu (1998), it is one of the main forms of “symbolic power,” which becomes even more powerful the less visible it is and, therefore, is harder to resist. To discuss it, I would like to take the concept of “mediation” from another perspective. In what follows, each of these is briefly discussed. First is Jeremy Stolow and Kelly Besecke’s idea that religion itself is a sort of media, which makes the idea of “mediation” even closer to this sphere. Second is Thomas Meyer’s concept of “colonization,” probably the closer theoretical idea to the concept of “mediation.” Finally come the changes in religious material culture caused by the adoption of media communication, as stated in different works by Lawerence Babb, Lynn Clark, Brigitte Mayers and Ann Moors. The Mediating Core of Religion As noted previously, there have been few attempts to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework to deal with the whole question of media and religion. Among those that do exist, the interpretation of religion as a kind of media, as posited particularly by Besecke (2006) and Stolow (2005) seems most relevant here. Besecke (2005) writes that, as a group of shared meanings, religion is a communicative relationship—it shares meanings that provide an understanding of the world to the community of believers. Or, as Babb describes it: One can visualize any particular religious tradition as a sort of ‘system’ that retains and transmits information. The information is encoded in the form of

34 The Mediatization of Religion symbols that can be propagated in various media: speech, writing, ritual gesture, iconography, and others. (Babb 1995:1) If on the one hand it is possible to identify in this process one of the privileged ways of religion to the public space, at the same time one can go further in order to question some reasons why religion has been easily mediatized. This process depends not only on the use of media, but on specific features of the religion itself according to White (1997: 44) and Stolow (2005), understood from a communication point of view. At least in the West, religion seems to have been always linked to some dimension of a communication process (Stolow 2005). From the oral teaching in the public square (the model adopted at the beginning of Christianity and that seems to have been the one responsible for the expansion of this doctrine) to the complex electronic and technological mediation employed by many churches nowadays, it seems difficult to imagine religion outside the media environment of each age. It is valid to briefly highlight this concept in that it can help to understand the intersections between religious practices and media environments. Durkheim (2003: 459), in his classic study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, specifies that the individual who contacts his god is endowed with powers that distinguish him from other people. The emphasis that can be given from a communicational perspective is the exchange relation between the worshipper and the divinity—or, more generally, between the human element and a “supernatural” one that regardless of its existence is recognized as “existing” by the worshipper. Likewise, Birgit Meyer (2012: 162) argues: Positing a distance between human beings and the transcendental, religion offers practices of mediation to bridge that distance and make it possible to experience – from a more distanced perspective, one could say produce – the transcendental. Religious practice, for Durkheim (2003), is grounded on the idea that an individual may contact a sphere apart from everyday life and, thereafter, to share the privileges assigned to those who make this contact. This relation can be thought of as a communicational process since the act of communication, as noted by Williams (1992), Lima (1983) and Marcondes Filho (2002), has among its dimensions the aspect of promoting the “participation,” that is, “sharing,” between the subjects. The individual who contacts the “supernatural” participates, or “shares,” the qualities of the supernatural. It is worth noting also that this participation, as Durkheim points out, does not end at the specific moment of the contact, but extends for the time when the individual returns to common life—but endowed with a new condition that can be temporary or permanent. Finally, in etymological terms, according to Williams (1992), it is recalled that the word “communication” comes from the Latin communicare, “to make common,” in a meaning of “to transmit” or “to share,” also similar to the words

What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? 35 “communities” and “communion.” Meanwhile, “religion” has its roots in religio in the sense of a “reconnection” between different terms. This seems to point out to an essentially communicative nature of religion which, first of all, could allow a rapprochement between religious practices and the media communication environments in which they are inserted. Religion, as a social practice, is orchestrated from a multidimensional web of communication relations that may change into practices and forms of everyday life. In the same sense, Besecke argues that facts about media and religion could be better understood if one takes into account “a concept of religion that highlights communication” (2005: 182). The emphasis on the “meaning” in religion allows the author to think of religion as communication since she appears to understand “communication” as a sort of “meaning exchange” between people. She then proposes what she calls “a new concept” of religion, highlighting its communicative dimension: This new concept of religion begins with Luckmann’s definition of religion as a layer of transcendent meanings diffused throughout a culture. This definition is enhanced by democratic theorists’ insight that communication constitutes almost a third analytic sphere between the individual and the institutional and cultural sociologists’ understanding of culture as a socially powerful conversation. Combining these two insights, we arrive at an understanding of religious culture as a societal conversation about transcendent meanings. (2005: 190, emphasis in the original) It is important to note that Besecke’s conception of “religion as communication” goes no further than interpersonal communication. She does not seem to take into account, however, that if religion is communication, it needs a channel between sender and receiver. This channel is the “media” in its narrowest sense (Holm 1991: 137; McQuail 1975). While this dimension is not analyzed by Besecke, the particular constraints and characteristics of the channel are considered by Stolow (2005). He highlights the “media” dimension of religion in an article entitled “Religion and/as media.” This suggests a double interpretation of the media/religion relationship by arguing that at the same time religion both is a media and uses media: I would suggest that the most fruitful studies often turn out to be those which proceed, not from the instrumentalist formula, “religion and media” (and all the less so, “religion and the media”, an expression which restricts the range of practices and techniques of mediation to the terrain of mass-circulation print and broadcasting), but rather from the idea of ‘religion as media. (Stolow 2005: 8) Religion, from this point of view, is the “binding element” between the sacred and the secular. Thus, religion could be seen as a liaison between two different spheres of existence. For this reason Stolow claims that the question about religion and

