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.

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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!

Nintendo's Power Glove & the Hand of God: Religion & Culture in the Digital Age

Over the last decade the study of religion has expanded its multidisciplinary reach by looking to see the ways in which religion and culture intersect with media and digital technology. Questions range from "How is religion represented in the media?" to "How are religious organizations using media and technology to promote their faiths" to more ambitious questions about the role media plays in shaping, and perhaps deputizing the role of, religion. 

As Dr. Stewart Hoover wrote in Religion in the Media Age, “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.” So too must the study of religion. Increasingly, individual and communal religious actors are engaging with media religiously or encountering religion through various forms of digital media.

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The University of Florida's religion department is interdisciplinary in nature. In approaching religion, the program  encourages students to draw on work in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. 

However, we would be naïve to posit that it is only the forces of media that impact religion and not vice-versa. As the twenty-first century comes of age, religion continues to prove a potent local, regional, and global force that is shaping the way we interact with, view, and create media. Indeed, both media and religion compete for the central constructive roles in the formation of social solidarity and thus, studies merging the two streams of cultural production are necessary and beneficial to understand religion, and/or media, in the digital age. Hence, the purpose and pertinence of the Graduate Student Conference "Religion and Culture in the Digital Age" held January 24, 2015 at the University of Florida. 

The conference sought to bring together graduate students from diverse academic backgrounds and scholars who conduct research in the digital humanities. The daylong event included three panels and a roundtable with Dr. David Morgan (Duke University), Dr. Stewart Hoover (University of Colorado at Boulder), Dr. Dragan Kujundzic (University of Florida - Jewish Studies), and Dr. Sid Dobrin (University of Florida - English). 

The papers presented at the conference, and the topics covered, were diverse and wide-ranging. What follows is a short overview of each panel and the roundtable talk, covering highlights and the most pressing issues and/or questions that emerged from each. 

Panel 1: The Creation of Sacrality and the Role of the Audience (Commentator: Dr. Terje Østebø)

At the fear of being partial to my own paper, I will start with the other two panelists. Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera (University of Florida) presented about the role of the audience in transcendental spiritual films, discussing films like Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007) and Don Hertzfeldt's "The Meaning of Life" (2005). Entitled, "Film as Temple" the presentation artfully explored the ways in which spiritual movies can often move the viewer beyond themselves much like sacred texts and ritual.

Alfredo Garcia (Princeton University) presented the results of a sociological study entitled, "Tolerance in an Age of Social Media: An Experimental Design Examining Muslims and Mosques in the United States," in which he and a co-author found that having a Muslim friend, or even interacting with Muslims on social media, did not significantly alter attitudes about the building of mosques in the U.S. 

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Trying to let the bow-tie do the talking for me. 

Honored to share alongside these two scholars, my paper presented the findings of my two-month long ethnographic experiment as a participant-observer on the "Latino Muslim Facebook Group." Latina/o Muslims in the United States are quadruple minorities (Latina/o and Muslim in the U.S., Latina/o in the Muslim community, Muslim in the Latina/o community). As such, Latina/o Muslims seek to create their own identity and supportive community. While national para-mosque organizations and local entities create some sense of shared identity, new media, specifically social media, play an increasingly important role in constructing a cohesive Latina/o Muslim community and creating causeways for greater inclusion in the global umma. By liking one another’s posts (the most common form of interaction on the page), Latina/o Muslims are doing more than having fun on social media. They are intimately, and actively, engaged with creating a hybrid community, crafting a worldview on the borderlands between the digital and real, between being Muslim and Latina/o, and shaping a Latina/o Muslim identity that will be applied online and in the “real” world. 

The discussion following this panel revolved around questions of methodology in the digital humanities and whether or not there is such a thing as an "ethnography" of a digital sociality. 

Panel 2: Digitized Hinduism (Commentator: Dr. Phillip Green)

Yael Lazar presents on "digital darshan" as Bhakti Mamtora, Nick Collins, and Dr. Phillip Green look on. 

Following this discussion and some refreshments provided by Harvest Thyme Café, Yael Lazar (Duke University) presented her paper examining the use of the internet and its shaping of Hindus, and Hinduism, through the practice of "digital darshan." Darshan, (Sanskrit: "auspicious viewing") is the beholding of a deity, guru, or sacred object (esp. in image form). The devotion is perceived as reciprocal in some traditions and the idea is that the viewer will receive a divine blessing. Some Hindus are taking to the internet to perform darshan and receive their blessings digitally, though the potency of such a practice is contested. 

Bhakti Mamtora (University of Florida) examined the websites, social media sites, and mobile apps of Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, known as BAPS, a major Swaminarayan organization. She argued that through sleek designs and highly visual and interactive elements, which introduced immediate and personal experiences (e.g. "Daily Satsang"), BAPS is able to help craft technologies that aid individuals in their spiritual endeavors and contribute to the formation of a global tradition.  Mamtora emphasized how this area of Hindu culture and practice, in addition to Lazar's study, needs more focused research and necessitates a focus on practice to understand the multiple levels of meaning that individuals ascribe to online practices as active social agents in community construction in a digital landscape. 

She argued that through sleek designs and highly visual and interactive element, which introduced immediate and personal experiences (e.g. “Daily Satsang”), BAPS is able to craft technologies that aid individuals in their spiritual endeavors and contribute to the formation of a global tradition.

