424674 ECSXXX10.

1177/1367549411424674Herbert and GillespieEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies

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European Journal of Cultural Studies

Editorial
14(6) 601­–609
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549411424674
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David Herbert
University of Agder, Norway

Marie Gillespie
The Open University, UK

The study of religion and media, and the significance of their interplay for social, cultural
and, political change in contemporary societies, has received steadily increasing scholarly
attention in the last decade and a half (Gillespie, 1995; Hjarvard, 2008; Hoover and Lundby,
1997; Lövheim and Lynch, 2011; Meyer and Moors, 2006; Mitchell and Marriage, 2003;
Rajagopal, 2001; Starrett, 1998). During this period, scholars from diverse disciplinary
perspectives have moved away from approaches that focus on the more or less instrumental
use of one by the other, towards approaches that seek to grasp their dynamic interaction in
contemporary cultures. These scholarly efforts reflect a range of interests, but many have
responded to the unexpected visibility of religion – especially for those working in a secular,
post-enlightenment paradigm – and its contentious presence and/or resurgence in new
forms in the public spheres of late modern societies of very different kinds across the globe.
Clearly, 9/11 and the presence of radical Islam, both in Muslim majority societies and
across the West, has been a key catalyst in this regard, reflected in various ways in this
special issue (Brown, Hoover, Herbert, Ohm, this issue). This heightened visibility is not
attributable solely to the emergence of Islamist or Christian, Hindu or other varieties of
politico-religious fundamentalisms over the last couple of decades, but encompasses a
wider range of phenomena. These include the spread of New Age beliefs and practices
(Redden, this issue), discourses of spirituality (Noonan, this issue), and the opening up
of broadcast and micro-media to a much wider range of producers, including religious
ones, which has resulted in the proliferation of religious and sacred symbols and discourses
across ‘the surface of social life, disseminating signs yet having to accommodate to given
formats’ (Meyer and Moors, 2006: 19; Gemmeke et al., this issue). Arguably, relations
between the religious, the sacred and the social are increasingly enacted in and through

Corresponding author:
David Herbert, University of Agder, PO Box 422, NO-4604 Kristiansand, Norway.
Email: david.herbert@uia.no

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602 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6)

the media, obscuring what were once regarded as distinct domains and posing conceptual
and methodological challenges to researchers.
Often, scholars from diverse disciplinary traditions (anthropology, sociology, media
and cultural studies, political science, religious studies) and regional specialisms are not
used to working closely together, and may lack opportunities and the infrastructure for
doing so. In addition, the topic of religion presents some particular challenges beyond the
usual disciplinary boundaries, as Guy Redden discusses in this issue in relation to cultural
studies. Following Felski (1999), Redden describes cultural studies’ ‘default position’ as
assuming that

everyday life is thoroughly secular. Cultural studies scholars are well placed to think through
everyday meaning-making processes, but have tended to assume that consumer culture has
replaced religion as a site of personal aspiration towards higher values. (p. 651)

This leads him to ask: ‘What then of consumption that is substantively metaphysical in
orientation while it simultaneously applies conceptions of the sacred to constructions of
a better life in the world?’ (p. 651). How do secular academics apprehend and approach
the study of religion? Do they regard those who practise religion or embrace beliefs in
transcendent deity/ies as utterly irrational – stupid even – and with what consequences
for the nature of research? How can academics contribute to an increasingly polarized
public debate about religion and the mediated public sphere? What are the problems and
pitfalls of secularization theories – especially when confronted with seemingly incontro-
vertible evidence to the contrary? Is there a resurgence of religion or has the nature of
religion changed, or do transformations in media and communications technologies simply
redraw the boundaries and contours of what constitutes the sacred and create new rituals?
How do different ways of conceiving of the intersections of mass media and interpersonal
communications, and of apprehending the relationship between religion and the sacred
shape research questions and outcomes?
It was precisely in order to provide a forum for interdisciplinary reflection on these
kinds of questions that an international research network, ‘mediating religion’, was founded
at the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC)1 on the joint initiative of
the present editors. The first meeting was held at The Open University’s London Regional
Centre in Camden in January 2007, at which the majority of the articles in this special
issue were presented.2 Three further annual symposia have been held, with plans for more,
and a website established (www.mediatingreligion.org/network) under the leadership of
John Zavos (CRESC, University of Manchester) to broaden the conversation and develop
new research partnerships.
Stewart Hoover’s article, which opens this edition, claims that such a close relationship
has developed between media and religion in contemporary popular culture (especially
in the American and transnational Muslim public spheres from which most of his examples
are drawn), that one cannot be understood without the other:

[M]edia and religion are no longer separate ‘spheres’, but … they are evolving in a kind of
dialectic relationship, and … it is not possible to fully understand either without reference to the
other (p. 613)

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Herbert and Gillespie 603

This bold and controversial statement is useful for introducing the debates that run through
this special issue. It seems to imply at least four possible distinct claims:

1. religion is known (both to insiders and outsiders), to a significant extent through its
projections in a variety of media genres and representations (and media here are
broadly defined);
2. media formats and genres shape the way in which religious messages are articulated
and received;
3. religion is not reducible to regimes of media representation and reception; religion
has its own distinctive dynamics of meaning-making; and
4. religion is so integral to contemporary media systems that these media systems cannot
be understood without reference to religion, or at least to some sense of the sacred.

These claims may be usefully compared with those made by the Danish sociologist Stig
Hjarvard (2011) in his ‘mediatisation of religion’ thesis. The first two claims are similar.
Hjarvard also claims that ‘media have become an important, if not primary, source of
information about religious issues’, and that ‘religious information and experiences become
moulded according to the demands of popular media genres’ (2011: 119). These claims are
likely to be uncontroversial among media and cultural studies scholars, since they underline
the decisive role of the media and communications systems in shaping contemporary
popular culture, including popular religious cultures.
Hoover and Hjarvard differ somewhat on the implications of the second claim. Hjarvard
emphasizes the accommodation of religion to media genres and formats such that the latter
dominate the former in the construction of meanings (2011: 126). For Hoover, distinctively
religious meaning-making remains important. This difference becomes clearer when dis-
cussing Hoover’s third claim, that religion has its own distinctive dynamics of meaning-
making, distinctive because religion contains reference to one or more transcendent other(s),
such that identity formation, articulating belonging, the shaping of loyalty, and moral
sensibility take distinctive forms when religion is involved. A consequence of this is that
any attempt to understand contemporary societies without a knowledge of the dynamics
of religion is inherently limited: hence Hoover’s claim. Clearly, the importance of religion
in the sphere of popular culture in the USA, Latin America, and in the Muslim majority
societies that form the basis of Hoover’s research, shapes his arguments. But how applicable
are these arguments beyond these contexts?
Hoover argues that in the USA, the political influence of the talkshow host Glenn Beck
needs to be situated against both the backdrop of the growing influence of entertainment
formats on political discourse in the USA (itself a political global trend), and the particulari-
ties of American social conservatism rooted in Evangelical Christian culture. Hoover sees
in Beck’s influence ‘a triumph of the image over rationalism in relation to what are the
definitive mediated circulations’ (p. 614). This is in itself an important claim about the
impact of mediated religion on political culture; however, the point to note is that influence
cannot be explained purely in terms of media effects: rather, it requires understanding of
the articulation of media formats with what, at any particular conjuncture, resonates with
US national culture, which is itself, in part, constituted by Evangelical Christianity. Hence,
for Hoover, distinctively religious meaning-making – with its many modes of articulating

