The mediatisation of religion: Theorising religion, media and social change

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The mediatisation of religion: Theorising religion, media and social change Stig Hjarvard

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The Department of Media, Cognition and Communication , University of Copenhagen , Njalsgade 80, DK-2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark Published online: 13 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Stig Hjarvard (2011) The mediatisation of religion: Theorising religion, media and social change, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12:02, 119-135, DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2011.579719 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2011.579719

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Culture and Religion Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2011, 119–135

The mediatisation of religion: Theorising religion, media and social change Stig Hjarvard*

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The Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark Drawing on recent advances in mediatisation theory, the article presents a theoretical framework for understanding the increased interplay between religion and media. The media have become an important, if not primary, source of information about religious issues, and religious information and experiences become moulded according to the demands of popular media genres. As a cultural and social environment, the media have taken over many of the cultural and social functions of the institutionalised religions and provide spiritual guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages and a sense of community and belonging. Furthermore, the article considers the relationship between mediatisation and secularisation at three levels: society, organisation and individual. At the level of society, mediatisation is an integral part of secularisation. At the level of organisation and the individual, mediatisation may both encourage secular practices and beliefs and invite religious imaginations typically of a more subjectivised nature. Keywords: media; mediatisation; Nordic countries; popular culture; secularisation

Mediatisation has emerged as a new theoretical framework to revisit and reframe old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. In particular, the theory of mediatisation has proved fruitful for the analysis and discussion of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other fields or social institutions such as politics, family and religion. In general, mediatisation denotes the social and cultural process through which a field or institution to some extent becomes dependent on the logic of the media (Asp 1986; Hjarvard 2008b). Many analyses have demonstrated, for example, how the institution of politics in various ways has accommodated to the demands of both news and entertainment media (Stro¨mback 2008) at the same time as political parties and individual politicians build up media expertise and make use of various interactive media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook in order to re-establish contact with their voters. In a similar vein, religion as a social and cultural institution has in various ways become influenced by the media. The Mohammed Cartoon Crisis was a spectacular example of how public

*Email: [email protected] ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2011.579719 http://www.informaworld.com

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discussion about religion and religious conflicts became intertwined with various media dynamics (Eide, Kunelius, and Phillips 2008; Hjarvard 2010), but more importantly the mainstream, day-to-day religious beliefs and practices of both individuals and religious communities have also become dependent on and integrated with various media practices (Hoover 2006). Mediatisation is about long-term social and cultural change and as such it may be considered on par with other significant social and cultural transformative processes of high modernity, including individualisation, urbanisation, globalisation and secularisation. It is also highly interdependent with these processes; for instance the rise and spread of communication media have in some ways been a prerequisite for the globalisation of culture and commerce, but through the break up of national media systems globalisation has also changed the way media are produced, distributed and used. The aim of this article is twofold: first, it outlines the core elements of mediatisation theory with specific reference to the mediatisation of religion. The concept of ‘banal religion’ is also introduced to highlight some important ways in which media may rearticulate religious imaginations. Second, we will consider the relationship between mediatisation and secularisation. Here, the basic research question we will address is to what extent and in what ways processes of mediatisation are implicated in the secularisation of culture and society? This is of course a complex question to try to answer within the limits of a single academic article, so we will immediately try and delimit the scope of our inquiry. Media may have numerous and variable influences on religion depending on the types of religious practices and beliefs in question and in the general social and cultural context. For instance, mediatisation may imply something rather different if we compare the use of media by Pentecostal movements in India (Thomas 2009) with the use of media by protestant youth in northern Europe. For our discussion, we will delimit ourselves to the role played by media in the protestant, yet highly secularised societies of the Nordic countries. Furthermore, we will primarily consider the role of the mainstream and ‘weak’ religious beliefs and practices and not ‘strong’ religion (Kelley 1972). In the Nordic context, the most widespread form of religion may be categorised as ‘weak’ because it is characterised by a lesser degree of commitment to religious organisations and a higher degree of individualised belief. In the words of Grace Davie, mainstream religion in the Nordic countries may both entail ‘believing without belonging’, i.e. individualised faith outside the church, and ‘belonging without believing’, i.e. membership of a church is a widespread custom but with little or no impact on belief or behaviour (Davie 2007, see also Storm 2009). ‘Strong’ religions of Christian, Islamic and other origin do also exist in Nordic countries, and they have come to play a rather significant role in the representation of religion in the news media. The public image of Islamic fundamentalism is, not least, influenced by the workings of the media. However, the role of media in relation to ‘strong’ religions may be somewhat different from the case of ‘weak’ religions, among other things because ‘strong’ religions in some cases have become politicised and, therefore, dominate the news media’s political agenda in highly