36 The Mediatization of Religion media should not be put in terms of “religion and media,” but in terms of “religion as media.” Indeed, religion “can only be manifested through some process of mediation.” Afterwards, he presents some historical evidence of the forms of religious communication through symbols, texts, body marks and other kinds of manifestations that can be understood as the delivering of a “numinous” message, and remarks that: Religion always encompasses techniques and technologies that we think of as “media”, just as, by the same token, every medium necessarily participates in the realm of the transcendent, if nothing else than by its inability to be fully subject to the instrumental intentions of its users. (Stolow 2005: 8) The starting point is his belief that talking about “religion and media” is a pleonasm, since religion is a kind of medium, and the supportive information he provides relates to the uses of symbols, marks, rituals and other forms of interexchange between the two levels, the sacred and the profane. Religion, therefore, could be understood as the way “sacred” communicates with “profane,” whatever these notions might be. From this point of view, religion is the link—“binding element,” in his words—between the sacred and the secular. Thus: Throughout history, in myriad forms, communication with and about ‘the sacred’ has always been enacted through written texts, ritual gestures, images and icons, architecture, music, incense, special garments, saintly relics and other objects of veneration, markings upon flesh, wagging tongues and other body parts … In other words, religion always encompasses techniques and technologies that we think of as “media”. (Stolow 2005: 8) He suggests that there is a full range of practices—texts, gestures, images, architecture, music, objects—that could therefore be understood as a medium where the religious message is. These assumptions could also lead to a paradox, however: has the media adopted religious values, practices and codes in its programs or, conversely, has the religion been mediatized? Stolow believes that: The field of religious symbols, practices, and modes of belonging has been radically extended through the colonization [my emphasis] of a dizzying range of genres, technologies and forms: from popular history and pop-psychology books to websites, cartoons, trading cards, posters, rock music, bumper stickers, television dramas, scientific treatises, package tours and sundry forms of public spectacle. (Stolow 2005: 6) Given this, it is possible to ask, therefore, if there is something similar in the media/ religion relationship, particularly as religion seems to use media to spread its ideas as much as politics does. In the past, politics used discourses and pamphlets—

What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? 37 otherwise known as rhetoric—to reach its public. At the same time, religion used narratives, sermons and prayers. Nowadays, politics has to match media practices to reach the public sphere. Equally, religion seems also to have become mediated to reach more people. Just as the use of media has changed the “logic of politics” (Meyer 2002), so too—to a certain extent, at least—media use has also changed the “logic of religion”. In a study concerning the mediatization of politics, Strömbäck (2008) matches the notion of “colonization” with a “fourth phase” of mediatization. It occurs when social actors “not only adapt to the media logic and the predominant news values, but also internalize these” (Strömbäck 2008:239). As Meyer (2002: 53) argues, “politics itself becomes increasingly politainment or a variant of popular culture.” There are examples of something similar happening in religion. In early 2000s, one of the most famous pop singers in Brazil was a Catholic priest, Father Marcello Rossi. His mass celebrations were like any pop music festival—there was a crowd waiting for the singer, repeating his verses and singing along with him. In just a few months he had become known not only among Catholic worshippers but internationally; he became a major pop success, appearing on a number of radio and television shows. Meanwhile, his CDs and DVDs are always on catalogue and continue to sell very well—indeed, so well that in 2006 he reached number one in the Brazilian charts. He is still a priest, but his way of doing things has been shaped—should we say “colonized”—by the constraints and style of the radio and television. Religion, Material Culture and Media Communication A number of other recent works have provided useful insights into the relationship between media and religion by highlighting media influence on churches and religious practices, and taking into account the previously mentioned characteristics of the media. Lynn Schofield Clark (2007) suggests that the study of media and religion should be framed on the cultural production inside a society. Media and religion cannot be detached from the society where they belong. Rather, they exist in a cultural, political and social context and they cannot ignore the surrounding society: [P]opular media and the stuff of the market place are contemporary and current, whereas religion is ancient and timeless. Popular media and especially things related to marketing are all about materialistic matters, and whereas religion is about the spiritual and ethereal … Religion is always experienced and practiced in a specific cultural context, and today’s context is saturated by popular media and artefacts of the marketplace. (2007: ix) Roof (1999: 79) claims that religion is always framed in a broader cultural context. It cannot be unaware of its constraints and limits, and must adapt to the

