Religion at the 2023 Academy Awards

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 95th Academy Awards in January, contenders included several movies with religion angles and numerous actors with faith backgrounds.

A short list for the ceremony, to be held March 12, 2023, includes the eco-spiritual themes of Avatar: The Way of Water, revivalist roots in the Elvis biopic starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, themes of “faith and fatness” in The Whale with Brendan Fraser, the Bible Belt cultural cues that are felt but never fully seen in To Leslie’s melancholic storyline, and confessions and questions of whether God cares about miniature donkeys in The Banshees of Inisherin.

That’s not even to mention Stranger at the Gate. Directed by Joshua Seftel, the film is about an Afghan refugee named Bibi Bahrami and the members of her Indiana mosque, who come face to face with a U.S. Marine who has secret plans to bomb their community center. That’s when the Marine's plan takes an unexpected turn. The moving real-life story is considered a favorite in the best documentary short film category.

Beyond awards season, 2023 has a slew of new religion-related releases sure to catch audiences’ attention.

It’s safe to say that if you head to the movies – or catch the Academy Awards ceremony – this year, you’re likely to run into religion. But what might we learn about religion and culture from this year’s many intersections between faith and film?

The Theme is Religion, James Bond Religion

When you think of James Bond, you probably don’t reckon with whether or not the super spy is religious or if spirituality plays a major role in his action-filled escapades.

But if you look for it, religion is everywhere in James Bond:

• In the novel You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming casts James Bond in the role of a savior, prophesied by Shinto priests and embodying the saintly personage of the Catholic, dragon-slaying hero St. George.

• Live and Let Die — both the book and movie — heavily feature vodou and obeah, with a 007-emblazoned, customized tarot card deck specifically designed for the film.

• There is a “priest hole” and chapel on Bond’s family Scotland estate in the movie “Skyfall” (2012).

• Bond battles with a man dressed as a Nio guardian statue in the film, “The Man with the Golden Gun” and traipses through Cairo, Egypt’s Ibn Talun mosque in “The Spy Who Loved Me.”

• In 2015’s “Spectre,” Bond replies to his love interest Dr. Madeleine Swann's question, "Why does a man choose the life of an assassin?" with, "Well, it was that or the priesthood."

The list could go on, but suffice it to say: James Bond has a long and complicated relationship with religion.

On the occasion of the 60th-anniversary of the world premiere of the first James Bond film Dr. No in 1962 (October 5, 2022), I take a look at religion in the Bond universe and consider what we might have to learn about religion — and the world-famous super spy — in the process.

House of Cards, the Boss, & the Interplay of Religion & Pop Culture

There was a time when the realms of popular culture and religion did not meet — at least in an academic or analytic sense. The space betwixt, between, around, and interpenetrating each was relatively unexplored. Into that gap came God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture with the contention that to understand American religion today researchers must enter the interstitial spaces — the borderlands — that straddle the boundaries between religion and popular culture.

Today, the field of religious and popular culture studies is rich in both depth and diversity. From the exploration of popular culture as a “hyper-real” religion (Adam Possamai), to the examination of aesthetics and material religion (S. Brent Plate and David Morgan), audience-centered surveys of media (Stewart Hoover), and delineation of “authentic fakes” (David Chidester) the research on religion and popular culture is varied and voracious.

In part, the plethora of studies currently available and the profusion of contemporary projects emerged out of the work of McCarthy and Mazur in both editions of God in the Details. Recognizing that the field itself is fluid and that observations of present popular culture phenomena can be obsolete almost as quickly as they were relevant, the editors were sure to release a sequel to their original 2000 work with a 2011 second edition. The principles at play in their particular approach to religion and popular culture still stand.

To read the rest of my response to Kate McCarthy's interview with A. David Lewis at the Religious Studies Project...

Jesus Christ, Movie Star?