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604 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6)

our relationship with the numinous and transcendent dimensions of human experience –
remains important to our understanding of the cultural authority attributed to Beck by his
audiences: processes that interact in unpredictable ways with celebrity in contemporary
media.
This is a more controversial claim than the first two, especially for media and cultural
studies scholars, because it questions the sufficiency of these approaches to make sense of
contemporary popular culture. It also drives Hoover’s argument for interdisciplinarity:
religious studies and media studies need each other to make sense of a variety of significant
contemporary cultural phenomena. For example, Beck’s rhetorical style resonates with tradi-
tions of Christian preaching, his discourse appeals to the moral and eschatological assump-
tions of the evangelicals amongst his audience. However, perhaps the differences between
Hjarvard and Hoover here can be attributed, at least in part, to context: in his most recent
contribution to the debate, Hjarvard emphasizes that his account is developed against a
Scandinavian backdrop where ‘weak religion’ (following Kelley, 1972) predominates. Weak
religions tend to be flexible and accommodating to mainstream cultural trends. In contrast,
strong religions tend to be more dogmatic, taking firm countercultural positions which are
more typical of the traditions addressed by Hoover: for example, American Evangelical
Christianity and transnational revivalist Islam. However, we may note that the idea that only
‘strong’ religion is socially significant (and evades being overrun by media-driven norms) is
challenged by Redden (this issue) with reference to New Age practices, as we shall see below.
The fourth claim implicit in Hoover’s statement, that ‘it is not possible to fully under-
stand either [media or religion] without reference to the other’ (p. 613), seems to imply
that religion is so integral to contemporary media systems that these media systems cannot
be understood without reference to religion. This claim could have several meanings. The
first meaning could be that the media are in some sense implicitly religious, e.g. they
invoke the transcendent, constituting a sacred ritual space (cf. Couldry, 2003; Carey, 1989),
such that, in order to be fully understood, the media must be analysed in terms of religion,
or at least in terms that take into the account the workings of religion. Second, religious
groups have always been early adopters and skilled users of media and communications
technologies, so in the light of a history of religious entrepeneurship in media use and
development, perhaps especially in America, the claim may simply be that religious actors
are so central to the media field that developments in it cannot be understood without
reference to such religious actors. The third possible meaning of Hoover’s fourth claim
would seem to involve challenging, in some way, the argument that media institutions
have become both increasingly autonomous and now influence other social institutions
(including religious ones). As Hjarvard succinctly states, the media have:

acquired a unique position in which all other institutions in society are at least somewhat dependent
on the media, while the media are primarily dependent on the market. Second, at the same time
as the media have emerged as an independent institution in society, the media have become
integrated into the workings of other social institutions. (2011: 122)

For the interdependence of religion and media to be as mutual as Hoover’s statement

implies, would require that the media are still in some way constrained, regulated or
controlled by religious institutions (as they used to be). However, while there may be
some exceptions to the pattern of growing media autonomy with respect to religion and

