by Amy Levin
For those bizarre folks who follow, track, analyze, or write about religion and media, it is essential to maintain a keen and nuanced eye when grappling with such monstrously complex topics. Religious wars, religious dress, religious money – these are the real and yet superbly complex elements of our cultural existence. Scout any crack or cranny of popular culture and you find religion creating a glorious maze of topics for writers to discover and sift and sing to the masses.
But lately, I find that a repulsive plague of repetition and banality has swept over the disenchanted cybersphere. Each day I begin my religion news search with hopeful eagerness, sifting closely through mainstream and fringe outlets, hungry for signs of a new trend, movement, argument, study–anything other than what I consumed the day before. But I search in vain, and my doldrums have led me to take action.
That is why I’ve made a list of the five “religion and media” tropes that pervade and pox the information media highway. I’m calling on writers to take new routes and exits so that we can end this circular road to religion boredom. Oh, and there’s an ethical side as well – I aim to convince that each topic’s overabundance glosses over the political reasons for its frequency, enables bad journalism, and limits our ability to have different kinds of conversations about religion without falling asleep.
1. The Loaded Term It’s the most trending topic in the history of media coverage on religion! It’s one of the most loaded terms in our public vernacular. Widely misunderstood and continually spoken for, the term religious freedom is one that is so strategically obscure that any blogger, journalist, academic, theologian, etc., can logically apply it to any number of causes. The most polarized invocation of the term tends to occur militantly between the “religious right” and the “secular left,” or also known as “freedom of religion,” vs. “freedom from religion.” Despite efforts to clarify the concept of religious freedom as explained in the constitution as well as its linguistic evolution in popular rhetoric, this conversation is more of a military crusade to get the last word.
2. Conscience in Chief First it was Obama is Muslim (which apparently 11% of Americans still believe). Even though we’re told over and over that this is an unquestionable myth, birth certificate and all, many writers feign chronic shock every time Obama invokes his liberal Protestant God. Then, before Mitt Romney became the Republican nominee, there was Herman Cain’s black liberal church (too “confusing” for mere journalists to comprehend!), Michele Bachmann’s evangelicalism, Rick Santorum’s Catholicism, and of course Newt Gingrich’s ADD (All Denominations Deserve a try). Of course, Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is about the only thing most of us know about him, and yet we still know next to nothing about Mormonism (extra wives? funny undergarments?). The media coverage of Presidential candidates’ religious beliefs almost always centers around a discussion of religion-as-threat to government (Mormonism, Islam), American’s naïveté about their leaders’ personal lives, or whether our President’s religion does or doesn’t “matter.”
3. Religion: What is it good for? The obsession with knowing whether or not religion is “good” for society is a symptom of what many religious studies scholars call the “functionality” argument. Instead of treating religion as a fluid concept that enraptures a variety of elements in human life–including language, dress, psychology, bodily rituals, consciousness, etc.–we like to reduce it to a belief system or text whose function is either essentially “good” or “bad” for the greater public. While there may be nothing wrong with this question in a philosophical setting, when we hear the functional argument in a journalistic setting, it’s almost always a part of a greater political or theological argument.
4. Atheism vs. Religion Also known as ”The Good without God Debate,” or the
“Secular Humanism Obsession.” These conversations don a number of different styles, my most favorite being the “religion and science can/cannot coexist” argument. Like the religious freedom conversation, from a historical point of view, the religion and science debate in media forums is more of a function of who is speaking than what ideas they are promoting. In other words, the coexistence of religion and science is not (that I know of!) a current threat to the human condition. An argument for their coexistence tends to stem from the religious (left), while fears of their incompatibility tend to come from Atheist forums. But my exhaustion with religion vs. science is of another matter: Why do we care?