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polarised ways. In contrast, ‘weak’ religion may not be high on the news agenda, but media may nevertheless play a significant role for the production, circulation and usage of ‘weak’ religious imagery and practices. The focus for our subsequent theoretical discussion is how mediatisation of ‘weak’ religion in the Nordic countries may or may not contribute to the development of secular views and practices. Mediatisation: Key assumptions Media theory has been dominated by two major paradigms. The first and oldest paradigm, theories of media effects, has been concerned with the ways media may induce change in attitudes and behaviour at both societal and individual levels. Studies of the effect of political propaganda and research into the possible consequences of exposure to violence on television screens are examples of this research paradigm. The second paradigm has focused on how individuals and social groups make use of media for various purposes. The so-called uses-andgratification approach (Rosengren, Wenner, and Palmgreen 1985) represents one strand of research within this paradigm and it has been studying how specific forms of media usage may be motivated by different types of social and psychological gratifications (e.g. diversion, social contact and prestige) that people may obtain through their media usage. More recent research within this paradigm has considered how usage of specific media and interpretation of various kinds of media texts play an important role for audiences’ construction of cultural identity and sense of public connection (Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham 2007). Although the first paradigm primarily considers what the media do to people, the second paradigm is mainly concerned with what people do with the media. The first paradigm has historically been trying to document powerful media effects, and the second paradigm has generally bestowed the audience with considerable power to pursue its own needs and construct its own cultural identity. Both of these paradigms have their merits and may provide useful insights. However, mediatisation theory occupies a third position and is sceptical of these paradigms, because both of them conceptualise media as something that is separate from culture and society. The effect paradigm suggests that media are an independent factor that may bring about change in either society or an individual actor. The second paradigm often involves a voluntaristic view of culture and society in which social actors are free to use or not to use media for their own purpose. In contrast, mediatisation theory stresses the interaction and transaction between actors and structures: ‘mediatization goes beyond a simple causal logic dividing the world into dependent and independent variables. Thus, mediatization as a concept both transcends and includes media effects’ (Schulz 2004, 90). According to mediatisation theory, media are not outside society, but part of its very social fabric. Media have become integrated into the workings of almost all types of social institutions at the same time as they have become responsible for

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the general society’s public as well as private communication. It is precisely through this social integration that media may exert their influence and be implicated in the transformation of social institutions, including religion. Schulz (2004) suggests that mediatisation brings about four types of changes: (1) media extend human communication and interaction beyond immediate time and space, (2) they substitute existing forms of face-to-face communication and interaction, (3) media and existing forms of communication and interaction amalgamate with one another and (4) social actors and institutions may accommodate to the logic of the media. In the case of religion, the television broadcast of a religious service extends the reach of the sermon to a mass audience. The audience’s reception of popular media fiction with quasi-religious content may provide a substitute for the reading of the bible, and when a minister in her sermon makes use of stories from the news media as a contemporary point of comparison, the news discourse amalgamate with a religious discourse. Finally, religious institutions are encouraged to accommodate to the demands of the news media (e.g. news criteria, presentation formats and so on) in order to be able to project their voice into the media’s public sphere. Mediatisation is characterised by a two-sided development. First, the media have developed into a more autonomous, independent institution in society. Previously, media were often in the service of another social institution. In the first part of the twentieth century, the political press served in many countries as a mouthpiece for particular political interests, parties and movements. Gradually during the twentieth century, the press gained more independence vis-a`-vis political parties and became news media governed by professional journalism. Similarly, other media such as books, journals and magazines were to a greater extent than now in the service of cultural, religious or scientific institutions, but today are primarily businesses governed by professional media considerations such as generic conventions, technological affordances and market demands. From a sociological perspective, institutional independence or autonomy is always relative, so the independence of the media institution from political institutions is to some extent achieved through an increased dependence on the commercial market. However, for the media, the relative independence acquired vis-a`-vis other social institutions and increased dependency on the commercial market is not necessarily a zero-sum-game. Because media institutions control a crucial and common resource, public communication in society as a whole, it has 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. Mass media, interactive media and combinations hereof have become commonplace, natural components of everyday life such as education, politics, family life and religion. Office work has been revolutionised by computers and Internet and the private household has become a media-saturated environment. Through this integration of media into other institutions, the media have partly been