Think religion doesn’t matter at the movies? Think again. More specifically, think of the kerfuffle over the Church of England’s “Lord’s Prayer Commercial” and some of the UK’s biggest cinema chains denying the commercial ad space in its theaters.

As Reuters reported, “The 60-second ad, which shows a variety of Christians including a police officer, weight lifter and school children each saying one line of the prayer, had been due to be shown next month before screenings of the new Star Wars film ‘The Force Awakens.’” 

Not only was the Anglican church confused over the refusal, but social media and blogs erupted with robust conversations about the place of religious ads before movies, on television, and on radio. This scenario of scandal underscores the importance, and urgency, of considering the interaction of religion & pop-culture in its many, many, forms. 

That is why I am overwhelmingly excited to announce the release of Jesus Christ, Movie Star by Edward N. McNulty, in which I was humbled & honored to write the foreword. In that introductory statement I attempted to frame McNulty's work on Jesus and movies in the contemporary context of currents in religion & pop-culture. 

In the foreword I wrote that in a global culture, where internationalization occurs across, through, and in tension with various sites and conduits of ethnicity, technology, financial systems, media, ideological networks, and religions the images of Jesus not only matter to U.S. moviemakers, and consumers, but people throughout the world. Hence the importance to critically think through what depictions of Jesus mean — how they are represented, how they communicate, how they are interpreted, and how they reflect, critique, and interact with wider socio-cultural realities. 

This is even more pertinent because Jesus is such a popular movie star and it is helpful -- both theologically and from a religious studies perspective -- to consider him as such. As David Crumm of Read the Spirit wrote:

“ONLY ONE FIGURE rivals Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus as the longest-running characters in world cinema. As veteran-faith-and-film writer Edward McNulty points out in his new book, that unique, history-spanning figure is Jesus Christ, Movie Star.”

McNulty’s exploration of Jesus-figures, faith, and film gets us started down a path to not only catch the great importance of Jesus’ story as it was, but also — crucially — how it is transported and transposed in our current culture. To that end, I invite you to explore more about the work or to purchase it at Amazon.com to engage heartily in discussion with those with whom you watch, react to, and examine faith and film.

A.D. & How Biblical Movies are the New Global Cathedrals

This is awkward, but when I was growing up I had a huge crush on Roma Downey. As a kid, my family would tune into "Touched By An Angel" every single week and I was glued to the television to hear Downey’s Irish-tinged angelic messages float through the cathode tubes to my waiting ears. 

With that little confession session out of the way, let’s fast forward to February 2014. To say the least, I geeked out a bit (okay, a ton) when I had the opportunity to meet Roma Downy at a Son of God screening in Houston, TX. Long story short, I was asked by the local Christian radio station KSBJ to say a few words before pastors and faith leaders from the Bayou City got a sneak peak of the film. I got to talk to Downey after the film and we talked a bit about her husband — Mark Burnett — and her and the faith-based media empire they were building together. 

First it was History Channel’s mini-series “The Bible” and then the theater-released “Son of God.” They’ve since followed this up with their most recent made-for-television biblical epic: "A.D. The Bible Continues."

Last week, I got the opportunity to preview A.D. By now, those who wanted to see it have had the opportunity to watch it (SPOILER: Jesus dies…then rises again). While I could comment on its a-little-too-fast-paced narrative (like the Gospel of Mark on steroids), the over-reliance on British actors (is that supposed to make the Bible feel more sophisticated?), or the fact that Burnett and Downey are effectively preaching to the choir with a less than stirring media rendition of a story familiar to most of the people watching it already I am more interested in the reception of the Bible on TV than in its representation therein. 

Effectively, I am wondering why is Jesus such a money maker right now? Or, broader yet, why is the Bible such a hot movie ticket and television cash cow? 