Nick Collins (University of Florida) rounded out the panel by talking about the "digital super nature" available to Buddhist practitioners experiencing the anomic experience of a fractal mind and self. He called the various media online and the networks of connections available to practitioners as an "invisible school" offering an opportunity to enter into the Vedic mind. He wrote, "In the contemporary digitally mediated cultural landscape, the traditional lineage lines, forms, and structures of cultural systems, including religious traditions, have become 'cut loose' from their (prior) cultural bodies and aggregately integrated into a single, all inclusive spatial-temporal environment, a discarnate, nonlocal, and ever-present now represented by the interconnected digital media landscape."

He closed by emphasizing the importance for the scholar of such a tradition to "enter into experiential contact with such practices" and "Be a Weirdo" in both society and academia. 

Panel 3: The Mediazation of Myth and Learning (Commentator: Dr. Robert Kawashima)

The final panel of the day focused on Christian traditions. Chris Fouche (University of Florida) talked about the potential promises and pitfalls for seminaries and other theological institutions offering distance education while at the same time seeking to form deep Christian community. Using Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Finkenwalde seminary project as a litmus test of sorts, Fouche recommended hybrid models for online/offline theological education and underlined just how difficult online education is in the creation of authentic community. 

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Michael Knippa brings McLuhan into the digital age, arguing the Bible might be seen differently now since "the medium is the message." 

Michael Knippa (Concordia Seminary, St. Louis) discussed the transformation of interpretation and meaning of biblical texts due to their various media: scrolls, codices, amulets, collections, book form, and digital representations. Pulling on the theory of Marshall McLuhan ("the medium is the message") he argued that in the shift from print to digital we can't pretend that the digitization of the Bible will not have an impact on its reception and its message. He offered that digitized Bibles will transform our methods & theories of interpretation, perhaps more mythologically. Only time will tell.

From the up the road in religious studies land, Carson Bay (Florida State University) examined various Christian reactions to the film Noah released last summer (2014). He discussed the film's platform and whether or not it was perceived as legitimizing or delegitimizing certain narratives in the Bible. Regardless of various negative lines on the reception of Noah among Christians, evangelicals used the movie as culturally-relevant tool for proselytization, with attendant theological corrections (e.g. with 'the Watchers' and Noah's abortive mania). 

The discussion following this panel was the most lively of the day as the discussion centered around McLuhan's theoretical system and whether or not it was viable. As Dr. Hoover mentioned, these young scholars were entering into a very long, and historical, discussion about media and religion. That was where he, and others, would begin during the roundtable discussion that rounded off the day. 

Roundtable Discussion (Moderator: Dr. Manuel Vásquez)

Featuring four scholars each with their own unique, and significant, contributions of the field of religion and digital humanities, the roundtable discussion was the highlight of the conference. 

David Morgan's major interests are the history of religious visual and print culture and American religious and cultural history. He opened by reminding students that this area of study "is not always about being sexy, it's about contextualizing the new to give it historical depth." He further offered that it is healthy and helpful to "bring a hermeneutics of suspicion to media studies and the investigation of religion and material culture in the digital age." Speaking to earlier discussions about ethnography in the digital age he underlined the need for hybrid methods. He said, "There's no 'pure' digital ethnography. We have to develop the tools to track people between both online and offline worlds."

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Dr. Manuel Vásquez, Dr. David Morgan, and Dr. Dragan Kujundzic listen as Dr. Sid Dobrin presents his angle on religion, interpretation, and the digital age. 

Echoing Morgan, Stewart Hoover, Professor of Media Studies and founder/director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, underlined that while "the 'digital age' is different, we must view religion and media through an historical lens...looking at the issues our research presents over time." Furthermore, he talked about how he is not interested in studying the media on the screen people are viewing, but watching the people who are watching the media. Beyond this ethnographic perspective, he encouraged researchers in this area to think cosmopolitan-ly. He closed stating, "religious transnationalism, globalization, and the like must be considered in our study of religion & digital media."

Kujundzic and Dobrin each added their own perspectives, with the former focusing on the post-modern lens and the study of religion and media and the latter bringing his perspective from literature studies to the consideration of religion in print media, film, music, and digital media. 

Feeling as if they had drank water from a firehose all day long, the participants and presenters retired to the Keene Faculty Center for a reception to interact and continue the discussion. 

As wine glasses clinked and the conversation circled back to the various topics presented throughout the day the general conclusion was that the day was a success. Not only were the papers and topics scintillating and interesting, each in their own regard, but the atmosphere of the conference was prosperous in that it brought together core academics and new scholars to discuss an apposite interdisciplinary field that is of special interest to anyone concerned with religion, digital media, or the intersection and intermeshing of the two in the 21st-century and beyond.   

Special thanks to Dr. Manuel Vásquez, Dr. David Hackett, Dr. Terje Østebø, Dr. Phillip Green, and Dr. Robert Kuwushima for their support of the conference. Thank you also to the conference's graduate student organizers Prea Persaud, Jason Purvis, and Caroline Reed for their efforts in making this first annual grad conference with #UFreligion a major triumph and contribution to the fields of religious studies and digital humanities.