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appropriated to serve the needs of these institutions, but at the same time these institutions have also been transformed in various ways. In the case of the family, both mass media and social media have opened the household for continuous contact with the external world, changed the family’s authority structures, transformed leisure activities and altered adult, youth and child identities (Buckingham 2000; Meyrowitz 1986). Through this two-sided development, the media are both ‘out-there’ in society as an independent institution with a logic of its own that other institutions must accommodate to, and ‘in-here’ as a part of the everyday experience of doing work, going to school and relaxing with the family. This duality is also reflected in the media’s simultaneous visible and invisible character. They are both highly visible as an institution commanding authority and attention, and invisible as part of the mundane flow of everyday life. As a consequence of this dual development, social interaction – within the respective institutions, between institutions and in society at large – takes place via the media. By the term media logic, we do not imply a singular, uniform logic that resides behind every kind of media activity. Media logic refers to the institutional, aesthetic and technological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic resources and operate with the help of formal and informal rules (Hjarvard 2008b; see also Lundby 2009). Media have a series of characteristics – a set of affordances (Gibson 1979) – that come to influence the ways that humans interact with and through the media. Thus, media logic comprises the various operational modalities by which the media enable, limit and structure human communication and action. In the case of journalistic media, news criteria and journalistic ideals of objectivity and the press as the fourth estate may constitute key elements of media logic. In the case of film drama, genre conventions and the star system may be other examples of the logic of the media. Media are not a unified phenomenon and the actual analysis of mediatisation processes must, therefore, take the specific features of the media in question into account. In spite of the differences, a convergence between various media has taken place during the last decades. Digital technology has created multimedia platforms that make individual media less distinct, and the continued economic concentration of media industries has also brought different media together under the same commercial and professional objectives (Bagdikian 2004; Deuze 2007). A hundred years ago the notion of ‘the media’ did not spring to people’s mind when talking about the press, the telegraph or the gramophone. In those days, they were considered as distinct communication technologies serving different social and cultural needs and purposes. Today’s widespread references to ‘the media’ bear witness to the fact that the media have emerged as an independent institution in society with a set of distinct modus operandi through which they control a collective resource. As a final clarification of the mediatisation concept, we will briefly consider its relation to the broader concept of mediation. Mediation refers to the act of communication via a medium, the intervention of which can affect both the message and the relationship between sender and receiver. For example, if a

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priest chooses to use a blog instead of a printed newsletter to communicate with his followers, the choice may well influence the form and content of his communication, whereas the communicative relationship between the priest and the followers will be altered due to the blog’s interactive features. However, the single instance of using one medium or another will not necessarily have any notable effect on religion as a social institution. Mediation describes the concrete act of communication by means of a medium in a specific social context. By contrast, mediatisation refers to a more long-term process, whereby social and cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a consequence of the growth of the media’s influence. Mediatisation theory involves an institutional perspective that considers social and cultural change at the meso-level. It is not a macro-theory of universal media developments that will produce a uniform outcome across all social and cultural domains. Neither is it a micro-theory that only looks at communicative mediations among individual actors in particular situations. By insisting on the institutional and historical situatedness of social interaction, mediatisation theory tries to steer free of both the media determinism of certain macro-level theories like medium theory (McLuhan 1969) and the inability of some micro-level analyses to produce any generalisations beyond the immediate mediated encounters in particular situations. The mediatisation of religion The mediatisation of religion is not a universal phenomenon that characterises all cultures and societies. It is primarily a development that has accelerated particularly during the last decades of the twentieth century in modern, highly industrialised and mainly Western societies. The nature of this development takes many forms and has various consequences depending on the specific religion, media and context in question, but, in general, mediatisation entails the transformation of three aspects of religion (Hjarvard 2008a): . The media become an important, if not primary source of information about religious issues. Mass media are both producers and distributors of religious experiences, and interactive media may provide a platform for the expression and circulation of individual beliefs. . Religious information and experiences become moulded according to the demands of popular media genres. Existing religious symbols, practices and beliefs become raw material for the media’s own narration of stories about both secular and sacred issues. . As a cultural and social environment the media have taken over many of the cultural and social functions of the institutionalised religions and provide spiritual guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages and a sense of community and belonging. To illustrate the first point about the media’s importance as a source of information about religious issues, we will briefly consider some findings of a