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Herbert and Gillespie 605

the state (e.g. post-revolutionary Iran), this is not a widespread trend. In fact, neither
Hoover nor any other contributor to the special issue makes a case either for understanding
media processes in terms derived from the analysis of religion, nor for religious authority
providing a significant brake on the growth of media autonomy (i.e. the first and third
possible meanings of Hoover’s fourth claim). But, if we limit Hoover’s fourth claim to
simply highlighting the important role of religious actors as early adopters and developers
of media technologies in a range of contexts, and concede that the relationship of influence
between religion and media is one in which the media has become the dominant partner,
there remains plenty to investigate, both concerning the other three claims, and a further
contention made by Hoover, that ‘[r]eligion is resurgent today, but in a restructured form
that is far less elemental than it might have been in the past’ (p. 621). This claim is also a
controversial one, contested both by Hjarvard, who sees mediatization as part of a process
of secularisation, and by other authors in this special issue.
Herbert examines the implications of the intersection of religion and media for socio-
logical accounts of religion and society. He differentiates the visibility of religion from its
vitality and social influence, arguing that visibility in itself is a significant phenomenon
that needs to be understood in its own right, and only then can it be adequately assessed in
relation to its vitality and sociocultural and political influence. He observes the heightened
visibility of religion across a range of societies, including secularized Western European,
post-communist and post-colonial (e.g. Middle Eastern, African and South Asian) societies.
Herbert argues that religion is made visible in different ways across these societies: for
example, in Western Europe religion is visible primarily because of political controversies
connected with the religions of migrants, whereas in post-colonial societies partial media
liberalization has triggered the permeation of religious symbols and discourses into the
media and social worlds. However, in each case there is sufficient overlap in causal pro-
cesses, to which media are central, to label the phenomenon ‘publicization’ – or ‘re-pub-
licization’ – where religion is becoming more visible again after a period of relative
privatization, whether enforced (as in post-communist societies), or having occurred through
an endogenous secularization process (as in Western European societies).
Herbert further proposes that there are contradictory forces at play and that for each set
of processes associated with secularization – understood as the declining social significance
of religion – there are counter processes associated with publicization. Hence structural
differentiation – associated with the growing autonomy of social institutions in industrial
societies – is countered in large part by media developments, through a process of de-
differentiation in which religious symbols and discourses are diffused across other social
institutions. For example, Hindu symbols permeate across commercial, entertainment and
political systems in India (Rajagopal, 2001), and Muslim symbols across education, health-
care and legal systems in Egypt (Starrett, 1998). Second, societalization (the sociological
term for rural–urban migration in which patterns of life in which religion was integral
become fragmented, leading to loss of religious influence) is in part countered by what he
calls ‘diasporic intensification’. Here, intranational or transnational migrants are able to
maintain immediate and intensive links with their home village or city through media
technologies such as mobile phones, the internet and (relatively) cheap travel, enabling the
maintenance of transnational lifeworlds including a sense of obligation and disciplinary
structures to which religion is often integral. Third, Herbert argues that the idea that ration-
alization (the use of means-end logic, including in media technologies) undermines the

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606 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6)

practical grip of religion on human living and thinking is itself undermined by a range of
ethnographic and survey evidence which shows that people can concurrently deploy reli-
gious/magical and rationalistic/scientific modes of cognition without difficulty. Indeed,
there is a some evidence of re-enchantment processes in which modern media technologies
are closely entwined (Pinney, 2002).
While some secularization theorists (Bruce, 1998) have sought to limit the scope of
secularization to western societies, Herbert argues that for this move to work, they must
find reasons why the same technological, cognitive and organizational changes, which they
claim are driving the decline of religious influence in some contexts, are associated with
the extension or reconfiguration of religious influence elsewhere – and this, he contends,
they have failed to do so far. He also points to the difficulties of trying to draw a boundary
around the West, given the extent of transnational migration and influence. More light
needs to be shed on these processes by comparative ethnographies that encompass the
study of religon and media in social life, which can afford insights into how and under
which circumstances religion and the sacred become visible and contentious (Gillespie,
2007). On the question of what contemporary articulations of religion and media do to
religion, Herbert considers a range of evidence, suggesting (with Hoover rather than
Hjarvard) that transformation rather than secularization or being subsumed within the logic
of media forms is a more accurate overall description.
The theme of transformation is also evident in Redden’s paper which follows Hoover
and Herbert’s, and like theirs is a broad survey with theoretical reflections, in this case
focused on New Age practices/consumption. Redden argues that New Age is interesting
partly because ‘it is not the kind of religion-as-marker-of-ethnocultural-identity that has
been most associated with the “new visibility’’’. Yet it also provides evidence both of re-
enchantment and de-differentiation, this time amongst the middle classes of the most secu-
larized Western societies:

New Age theories re-enchant aspects of the lifesphere, supposedly withdrawing them from the
purview of technocratic power just as they open them up to market agencies that act on behalf
of the person. This can be seen as effecting a countervailing dedifferentiation of religion from
worldly matters because it discourages organizations that focus purely on the sacred and a fixed
interpretation of it.

