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Religion, Media and Popular Culture: Take-home exam
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Questions and answers of my take-home exam for Religion,Media and Popular culture. Grade: 8,5
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Cover sheet for take-home examReligion, Media and Popular Culture
Course number 201400040
Answer to Question A
, Question A
For this course we have visited the exhibition ‘Longing for Mecca’ on the Islamic pilgrimage
the Hajj. Beyond this pilgrimage and other traditional pilgrimages, we are witnessing around
the world that people undertake journeys to visit the sites they have seen on film or television
and which convey personal values that are akin to religious experiences. People visit the sites
that feature in the Harry Potter movies and the sites that feature in Game of Thrones series,
for example. Scholars have called these journeys ‘media pilgrimages’ and have described
these pop culture pilgrimages as the ‘secular religion of fandom’.
1. Argue with the help of Hjarvard’s (2008) article, Coleman’s (2006) article and
Klassen’s (2014) book why it is better not to define these and similar media
pilgrimages as ‘secular religion’.
One of the main problems in defining these forms of pilgrimage as being ‘secular religion’ is
the term itself. First, it is inherently self-contradictory; the secular is that which in not
religious (Klassen 2014, 11). Naming these pilgrimages secular religions undermines the
religious nature these pilgrimages could have and suggests it is incomparable to ‘traditional’
religions. Arguably, a better term for these pilgrimages and the popular culture with which
they are connected would be what Klassen describes as popular culture as religion; “myths,
morals and rituals” that “may look ‘secular’ to the casual observer, but, like religion, they
shape they shape viewers sense of the world and provide […] moods and motivations for
daily behaviour.” (Klassen 2014, 25)
As Coleman (2006) substantiates in his paper on pilgrimage, the motivation for such ritual
undertakings can be many things; from a search of spiritual enlightenment to such earthly
things as a plea for a better job. (Coleman 2006, 389) Calling any pilgrimage ‘secular
religion’ then is much too inconclusive, not only because of the vagueness and illogical nature
of the term, but also because any pilgrimage has in its participants outliers and this variation
in motivation is a deeply individually dependent variable.
Besides, creating an alternative discourse around pilgrimages that have been inspired by
relatively recent forms of media instead of ancient paper media limits the recognition of these
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