Religion, Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life

This seminar explored different ways in which people engage with media and culture in the practice of contemporary religious life. These included new Islamic consumer cultures, the re-working of religious symbols and practices in the Burning Man Festival and the ironic uses of religion by the Reverend Billy, the uses of theology and technology in contemporary Evangelical groups, and the role of irreverence amongst young adults consuming religious material in the television show, The Colbert Report. Seminar presentations and discussion also raised key methodological issues in the study of lived religion, including the different perspectives brought by theologians and social scientists, the need for theoretical frames that allow closer attention to the intersubjective ground of religious lives, and the ways in which judgments about ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ religion, can continue to shape our scholarship.

The case examples discussed in the seminar demonstrated qualities sometimes associated with theories of ‘post-modern’ religion; reflexivity, irony, pastiche and bricolage. The ironic use of a religious persona by the Reverend Billy is, for example, a clear example of the playful use of religion, and even in the context of an Evangelical Anglican worship service it is possible to identify a diverse range of theological discourses and traditions being put to work. But notions of fundamentally new, post-modern, forms of religious practice were also challenged by the case studies. The Burning Man Festival, for example, involves both play (and sometimes direct subversion) of religious symbols, but also involves the creation of sacred space (e.g. the Temple area) which is often modelled on recognisable religious architecture. This reflects an idea noted in the previous seminar on media and religion that innovative forms of religious media and practice (e.g. religious communities on Second Life) often replicate traditional architectures, discourses and practices in order to maintain a sense of their religious character. Innovation in new media and cultural practices of religion can therefore, at the same time, reproduce conventional ways of thinking about and practising religion. The undirected way in which users of the Temple area in Burning Man maintain silence also suggests that modern conceptions of privatized religious experience remain important in this context of alternative cultural exploration. Similarly, whilst the Reverend Billy is clearly intended as an ironic figure, his performances have also increasingly taken on ritual structure and significance for their participants. The media and cultural context of late modernity may therefore, in some respects, encourage innovation and playfulness in religious life, but at the same time, can also reproduce symbols, discourses and practices with longer histories.

One element of late modernity which did seem to influence forms of religious practice in the case studies was a sense of the importance of tolerance in the face of social and cultural pluralism. Both liberal and conservative viewers of The Colbert Report appear to welcome the ironic representation of a conservative TV talk show host by Stephen Colbert, as this allows them both to find moments in which their values are confirmed, as well as allowing them not to take those articulating those values too seriously. Irreverence becomes a way of negotiating commitment to particular values or beliefs, whilst not appearing to follow a particular authority figure too slavishly or being unable to laugh at oneself. Values of inclusivity are also evident in other emerging religious structures, such as Fresh Expressions churches in the UK. Whilst the importance of tolerance and irreverence do not preclude the continued importance of boundary-maintenance, and the distinction of self from others, it suggests that contemporary religious life can involve complex negotiations with such difference.

The session on Islamic consumer cultures enabled further discussion of issues initially raised in the first seminar on religion and consumer culture. An important element of contemporary Islamic revivalism has been the emergence of new Islamic media and consumer products, notably in the Middle East, which are consciously framed as an Islamic alternative to Western, secular culture. This new Islamic consumer culture seeks the creation of a counter-public, or the formation of a distinctive sub-culture, which provides people with the opportunity to consume recognisable products and services but which carry different cultural connotations. Recent examples of this include Fulla, an Islamic version of Barbie who wears the hijab and is represented as a pious young woman, Islamic versions of popular music TV channels replicating mainstream pop genres, and Islamic reality TV shows clearly based on Western formats such as ‘The Apprentice’. As with Evangelical consumer cultures, however, such attempts to develop religious counter-publics raise their own ambiguities and tensions. Some of the producers of this new Islamic media and consumer culture are at the same time involved in other forms of media production (e.g. adult programming), underpinned by the market imperatives of producing profit through differentiated output and services. Similarly, whilst this new Islamic media and culture aspires to provide an alternative to the secular, West, it tends uncritically to reproduce structures and assumptions of late capitalism, re-presenting these in a religious idiom. This raises questions, again discussed in the first seminar, about the ways in which contemporary practices of religious consumption reproduce or offers means of resistance against the structure and ideologies of late capitalism. This Islamic case also exemplifies complex patterns of cultural circulation, in which media and cultural formats are not only taken from secular sources, but consciously adopted from other religious sub-cultures (e.g. Islamic 'televangelists').

A final question emerging from the discussion concerns the ways in which contemporary religious consumption of media and culture are used in relation to basic existential questions of human relationships, limitation, suffering and death. Much of the study of religion, media and culture has focused initially on understanding the ways in which these intersect, and then more recently on theorising religion or analysing the broader social contexts of contemporary religion. What work in this field has not done so much is to explore how people use media and culture to address fundamental struggles and limitations in their lives. There is potential then for the study of the changing media and cultural contexts of contemporary religious life to offer richer accounts of the lives of those being researched, which extend beyond the presence and uses of new media and culture, to the ways in which these are situated in basic human problems of belonging, desire and suffering.

The following seminar presentations made at this event are available for download as podcasts:

Lynn Schofield Clark, 'Religion, irreverence and Stephen Colbert: negotiating authority in relation to media'

Nabil Echchaibi, 'New forms of Islamic consumer culture'

Lee Gilmore, 'From Burning Man to the Reverend Billy: new forms of ritual practice'