I mean, we can’t count on two hands the number of biblical movies that have been released, or are coming out, to great fanfare in 2014 and 2015: Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Heaven is For Real, God’s Not Dead, “The Bible,” Son of God, A.D., Mary: Mother of Christ (the prequel to the Passion of the Christ), The Redemption of Cain (Will Smith’s vampire remake of the Cain and Abel story…wha?!), Killing Jesus, Finding Jesus, and the list could go on. 

To say the least, biblical movies and Christian films are big money right now. Toss in Bollywood's Hindu epics and other films with religious/spiritual themes and you've got "spiritual movies/TV shows" making up a significant slice of the film and television industry. But why? 

In my estimation, there are three reasons for the proliferation of biblical blockbusters and spiritually-themed television and media: 1) the persistence of religion and the re-enchantment of the cosmos in a global age; 2) the important role of media in belief in such an age; 3) the piety of visual culture and media. 

1) Persistence of religion, re-enchantment of the world. 

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It seems, by now, that the dim prophecies of the secularization theorists — that with the advent of modernity religion would fade into the background or go completely extinct in the face of a rising tide of secularization — were overblown at best. While secularization, at the public and private level, is worth studying and is still a potent force at work in the world there has by no means been a drop off, or even a marked decline, in religion across the world. 

Indeed, it might be said that there has been the complete opposite. That in the face of late modernity and its global and fast-paced dimensions our world has been re-enchanted with divine intimations and spiritual promptings. As individuals and communities are (re)introduced to a whole buffet of religious and spiritual options to help them make sense of themselves, those around them, and indeed the entire cosmos they are finding that religious options for explanation often outweigh secular ones. 

That doesn’t mean that secular values are never present, but they are increasingly consumed, co-opted, and existing side-by-side spiritual affirmations, worldviews, and lifeways. For examples, a staunch affirmation of the theory of evolution can go hand-in-hand with the Gaia principle and a thoroughly modernistic approach can typify the structural approach of a seemingly pre-modern religious terror organization. 

The modern and secular are viewed through the lens of the late-modern religious impulse at work within many of us. Those religious systems and spiritualities that are doing best are able to bridge the chasms wrought by modernism. They are able to weave together the global and the local, the transcendent and the imminent, the spiritual and the physical, the personal and the cosmic, the individual and the communal, the imagined and the material. These successful religions are furthermore personal, portable, and practical. 

This is where the religious use of the media, and the media’s use of religion, comes to the fore. 

2)  The important role of media in belief in such an age

Dr. Stewart Hoover, Director of University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, has said that “the media determine the transnational civil sphere in important ways.” Not only does media bear witness to religious and spiritual trends, reporting, recording, and re-imagining them in audio/visual dimensions, but the media also are a source of religion and spirituality, compete for devotees and practitioners, and are indicators of religious and spiritual change.  

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The best "biblical" movie ever. Period. 

So what is the proliferation of religious media indicating to us about the trends in the re-enchantment of the world? Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has written about what he calls the shift from "doctrinal religions" to “imagistic" ones. The doctrinal mode of religion is characterized by a top-down hierarchy, involving regularly repeated daily or weekly rituals, written texts, standard teachings, and lower levels of emotional arousal. Imagistic religion is less structured, with little or no hierarchy or doctrine, characterized by periodic festivals with high levels of emotion that mark a break from regular daily life. Imagistic religions utilize ecstatic trance states and altered forms of consciousness to bring about direct divine contact; doctrinal religion employs mediators to interpret the divine. Imagistic can also be imagined in its literary sense in which it refers to a poetic movement in England and the U.S. during, and around, World War I, that emphasized the use of ordinary, vernacular, speech and the precise presentation of images to arouse reaction. 

As religious adherents are looking to personalize, localize, pragmatize, and spiritualize their religious practice (over and against corporate, global, sentimental, and institutional forms of belief and practice) they increasingly look to media in order to do so. Hoover, again, said: 

“Media provide rich symbolism, visual culture, salient contexts and practices of social participation and identity, and opportunities to make and remake identities and social relationships to fit evolving patterns of ideas and action. The media are, further, the dominant and definitive source of what is socially and culturally important in modernity. Journalism acts in this way by setting the agenda of public and private social discourse. The entertainment and advertising media do so by creating and maintaining taste cultures through which identities are given value.”