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recent national survey in Denmark about the ways in which people engage with spiritual issues (Table 1). The two most common ways of relating to spiritual issues are discussions with family and close friends and watching television programmes. The reading of non-fiction books and use of Internet websites and discussion are also a frequent channel for such engagement, and only 6.7% report that they have attended church ceremonies. The reading of novels, attending public lectures, going to cinema and listening to radio are not high up on the list, but these media are still more frequently mentioned than the reading of the bible (or other holy scripture), when it comes to the average Dane’s engagement with spiritual matters. The preferences for various media vary considerably according to the religious faith of the Danes. People who have a more traditional belief in a personal god are much more likely to go to church and read the bible, whereas people who believe in a spiritual force or are in doubt are much more likely to use the media to engage with these issues. The media’s importance as information source and discussion forum for issues relating to religion broadly challenges the authority of religious institutions. The places (churches, etc.), representatives (ministers, etc.) and texts (bible, etc.) of institutionalised religions have not only in general been relegated to a marginal position in society, but also, when it comes to issues concerning spiritual matters and religious institutions, no longer take centre stage. When media become an important source of information about religion and more generally the place to visit in order to engage with spiritual matters, the media acquire some of the church’s former power to define and frame religious issues. The ability to define what counts as religion, and what parts of religion which are worth talking about have to some extent been passed over from the church to the media. Table 1.

Ways of engaging in spiritual issues in Denmark in 2009.

Ways of engaging in spiritual issues Discuss with family and close friends Watch television programmes Read non-fiction books (e.g. philosophy and psychology) Visit websites/Internet discussions Attend church ceremonies Read novels Attend meetings/public lectures Go to cinema Listen to radio Read the bible (or other holy scripture) Other Did not engage in such issues

% 24.3 22.6 10.5 8.9 6.7 5.8 5.2 4.3 4.2 3.9 3.0 50.4

Notes: Question: ‘People may have an interest in spiritual issues, including faith, folk religion, ethics, magical experiences, life and death, and so on. If you are interested in such issues, how did you engage in them during the last couple of months?’ The respondents were asked to tick a maximum of three possibilities, thus, the sum exceeds 100%. The question was part of the research institute Zapera’s regular Internet based survey in Denmark – 1st quarter of 2009; N ¼ 1010.