New Age theories are also important for considering the implications of the relationship
between religion and media for social theory, because they highlight a neglected location
for the exercise of religious influence, that is through individual choice in the articulation
of social difference, rather than the standard emphasis on integration:

religion in general, in pluralized societies at least, may also be thought of as bearing significance
precisely in relation to social difference and change rather than overall integration of societies
as in Durkheim’s classic functionalist formulation. (Redden, p. 658)

In contrast with Hoover’s claim of resurgence and Herbert and Redden’s claims of trans-
formation, in her comparison of television in Turkey and India, Ohm is more sceptical
about whether the visibility of religion in politics or commercial media is indicative of
religious resurgence, and sees transformation more in terms of loss than change for

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Herbert and Gillespie 607

religion: specifically, an undermining of religious or any collectively-oriented solidarity

by the individualistic logic of commercialization. In the case of India she points to a shift
from the televised representation of religion as the object of devotion in the epics broadcast
in the early 1990s to soap operas of the early to mid 2000s, in which:

A standardized array of religious symbolism and ritual was transferred onto the screen to be consumed
mainly as a reassuring and comforting moment by middle to lower-middle class viewers (often
living in nuclear families) after a hard day’s work in an increasingly demanding and insecure
economic environment. An informant of mine commented: ‘It is not that people have become more
religious, it’s just that the signs of Hinduism and Hindutva have become more entertaining.’ (p. 679)

In Turkey, it seems that the installation of a moderate Islamist government has led to a
reluctance among private Islamic TV channel to tackle political issues, as they are appar-
ently keen to differentiate a sphere of piety distinct from politics, and hence reorienting to
more ‘purely religious’ concerns. Ohm also highlights the importance of different forms of
state secularism in shaping the form of public religion, and the very different meanings that
a term such as privatization can bear in different contexts:

In India, privatisation connotes a commercialisation of Hinduism – pursued by basically secular

nationalist activism in the form of Hindutva and supported by the government – in the public
sphere, and thus its economic dimension. In Turkey it signifies a withdrawal of Islam into a
redefined private sphere of the non-commercial. (p. 681)

She also raises the question of how different religious traditions articulate with different
media, referring to ‘working with an at least apparent contrast between the ready visuality
of Hinduism with the visual reticence of Islam’. However all is not as it seems; she warns
that the ‘ubiquity of spectacular imagery’ also can be used as to ‘veil anti-democratic
politics, alluding to aspects of the political ‘Hindutva’ (‘Hinduness’) movement, and
their connection to communalist agitation.’ (p. 681).
Gemmeke’s study of the ‘marketed spirituality’ of marabouts (Sufi healers) in Senegal
and the Netherlands has points of contact with several of the other articles in this col-
lection. The marabouts that she studies span both a religion-rich public environment
(Senegal), perhaps similar in this sense to India (as addressed by Ohm), and a more
secularized context (the Netherlands), perhaps similar to the UK (as addressed by Brown
and Noonan). Like Redden and Noonan, Gemmeke is also concerned with the market-
ability of religion in competitive, media-rich environments. She compares the forms of
scepticism towards the practices of marabouts found in both Dutch and Senegalise
media: in Senegal there is scepticism but it is directed towards the honesty and integrity
of the marabouts rather than the efficacy of their remedies; in the Netherlands it is part
of a wider secular scepticism towards alternative treatments, and she notes that the
Dutch authorities have become involved in attempting to regulate the marabouts’ prac-
tices. She also describes how marabouts use different appeals to tradition as a sign of
authenticity in different contexts: in Senegal they emphasize their rural roots, contacts
and Islamic credentials; and in the Netherlands their Africanness, while downplaying
their Islamic identity.