— Stewart Hoover

Media then become our new “doubting Thomas” encounters. Whereas Thomas was bidden to touch Jesus' side and feel his wounds religion in the media age invites us to see Jesus’ side pierced via "cathode ray tubes" (to use Kurt Vonnegut’s anachronism for television) and to watch his wounds on the big screen. 

3) The piety of visual culture and media

And so it is clear that in an age when the world is desiring the spiritual, but not the religious and media is a near-perfect conduit for such religious pursuits it is no wonder that we desire “visual piety.” But what is its effect? 

In his book Visual Piety: The History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, Dr. David Morgan illustrates that popular visual images — including television images, velvet paintings, prayer cards, talismans, or movies — have assumed central roles in contemporary U.S. spiritual lives and religious communities. 

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Are biblical movies and TV shows the new cathedrals of our age? 

Not only does Morgan situate American Christianity’s practice of visual piety in the longue-durée of history showing that it is not necessarily new — that it does not represent the rupture we think it does when history is taken into effect (think of icons, stained glass windows, sacred paintings, etc.) — but he also contends that religious aesthetics must be viewed in the context of social reality. That is to say, we have to understand what is happening with us in order to understand what is happening with the proliferation of religious movies and TV shows, etc. 

Morgan wrote, “The point behind the visual culture of popular piety is not principally an admiration of skill, which pertains to the manipulation of a medium, but admiration for the object of representation…We can therefore speak of beauty in visual piety as consisting…in the reassuring harmony of the believer’s disposition toward the sacred with its visualization.” 

I quote Morgan at length here to silence all the critics who complain about Kirk Cameron’s crappy acting in, well, pretty much any Christianese films he makes these days. It’s also to contend with those who want to critique A.D. based on its visuals or its score or all those British accents. Morgan is making the point that these evaluations are not all that important. 

What really makes visual piety in the form of biblical movies and Christian television beautiful is its representation of the divine object itself — in this case the beholding of the Trinitarian God of Christianity (but we could also extend this and apply it to Bollywood's representations of Hindu epics or negatively to the destruction of, and reticence to accept, images of the divine in Islam). 

Media, specifically in this case television and movies, embody and represent the very rise of modernity that was to be the harbinger of rapid social change and secularization. The likes of Marshall McLuhan warned of the advent of a new age with the introduction of digital and screen media and the secularization theorists were ridden with a foreboding prophecy of atheism and non-religion just on the horizon. What we have instead found is that all forms of media — from comic books to computer screens, from smart phones to cinemas — have been imbued with sacred images and representations. This means that instead of chasing religion out, media has presented a new conduit for visual piety. Media has become a new way for admire “the object of our [religious] admiration” and over and against the dangers of secularization, late modernity, and pluralism, attest to the reality, the portability, and the visual-tangibility of “our God” via the screen whether we be Christian or Jewish, Hindu or Neo-Pagan.

To sum up, A.D. should not be evaluated based on its award-winning effects, writing, production, acting, or lack thereof. Instead, it should be appraised as a benchmark of the re-sacralization of the world in a new media age. As media and modernization threaten to strip us of our religious imagination these new forms of visual piety are important mediums for confirming, or challenging, our religious curiosities and convictions and bearing us forward as religious beings in a global age. In effect, they are the cathedrals and temples of our age, where we go to encounter the divine.

With that, expect more biblical movies and Christian-themed television shows to come. Just as the faithful have given of their time, talents, and treasures over the years to build edifices to their religious sentiments and to bear testament to the divine in brick and mortar, stone and stained-glass, so too we will shell out our hard earned cash to see a movie that reassures us of our beliefs in visually appealing forms such as TV shows and movies. 