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Through the agenda-setting function of the media (McComb 2004), both fictional and factual media influence the level and kind of information about religious issues that circulate in society at any given time. When media become producers and distributors of religious content, the institutional, aesthetic and technological characteristics of the media influence the framing of religion and the ways that audiences and users are supposed to interact with religion. Media may not only provide information about religion but also create narratives and virtual worlds that invite people to have experiences of a religious-like character. Furthermore, social media may provide a platform for discussions and community-building among people with similar religious orientation. Media in general, however, do not have any intention or obligation to propagate any particular religious views. On the contrary, mainstream media normally adhere to a secular worldview and are anxious not to give preferential treatment to any specific religious movement or belief. Media are not in the business to preach, but they may use existing religions for the media’s own purpose as a raw material in news reporting, television entertainment, film drama or computer games. The majority of the media’s representation of religion does not originate from the institutionalised religion or have close resemblance with religious texts. News media may of course quote religious spokespersons and a film like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ may occasionally build on sacred texts or myths, but the overwhelming part of media stories involving some kind of reference to religion is produced and edited by the media themselves in accordance with the demands of popular media genres. Through these genres, the media provide a constant fare of religious representations that blend elements of institutionalised religions with other spiritual elements in new ways. Computer games like World of Warcraft, novels and films like Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, television series like Heroes, LOST and X-Files, and their accompanying websites produced by media industries and fans alike, blend religious symbols and actions that invite religious interest and experiences. This bricolage (Le´vi-Strauss 1966) of religious elements constitutes a particular kind of religion, banal religion, that we will consider in more detail below. The media perform many of the social functions that in the past were conducted by religious institutions. The media not only transmit communication, but also serve a cultural function by creating and sustaining communities (Carey 1992). By opening the newspaper or watching the television newscast, the reader and viewer not only acquire information, but also enter a common social space, typically the national, regional, or local public and cultural sphere. Through their continuous representation of this common space, the media also demarcate who are inside and who are outside the community at the same time as they create a sense of belonging (or the opposite) among their audiences. More specifically, as the media have moved to the centre stage of society, they have come to perform a series of collective rituals that define and express important

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values and passages for society as a whole (Couldry 2003; Rothenbuhler 1998). This may be festive media events such as royal coronations or important national and international sports championships (Dayan and Katz 1992). The media also perform rituals in times of crises, for instance during catastrophes and war. During various tragic incidents such as the earthquake in Haiti 2010, the terror attack of 9/11 and the death of Princess Diana, the media were deeply involved in raising money for relief, symbolising the terror and providing guidance through society’s collective stages of sorrow (Kitch 2003; Wilson, Richards, and Woodhead 1999). Media may also provide smaller rituals that demarcate the small transitions of everyday life. The continuous flow of the day, the week and the time of the year once acquired its structure through the daily chiming of the church bells, prayers at specific times and particular seasonal religious feasts. Today, daily life has become structured, not least, through habits of media consumption, television time schedules and serial formats. Media may also provide a forum for worship of persons and artefacts. Fan cultures constitute an alternative social and interpretative community in which the fans often acquire a specific mode of reception of their sacred texts at the same time as they distinguish themselves from the ordinary, non-fan, consumption of the media products (Jenkins 2006). Fans do not necessarily believe that their media heroes and idols possess divine powers, but they do often treat them as if they were saints. Thus, the ritualised practices of fan communities may resemble religious practices and evoke similar emotions, but may also entail different assumptions and beliefs about the existence of a metaphysical realm. Like Hill (2002), we may not necessarily equate these fan cultures with religious communities, but the similarities bear witness to the fact that religious practices such as worship and idolatry can be re-contextualised into more or less secular media-centred activities. Finally, it is important to distinguish between the mediatisation of religion as a specific contemporary development of high modernity and the fact that religion has been involved in – and influenced by – various media activities throughout the centuries. As Eisenstein (1979) has demonstrated, Gutenberg’s printing press was of significant importance to the development of Protestantism among other things because the proliferation of printed Christian texts made it possible for the layperson to have a personal relationship with the Word of God. Similarly, missionary work has almost always involved some kind of mediation through books, magazines, television and so on. The difference between these religious mediations and the contemporary process of mediatisation is both qualitative and quantitative. First, mediatisation implies a qualitative different relationship between religion and media, as media have become an independent institution in society, whereas the media in earlier times were more of an instrument of other institutions such as politics and religion. Second, the sheer volume and intensity of media presence in all kinds of spheres in contemporary society make the influence of media on social interaction – including religion – more pronounced.