38 The Mediatization of Religion surrounding society in order to be successful. Religious people who reject the world are a minority. Rather, throughout the world, faith is about learning how to be on the same wavelength as the rest of society. In a society that is highly defined by the omnipresence of media and its by-product, popular culture, this means sticking to television programs, web pages, popular music and other genres of media culture. Consequently, we should hardly be surprised to find Muslim pop music groups, Jewish rap (Lehmann and Siebzehner 2006), Hindu pop (Dasgupta 2006) and Christian rock (Clark 2007). In a study on religions in South Asia, meanwhile, Lawrence Babb (1995) argues that media use is responsible for changes in some aspects of the core structure of religion. Indeed, it would be impossible to explain religious change, he claims, without taking into account the influence of media use on religious beliefs, practices and actions. He argues that media has caused changes in religion ever since the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century, with the rise of printing providing the first examples of alterations in religion due to media use. Thus, sacred texts became widely available and this was a direct and significant challenge to the monopoly on holy knowledge enjoyed by religious authorities. From the printing press, Babb moves forward to the twentieth century’s digital technologies to show that religion has always relied on the available media to spread its message. There is no religion without the “mediation” to convey its message, and so, from this point of view, religion has always been linked to the broader context of the secular media. The challenge, he suggests, is to understand how media has influenced people’s religious experience. In the introduction to his book, Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, Babb (1995) argues that media use has altered the way people experience religion and understand religious beliefs in everyday life, offering the omnipresence of religion today as an example. Thus, people no longer need to go to a religious place to worship or experience the divine: instead, religion can be communicated to anyone with a mobile phone and at the same time it is everywhere on television or on the radio. Media communication has enhanced “the capacity of symbols to be projected from one place to another” and these media “have greatly increased what might be called the mobility of religious symbols” (Babb 1995: 3). Media has taken religion everywhere, far and out from the traditionally sacred places like churches or sanctuaries. Consequently, he claims that the whole concept of religion—the very structure of what has been known as “religion”— has been transformed into a new mediated form of social activity. His is a powerful argument, and probably one of the first to deal with media and religion from the perspective of change. What makes it so important for this book is that Babb actually takes into account that mass communication has the power to change the way people experience religion. He argues that religion had to change itself in order to deal with the demands and needs of media communication. It was not only a matter of adapting a message to a new media, but in a deeper sense, of restructuring some of the key concepts of religion as a personal experience and also as a social institution.

What Makes Religion Suitable for Mediatization? 39 Babb notes, for example, the experience of a publishing house in Delhi that produced several comic books depicting traditional Hindu myths, but using the of North American publishers such as DC Comics or Marvel Comics—with “Superman” and “Spider-Man” among the references. The publication made ancient myths available to a whole new generation, using a language—the comic book style—which young people in particular were familiar with. The publication was a huge success not only in India, but also among Hindu communities in English-speaking countries around the world. Babb also describes how audio devices such as Walkmans were used to spread religious songs and narratives, creating a more personal religious experience—a “private” religion, to quote Thomas Luckmann (1970)—which allowed people to be in touch with religion in a way compatible with the demands of contemporary society. As a result, the use of media communication changed the way religion exists nowadays in South Asia. It opened a new channel to spread religious messages, and this expansion has had influence in the very core of religious practices. Although Babb does not explore these changes in religion further, he does suggest that deeper changes would likely be found in religious practices where new means of communication are available. This is remarkably prescient given that while the book was published in 1995, two years after the first “boom” of the Internet, he could hardly have foreseen the explosion of information that would become available globally as a consequence. Surprisingly, however, he pays little attention to television, concentrating on other forms of mass communication and even in its product, popular culture. In spite of this, his work is a highly valuable examination of the relationship between media and religion from the point of view of institutional change, an idea that had been neglected by almost all theorists up to that point. It is possible to find similar arguments about media use and religious transformation in Clark’s “Introduction” to Religion, Media and the Marketplace (2007). She identifies an apparent paradox between religious practices as related to “spiritual” values, and the media or the market place, concerned predominantly with “material” things. While religion would (or should) be concerned with the transcendental, that is, things beyond the raw quotidian experience, the media and the market place belong to a sphere close to the ordinary—to what could be considered the “normal” course of events of everyday life, defined as the “social ordinary” by thinkers such as Lefebvre (1981) and De Certeau (1990). As she writes: People tend to think that the popular media and the global marketplace have little to do with the practices and beliefs of religion … Popular media and especially things related to marketing are all about materialistic matters, whereas religion is about the spiritual and the ethereal. (Clark 2007: ix) Religious experience is expected to break with the ordinary in order to reach the extraordinary—those elements beyond the current or the factual. It could therefore be seen as a paradox that two such different spheres as religion on one side, and media or the market place on the other, could ever belong together.