Has video killed the religion star? An interview with Dr. Stewart Hoover on religion & media

It doesn't take a PhD to see that religion and the media often intersect, intermesh, and play off one another. Whether it's a commercial about cell phone charging starring God as the protagonist (read "#SuperBowl religion") or how al-Dawla al-Islamiyya (ISIS) uses social media to advance its cause through digital propaganda, religion & digital media are constantly in conversation as forces in the globalized world.

*For more on religion & culture, follow @kchitwood

While it may not take a PhD to recognize this interchange of religion & media, it may take one to navigate its ins and outs and properly apperceive its many nodes and nuances. Last month (January) I had the honor of meeting Dr. Stewart Hoover of the University of Colorado Boulder at the University of Florida's "Religion & Culture in a Digital Age" conference. 

Dr. Hoover is Professor of Media Studies and adjoint of Religious Studies at UCB. He is the founder/director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture and his research interests focuses on the media audience and reception studies. He utilizes approaches founded in the fields of cultural studies, anthropology, and qualitative sociology. He is well-known for his work theorizing and explaining media and religion, particularly the phenomenon of televangelism and also, more recently, religion journalism. 

What follows is my interview with Dr. Hoover talking about his current interests, getting a broad survey of the field, and also some discussion of what opportunities this area of study might offer both the serious academic looking for a topic to dive into (ah hem, grad students) and the arm-chair religious student attempting to apperceive the dual forces of religion and media in the 21st-century. 

What got you interested in studying the intersection of, and interplay between, religion and media? 

I’ve always been interested in media and in culture.  I grew up in a small town with a diverse ethnic and religious culture, and was I think conscious from a young age of how cultures define people and vice versa.  Since it was a small, rural, community, I also became interested in how metropolitan cultures condition peripheral ones and how those at the peripheries negotiate their relations with the wider world.  And, religion was an important element of these processes, and has only grown in prominence in the years since thee 1979 revolution in Iran, the rise of Evangelical politics in the US, the growth of global Pentecostalism, and then of course 9/11.

And, of course, at the time I was starting out, there were few of us doing this, so it was a way of having a voice and a project.

What are you interested in at the moment or working on right now?

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Dr. Stewart Hoover is Professor of Media Studies and adjoint Religious Studies professor at University of Colorado Boulder. 

We have a research project underway with colleagues  abroad which is a comparative analysis of media ambivalence in daily life. A lot of ambivalence is religiously-based, but we find fascinating layers and embrications in the ways media cultures work into the lives of our informants.

I’m also developing work in the media and religious authority, and in connection with that, on the history of Establishmeent or Ecumenical Protestantism in relation to media and media culture.

How relevant is this discussion and why do people, in academia and at the popular level, need to be thinking about it?

It is very relevant.  Academic and other discourse lags way behind in understanding the extent to which contemporary culture is inflected with religion, with near-religion, with anti-religion, and with spiritualities of various valences and the extent to which you cannot understand this without attending to media cultures. So, across a range of fields, we have an incomplete scholarly project as a result of this neglect.

You wrote, “It has been argued that the media are today the most credible sources of social and cultural information, setting the agenda and the context for much of what we think and know about reality. Religion, which addresses itself to such questions, must be expressed and experienced differently as a result” and intimated that religion and media compete for the central constructive roles in the formation of social solidarity. Explain this: 

It is simply that the media must be taken for granted. They are ubiquitous and definitive. They are where we spend our time, they are what we attend to, they are what we talk about with each other, they are thee common language and common cultures today.  To exist today, institutions and cultures and communities must increasingly exist in thee media. Media languages set the agenda of what we talk about, the terms of those conversations, and they traffic in, and influence the broad public consensus where such a thing exists.  Religions, to the extent they are public (and they are increasingly so) must submit themselves to the demands of the mediated cultural marketplace.