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Banal religion If the media have become an important producer and distributor of religious imagery, we need to ask what kind of religion the media tend to communicate. In order to answer this question, we will borrow a concept developed by Billig (1995) in his study of nationalism. According to Billig, nationalism is not only constructed and maintained through explicit nationalistic movements, strong national symbols or elaborate national mythologies, but is also a mundane and implicit phenomenon that is reproduced through the everyday experiences or occurrences within the nation and the inherent taken-for-granted assumptions about who belongs to the national community and who does not. Billig distinguishes between ‘waved’ and ‘unwaved’ flags, i.e. between the explicit and elaborate representations of the nation, and the implicit and unnoticeable representations that constitute a backdrop for our spontaneous ideas of what the nation and national belonging may involve. This second and less noticeable kind of nationalism is what Billig labels ‘banal nationalism’. Just as the study of nationalism needs to take the banal elements of national culture into account, the study of religion must consider the fact that both individual faith and collective religious imagination are created and maintained by a series of experiences and representations in the media that may have little or no relationship with institutionalised religions (see also Lynch 2007). Accordingly, we may make a distinction between the explicit and elaborate texts and practices of institutionalised religions such as Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism and so on and the implicit and bricolage-like religious texts and practices of the media. The institutionalised religions actively promote particular religious worldviews through ‘waved’ religious flags, whereas the media through their ‘unwaved’ flags of various religious elements construct a variegated backdrop of religious representations and practices. We will label this second kind of religion, banal religion. Banal religion may consist of elements taken from institutionalised religion, such as crosses, prayers and cowls as well as elements usually associated with folk religion, such as trolls, vampires and black cats crossing the street. Furthermore, banal religion may incorporate representations that have no necessary religious meanings such as upturned faces, thunder and lightning, and highly emotional music. These may, however, come to be associated with religious meanings through the media’s representational practices. Banal religion is banal in the sense that it is unnoticeable and does not constitute a highly structured proposition about a metaphysical order or the meaning of life, and it is religion in the sense that it evokes cognitions, emotions or actions that imply the existence of a supernatural agency. The iconography and liturgical practices of both institutionalised religions and folk religions become stockpiles for the media’s own production of factual and fictional stories about the world. In this way, the media distribute banal religious elements that may or may not be integrated into more coherent narratives with more explicit religious meanings. Owing to their industrial nature,

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the media talk about the world through generic conventions and accordingly the media’s banal religious imaginations become moulded according to popular genres such as melodrama, crime stories, news, fantasy, comedy and adventure. A few examples may demonstrate the notion of banal religion. The Indiana Jones adventure film series is saturated with all kinds of religious symbols and practices taken not least from Christianity but also from Buddhism, Islam and various forms of folk religions. Despite their pervasiveness and very explicit nature, the religious representations do not constitute a coherent religious narrative, nor are we, as the audience, to take them seriously as real religious symbols, practices or meanings. The religious representations are there to serve the conventions of the adventure genre and invest the story with mysticism, magic and excitement. Thus, the generic conventions put the religious meanings in brackets whereby they become unnoticeable as religious representations. Another example of banal religion is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series about teenage romance that is centred on encounters with supernatural phenomena such as vampires and werewolves and invested with Christian Puritan beliefs. Again, the supernatural phenomena are not so much an end in themselves but serve the generic demands of the love story. The existence of a supernatural world invests the love relationship with a sense of destiny and deeper meanings, and the dangers of vampires and werewolves serve to spiritualise the love relationship and make carnal lust a dangerous feeling. The Twilight series is a re-working of an old Victorian tale about love and desire, in which the use of the supernatural iconography from popular fantasy and horror genres refreshes the Victorian story so that it becomes suitable for a contemporary teenage audience. Both in the case of the Indiana Jones and the Twilight series, religious representations serve the particular media genre in question and the religious meanings are not to be taken too literally. Nevertheless, as banal religious representations, they come to provide a backdrop in modern society of the continued presence and relevance of religious artefacts, meanings and sentiments. Banal religion not only makes implicit references to religion, it also challenges the authority of existing religious institutions by disembedding specific religious meanings from their original context and rearticulating them in new ways. The notion of ‘banal’ religion does not imply that this kind of religion is inferior or less important than for instance folk religion or institutionalised religions such as Islam or Christianity. On the contrary, it may be considered as a kind of fundamental or primary kind of religion that is certainly not restricted to the realm of the media, but may occur in various social conditions due to basic characteristics of social cognition and emotion (Grodal 2009). From the point of view of human history and evolution, such banal religious representations may be considered as the first inventory of religious imagination that rests on the human ability to ascribe intentional agency to unexplainable occurrences (Barrett 2004), to make anthropomorphic projections into a metaphysical world (Guthrie 1993) and to blend ontologically distinct categories (Boyer 2001). In view of this, banal religious elements are often about the supernatural and intentional force behind natural phenomena such as the sudden strike of lightning or meteoric fallout (ascribing