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608 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(6)

While Gemmeke’s marabouts are able, to some extent, to shape their identities to market
their services in different contexts, Brown’s study of English-language press coverage of
the death of the suicide bomber Murielle Degauque is about the over-determination of
media meaning. Following Stuart Hall’s classic understanding of the media as defining a
set of representations of ‘the real’, Brown’s feminist media content analysis shows how,
in spite of the potential for unsettling stable categories of the real presented by Degauque
as the first white European female suicide bomber, the media found ways to accommodate
her case to these categories by means of selective (and inventive) interpretation and silence,
such as suggestions of a ‘troubled’ sexual history, and a complete absence of consideration
of any kind of political motivation. Brown concludes that ‘although religion is granted a
dominant “presence” in news reporting, it is presented as irrational and foreign’ (p. 716).
Noonan’s study of the development of a discourse of spirituality in British broadcasting
on religion focuses on the BBC television series Extreme Pilgrim (2009). It draws on
producer interviews to trace how spiritual discourse is displacing that of religion in response
to market pressures, and this change depends on a dichotomy between western (secular
and rational, but out of touch with authentic spirituality) and eastern (religious and irra-
tional, but in touch with authentic spirituality). This runs somewhat counter to Noonan’s
general argument that presentations of spirituality tend to draw on a rather conventional
Christian background (the presenter of Extreme Pilgrim is a Church of England vicar;
The Monastery as a traditional Christian setting). It may be observed that the Eastern
spiritual/Western unspiritual dichotomy is perhaps the positive flipside (positive in the
sense that authentic spirituality is positively valorized) of the ‘irrational and foreign’
stereotype found by Brown.
In a popular television series (in terms of ratings and critical reception) such as the
BBC’s The Monastery, the familiar reality format is seen as a vehicle to enable wide
audience engagement with content (Christian monasticism) that would not normally be
appealing. Hence, in the words of one producer, ‘religion was no longer a freak’ (p. 740).
However, the success of that series was seen as a delicate achievement and difficult to
replicate: ‘you can only do that idea so often and it has run out of steam’ (p. 740). Producers
also complained that journalistic formats were being increasingly displaced by reality
formats, especially on television, such that ‘serious’ treatments of religion are becoming
more difficult to get made. Religious broadcasters seems to be caught in something of a
dilemma: dependent on reliably replicable formats to attract funding in a competitive
environment, aware that such formats wear out quickly, and increasingly compelled to
use entertainment formats. Here we see that even a state broadcaster funded by the licence
fee and so to some extent insulated from commercial pressures, is compelled to use the
entertainment formats to convey religious content.
The articles in this collection show that research on the interface between religion and
media is proving productive for progressing our understanding of the dynamics of con-
temporary socio-cultural change. Substantively, it seems that the increasing dominance
of entertainment-derived styles and formats is shaping what producers can say about
religion (Noonan), and what can be said about religion in such formats, can have practical
implications for politics (Hoover). It also shows how secular (Ohm) sceptical (Gemmeke)
and negative (Brown) media discourses strongly shape what can be said about religion;
yet some producers show considerable skill in adapting their message to different, scepti-
cal, market conditions (Gemmeke). The contributors to this special issue differ on what

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Herbert and Gillespie 609

they see as the implications of the commercialization of media markets for religion. For
Ohm, perhaps influenced by Durkheim’s understanding of religion as collective identity,
it is undermined even as it is publicized, whereas for Redden, New Age consumption that
is substantively metaphysical demonstrably thrives. In terms of theory, it would seem that
secularization and related theories – including the view that consumption has replaced
religion as a source of personal meaning – require some rethinking, as phenomena such
as diasporic intensification (Herbert) and re-enchantment and de-differentiation (Herbert
and Redden) seem to be widespread cultural processes with their own dynamics not envis-
aged in secularization-based narratives. What is clear is that new forms of media and
migration continue to reshape religious practices, and that the sacred and the religious
continue to animate and transform media genres in surprising ways.

Notes
1. CRESC is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research centre co-hosted
by The Open University and the University of Manchester. The editors gratefully acknowledge
the support of CRESC and the ESRC.
2. One article (Gemmeke) sprang instead from the third symposium in this series (hosted at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, July 2009), while another (Noonan)
was submitted to the journal independently.

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