Religion and media can collide, but they can also combine and crossover each other at times. Talk a bit about the sometimes positive, and negative, senses of the interaction between religion and media. 

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Dr. Hoover's book Religion in the Media Age is an excellent expansion of the topics covered in this blog. Find it HERE.

I think that religion and media do, in fact, enhance one another. The most fundamental way this is true is that the media sphere today is a primary sphere for the generation of religious symbols, discourses, communities, affinities, etc.  this is even so for the established and historic confessional faaiths, but is more so of course for emergent traditions, discourses, communities, and subgroups.  Media culture is producing or generating religion today, more than ever before, and that is not so much a collision or even an interaction between “media” and “religion” as it is an entirely new space of generation. This is most obvious in digital media, where my colleagues and I have been theorizing about emergent “third spaces of digital religion.”

You mentioned that it is important to situate the study of religion and media in its historical context. How do we avoid the allure of the “newness” of such a subject? 

Through intellectual rigor and discipline.  Good histories demonstrate the utility of not being caught up in the present. We need to attend to and listen to those.

Most people would have a familiarity with Macluhan’s “the medium is the message.” You take a more meaning-based approach. Why this is preferred over a medium approach?

Among the several problems (for me) with “medium theory” are two primary ones. First, as it is applied, it is over-general.  Its claims are not specific enough and thee kinds of “effects” or implications it proposes are hard to specify and attribute to media, mediation, etc. A second problem is one of scale, medium theories tend to look on too grand a level, and fail to helpfully describe what is happening in spheres of actual, historically-embedded practice.  They also often stumble into a kind of class-based “taste” arguments, where the kinds of meanings and functions attributed are judged in nearly moral terms.  I’ve always found it much more enlightening to do field research on what people actually do  with media, and build theory “up” or “out” from there.  That allows us to see the many ways that media and mediation are integrated and layered into the fabric of lived lives, and to see that media “affects” of the kinds suggested by medium theorists are often too grand.

What is the relevance of the “globalization” or “transnationalism” discussion in the realm of religion and media studies? 

This would be a treatise if I actually answered it. I’ll just say that it is more obvious all the time that we must look at things in a global context.  Not only do media enable religious and cultural transnationalisms of a variety of kinds.  A global view provides powerful insights into the meanings and functions of mediated religion in many local contexts.

What religion, in your opinion, is the most mediated? If you don’t feel you can answer this, why not? 

Wow. Lots of pretenders.  My favorite to look at now, because it is so complex, is neo-Pentecostalism.  But is it the “most” I don’t know…

What BIG question or area of study would you recommend a young scholar or interested individual go out and tackle in this field? 

History, history, history……that is, take on historiography and historicism in relation to thee range of phenomena that seem to present themselves ever and always in media and religion.

That, and authority, and the ways that structures of authority condition or determine or afford our understandings of these important questions

Thank you Dr. Hoover for your time and consideration and being part of the conversation here at www.kenchitwood.com!

Faith Goes Pop?

Taylor Swift. My new blog venture begins with Taylor Swift. What could go wrong? 

I am excited to announce a new project I am (re)launching with Read the Spirit entitled "Faith Goes Pop." 

The aim of the "Faith Goes Pop" blog is a "bold foray into the unknown and untamable intersections between, and manifestations of, religion and popular culture." Like Taylor Swift, I am "going pop" and jumping head first to combine sightings of the intersections between "faith" and "pop culture" with winsome and witty commentary that will hopefully lead to a book project down the road. But, I need your help! 

So, I invite you to check out the blog this week and share it your friends. It goes "full launch" with Read the Spirit next week when I will be featured on their e-mail blast and magazine front page. Exciting times, thanks for coming along with me on this journey! 

*For more on religion & culture, follow @kchitwood.

*Read the Spirit is a publishing company, an online magazine and a network of writers connecting readers with the most important voices in religion, spirituality, interfaith and cross-cultural issues. Read the Spirit strives for accuracy, balance and fairness.