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anthropomorphic agency), or about humans that can turn into werewolves or vampires (counterintuitive blend of categories such as human/animal and living/dead/eternal life). The weakness of banal religion is the absence of coherent and elaborate religious propositions, but its strength lies in the ability to create representations that arrest attention, evoke emotions and support memory. The media do not only spread elements of banal religion but may also distribute texts, practices and iconography from the institutionalised religions, e.g. television transmissions of sermons and regular newspaper columns by priests. Thus, banal religion is not synonymous with religion in the media and we may distinguish between mediatised forms of religion (religion that is highly influenced by media logic) and religious media (media that serve religious institutions). The former is highly influenced by banal religion, whereas the latter is dominated by institutional forms of religion. It should be added that by institutional religion, we imply the official religious texts and practices advanced by the priesthood. This official version of a particular religion has seldom been shared by the religious community in general who have often combined elements of folk religion with the official religion. Towler’s (1974) distinction between ‘official religion’ (the priesthood’s religion) and ‘common religion’ (the actual beliefs and practices held by the ordinary people) points to this difference. In view of the mediatisation of religion, the common religion has found a new and prominent source: the banal religion of the media. Secularisation In the final part of this article, we will address the relationship between mediatisation and secularisation with a particular focus on the Nordic countries that are characterised by a ‘weak’ religion. The concept of secularisation has been widely discussed and questioned, but we may initially take Peter Berger’s definition as a point of departure, in which he describes it as ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’ (Berger 1967, 107). Because ‘religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation’ of socially defined reality (Berger 1967, 32), secularisation implies that the maintenance of a religiously defined world is eroding. In particular, the pluralisation of life worlds in modern society has challenged the authority of religion by making religion just one among many possible sources to define and legitimate social reality. Peter Berger himself has later denounced the process of secularisation and stated that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today [ . . . ], is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken. (Berger 1999, 2)

A thorough discussion of the secularisation thesis is outside the scope of this article, but in relation to our argument – the interrelationship between media and

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religion – it is a mistake to denounce a general process of secularisation by pointing to the continued or even growing visibility of religion in society. The increased public presence of religion in many countries during the last decades may not be an endogenous or spontaneous resurgence of religion, but a complex reaction to and outcome of both an ongoing global modernisation process and a process of mediatisation that makes religion visible, but very often through the eyes of the media. Increased public visibility is not to be equated with a growing support for, or involvement in, religion. In particular, when we look at the Nordic countries, there is certainly very little evidence to support the idea of a religious revival. Despite a remarkable growth in the presence of religion in the public sphere (Rosenfeldt 2007), the typical indicators of religiosity (e.g. church attendance, baptism, belief and so on) for the general Nordic population signify a slow, but continued secularisation. As Norris and Inglehart (2004) and Inglehart and Welzel (2005) have demonstrated through extensive cross-national empirical analyses, secularisation is still an important component of the modernisation process of contemporary societies in Western Europe, USA and elsewhere. In other words, the idea that our contemporary world is ‘as furiously religious as it ever was’ (Berger 1999, 2) does not find support in these systematic and international comparative analyses. Although secularisation is still an integral part of modernisation, the demystification and disenchantment of the modern world neither was, nor is, an unambiguous process. As Campbell (1987) has demonstrated, the rise of the modern consumer was intertwined with the development of a romantic sensibility, and Ritzer (1999) has pointed to the fact that processes of disenchantment and re-enchantment seem to go hand in hand in modern consumerism. Inglehart and Welzel (2005) stress that the spread of selfexpression values in late modern societies may create a sensitivity towards diverse forms of subjectivised spirituality and non-material concerns. Similarly, we will argue that although mediatisation processes may often challenge the authority of institutional religion and de-sacralise social imaginations, this is certainly not a linear process. Precisely because media have become producers and distributors of religious symbols and practices, they may also serve to re-enchant the modern world in various ways. In order to consider the manifold influences of the mediatisation process in the Nordic countries, Dobbelaere’s (2002) distinction between three levels of secularisation – at the levels of society, organisation and the individual – may prove helpful. As regards secularisation at the level of society, both church and faith have been reduced to a niche in society. Although religion in earlier times played a central role for society as a whole, it has now been diminished to serve certain ritual and spiritual functions at the margins of modern society. In contrast, the media have moved to the centre stage of society. Earlier they were serving other institutions of society (such as politics, science and religion), but now they are increasingly governed by a logic of their own at the same time as they articulate society’s common experiences. In this sense, mediatisation is part of

