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Summary Religion, Media and Popular Culture: Lectures
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Summary of all lectures for the course Religion, Media and Popular Culture.
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Religion, Media and Popular CultureLecture I
Generally speaking, people in the West think that religion is considered less important nowadays.
Church visit has decreased, but religious gathering, in many forms, is still very much flourishing. For
example The Passion; an annual Christian musical that is televised with a lot of Dutch celebrities and
a big Christian cross that gets carried around if like its some sort of inner city pilgrimage for the sake
of the promotion of a Dutch city. This tends to result in a feeling of pride, collectivity and Christian
revitalization in the concerning city. When you look at The Passion in Dordrecht (2019) you’ll notice
that they use mainly pop ballads (non-religious genre) to enforce the message of Jesus and that Jesus
is wearing an orange overall (modern pop culture prison clothing) to imply he’s being sentenced,
which all by all suggests the following:
- Continuity and change of religious traditions within societies.
- The use and importance of new/mass media.
- Overlaps between celebrity culture and religious worship
- Overlaps between popular cultural genres and religion.
´The passion is seen as a free musical event, an excellent form of city marketing, a contemporary
form of worship, a sacrilege, reli-kitsch, a way to express the virtue of love, an experience of unity
and/or solidarity, a spectacular TV show, evangelization, and many other things, depending on whom
one asks.’
- Mirella Klomp & Marten van der Meulen (2017) The Passion as ludic practice
Aims of the course:
- Free the subject of religion from its ‘exotic’ position within social sciences and examine it in
relation to modernity.
- Free the subject of religion from the narrow description as belief and practice in the context
of churches/temples and mosques. By now religion has entangled with lots of other
phenomena. Just look at Pope Francis on the cover of Rolling Stone (rock ‘n roll music
magazine).
- Refined understanding of religious processes and their effects.
- Insight into the relation between popular culture and religion.
- Insight into how modern media are part of religious mobilization and revival.
- Insight into the way in which religious cultural and political processes interact.
- Refined understand of the relation between religion and globalization.
- Insight into the relation between cultural studies and anthropology.
In the documentary clip of Football as a Religion: The Church of Maradona you see an organized
community of people, mainly men, who believe the soccer player Diego Maradona is a divine person.
This contributes to the feeling of belonging to a place, a community and a religious sphere (they use
a lot of Catholic elements to confirm Maradona’s presence as a holy entity). This is a common sort of
phenomenon in which a certain kind of fan culture/collective starts to mingle with existing religious
traditions.
Taylor’s Age of Authenticity (2007) gives us a framework to think about the socio-cultural changes
that influence the place and role of religion in late-modern society.
‘In particular, I hold that religious longing, the longing for and a response to a more-than-immanent
transformation perspective… remains a strong independent source of motivation in modernity’
, The definition of religion by Steve Bruce (as quoted in Taylor 2007, 429):
‘A set of actions, beliefs and institutions predicated upon the assumption of the existence of either
supernatural entities with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral
purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or to intervene in, human affairs.’
Chris Klassen (Orsi 2003) says that we can have no static definition of religion, because it constantly
relates to our production of knowledge. She proposes three (intersecting) approaches to religion:
- Cognitive approach
- Functional approach
- Lived religion approach
Another way in which we can identify if people feel connected to something transcendental is by the
way of the concept of The Sacred; that which is ‘set apart’ from ordinary life; instills a sense of awe;
plays a key role in the reproduction of community;’ and is considered very powerful.
Modern society displays a host of institutions and organizations that produce sacredness – ranging
from sports federations that help to produce hero-athletes to museums that display exceptional
‘sacred’ artworks (Chidester 2005, 2012).
We adopt a socio-cultural constructionist perspective on religion in this course. This means that we
are not interested in the question if something should be considered true or false from an outsider
perspective, but that we are interested in understanding how everyday life, pop culture and religion
are entwined and produce meaning.
The Lived Religion approach (Klassen 2013:16) comes closest to the anthropological / socio-cultural
constructionist study of religion. Following Chris Klassen, who draws on the work of Thomas Tweed,
we start from the presumption that no theory of religion can be static.
Nutshell definition of secularization: 3 different levels:
1) The decline of popular religiosity
2) The decline of the public presence of religious symbols and values, privatization of religion
3) The separation of state from religious institutions
In theories of modernity, secularization has always played a big role as a concept, which Casanova
(1994) has developed into the secularization ‘thesis’; when societies move from ‘tradition’ to
‘modernity’, the following interlocked processes appear:
1) Separation from religion and politics, economics and science.
2) Privatization of religion in its own sphere (distinction private/public sphere).
3) Declining social significance of religious belief.
Three general possibilities for relationships between state and religious communities:
1) Fundamental unity of national church or other central religious organization and the state.
For example, in England.
2) Clear separation (anti-clerical or relatively indifferent). For example, in France.
3) Functional, but no strict separation, with cooperation in a broad range of fields. For example,
the Netherlands.
Another important facet of religion is that in reality it doesn’t disappear, even though with the
constitutional changes that happened mostly in the 19 th century, we saw that religion institutions got
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