5. We’re Getting More–or Less–Religious I call this the media’s “sociology of religion” problem. Symptoms include the pouring of vast amounts of money into studies aimed to quantify religion in the U.S., drawing “informative” conclusions about social trends from these findings, and then writing exhaustively about what we think these findings mean for the religious future. I think my skepticism for this mode of information-gathering fully matured the moment one of my graduate school professors ever-so-simply uttered: “there is a difference between information and knowledge.” Surveys proving or disproving the religiosity of Americans may offer us information about how people take surveys – perhaps even about how they identify religiously. But such polls disguise, or even enable, a kind of mathematic religious oversimplification: more “secularism” equals less “religion.” But to the dismay of many secularists, religions like Christianity and Islam are expanding rapidly around the globe. Furthermore, the idea that we can measure religion (aka, know it when we see it) is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Euro-American thought, and our attempt to name and control religion is historically and presently tied to colonialism, Orientalism, and neoliberal exploitation.
*Other trending topics that didn’t make the cut include: the evolution of religion, the Dalai Lama loves interfaith, and Tom Cruise.
6 comments
Per Smith says:
Jul 9, 2012
If we build them what will the off ramps of the “circular road to religious boredom” lead us to? My challenge to you is to produce a list of five such destinations with convincing arguments about why we would want to visit them. I think if you want someone (e.g the Media) to stop obsessively beating a dead horse you need, at bare minimum, to give that someone another activity. I wonder though, if teaching that someone a different way of interacting with the dead horse would also suffice. Maybe its not the topics but the approach(es) to them.
Religion in the mainstream press - Quaker Ranter says:
Jul 10, 2012
[...] They default to the same boring tropes, says Amy Levin at TheRevealer: Religious wars, religious dress, religious money – these are the real and yet superbly complex elements of our cultural existence. Scout any crack or cranny of popular culture and you find religion creating a glorious maze of topics for writers to discover and sift and sing to the masses. [...]
Amy says:
Jul 11, 2012
Thank you, Per Smith. I see your point and recognize the impulse to want generative topics/activities. However, my aim was to point out, as you mention, “different ways of interacting,” rather than destinations themselves. If we want to talk about religious freedom, we should be doing so in a nuanced way, and ask ourselves if we are providing any new or generative information by rehashing/giving voice to this debate.
Per Smith says:
Jul 12, 2012
OK well I guess the challenge then, as I see it, is to be clearer about how exactly to discuss these issues in a more nuanced way. Take for instance your fifth example which covers a topic I am both very interested in and know something about. The media tends to just reproduce soundbites about this without getting past the front door of the studies it references. So then media consumers get a few out of context figures showing more people today being less inclined to identify as religious with the requisite, “oh my gosh this might be a big deal” topping from the media. I get that this is both infuriating because of how it is presented and boring because of how repetitive it is. But I would argue with your insinuation that the studies themselves are a waste of time and resources because of the very fact that there is usually much more depth to them than the media is reporting. Some of these studies (often quoted by the media) cover much more than religion and some go in depth into other issues like the connection between religious self-identities and political beliefs for instance. The problem is that the media latches onto small pieces of information it thinks people want to consume and then sets up a virtual assembly line reproducing that product ad naseum. So I guess I’m saying that instead of suggesting that this is not an interesting topic, or that the studies it is based on are useless how about suggesting that the media dig deeper into those studies? Or something…
Amy says:
Jul 16, 2012
Well said. I don’t believe that these studies are a waste of time – sociology of religion gives us more of the “bird’s eye” view of religion that can generate very important knowledge. As you said, my problem is more with how the media interprets them. Thank you for your comment.
Rev. Barbara S. Eberle, MA, OMC says:
May 2, 2013
Well, Amy, I can only imagine that in your career position you have become anesthetized to the relevance of these issues. I understand the problem with the under defined use of these catchall phrases making their usage totally feckless. But, if the verbiage is the issue, then use new terminology. The word, as we know, is not the thing, so call it anything that suits your fancy. As with human nature, new philosophy, theory or rhetoric will soon follow. Be inventive, Amy, and the media will follows YOU and perhaps you will catch the dullsville endorsers off guard and put some real meaning behind the issues at hand.