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the very process of societal secularisation. Through social differentiation, the media come to acquire both independence and some of the social functions that the Protestant church used to serve in the past, and in this historical process, these functions are transformed into predominantly secular practices. With regard to secularisation at the level of organisation – that is the adaptation of the Protestant church to the secular norms of wider society – the role of media is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the church must, like many other organisations, adjust to the demands of media in order to be able to communicate with the external world. On the other hand, the church may also use new media such as the Internet for its own purposes, allowing it to communicate with its followers in new ways that may strengthen a sense of community. However, most research report that the use of new media by church organisations does not bring them in contact with many people outside the existing church members, and the spread of new media may also invite followers to adapt a less collective relationship towards the church (Hoover, Clark, and Rainie 2004; Lo¨vheim 2008). As Meyer and Moors (2006, 11) argue, media have ‘both a destabilizing and an enabling potential’ for religious establishments’ control of their communication, and media may, therefore, resemble a ‘Trojan horse’ that challenges the authority of institutionalised religion. Finally, as regards secularisation at the level of the individual, the media may challenge the individual’s normative orientation towards religion. In the era of late modernity, a new kind of social character or habitus has developed that involves the individual’s constant monitoring of his or her surroundings – including the media – for orientation and moral evaluation (Riesman 1950; Hjarvard 2009). As media produce and circulate various banal religious representations, these become the backdrop for the modern individual’s knowledge about religious issues and may, despite an overall tendency towards secularisation, encourage the subjectivised spiritual imagination. Furthermore, the media may also connect individuals to collective practices of worship and rituals and thereby provide the individual with a sense of belonging. Because the media circulate globally and to some extent are dominated by Anglo-American content and formats, the individual living in Nordic countries may become more acquainted with the religious representations of global and Anglo-American media than with the religious content of the Protestant churches in the Nordic countries (Petersen 2010). At the level of society, mediatisation is, therefore, an integral part of secularisation. At the level of organisation and the individual, mediatisation may encourage both secular practices and beliefs as well as more subjectivised religious imaginations. In actual social practice these levels are of course not completely separate but interact in various ways. For example, religious organisations may take up discussions of contemporary media culture in order to take advantage of individuals’ interest in various popular media narratives. This has, for example, been the case with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories that have

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received considerable attention and ‘counter-publication’ by religious organisations (Sky 2006). Media may to a limited extent perform a reproduction of religion in late modern society, but this religious role is volatile and certainly not of the same strength as the institutionalised religions. In that respect, the media pose the same – or an even stronger – challenge for the reproduction and transmission of religion than liberal religion poses. As Bruce (2001) had argued, liberal religion may often end up as a ‘weak’ religion because liberal religion is open to the pluralisation of lifeworlds which destabilises religious authority. In the same way, mediatised religion is not governed by an intention to preach a particular religious gospel, but on the contrary sensitive to the various social, cognitive and emotional preferences of media audiences and users. This is the strength of mediatised religion compared with the institutionalised religions, but also its Achilles heel: the media facilitate the very multiplication of lifeworlds that challenges religion’s authority to define the social world, and because of this the media will be a very unstable force to ensure the maintenance of coherent and stable religious worlds. In this way, mediatisation of religion primarily tends to be intertwined with the process of secularisation. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Prof. Knut Lundby, Oslo University, and the editors of this special volume for their comments on the article.

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