Abstract
With the proliferation of new media, social media and changing technology, there have been varying degrees of attention paid to legacy media and how users interact with them. Given the flurry of research focusing on the shifting landscape of media, Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred locates its research firmly in the realm of traditional print and broadcast media, and justifiably so. The authors analyse media representations of religion that fit within Hoover and Lundby’s (1997) approach of a ‘wide range of understandings of religion, leaving space for both the more narrow, substantive definitions, and for wider more functional definitions that address the religiosity of seemingly nonreligious phenomena’ (p. 7). Knott, Poole and Taira’s book is relevant and timely as part of a field of study, media and religion, that is growing and shifting with a changing technology and consistently shifting notions of what qualifies as the religious and how that operates in society. Their study creates important categories for analysis, differentiating between conventional religion or the ‘organized and official religions’, common religion – ‘those beliefs and practices associated with the supernatural but beyond the churches and other religious organizations’ (p. 41) – and the ‘secular sacred’ which includes all those references to ‘secularism, atheism and other deeply held philosophical perspectives which do not make reference to or depend upon supernatural agents such as God, Allah, spiritual forces or people’. All of this comes in order to understand questions about how secular and religious belief and values are portrayed, what that portrayal reveals about society and how those portrayals are experienced by audiences. A recurrent question and theme was whether Christian traditions were being marginalized by secularization and whether religion was indeed a private matter.
While the book is highly context specific (to the United Kingdom), the theoretical frameworks and attention to historical treatments of religion within a cultural and political context are well received and offer potential applications beyond this particular study. Furthermore, the important attention to treatment of mainstream and dominant religions in the media as a part of maintenance of cultural heritage is relevant to multiple contexts and regions. Through an analysis of various interactions of religion and the media in traditional media sources, the book provides a strong context from which to build future research and uses a methodology that can be extended to other regional settings. The book continues the research of many others who seek to move away from studying the media and religion as separate spheres. The authors take account of the fundamental debates and perspectives in the field from the distinction between the media logics of mediatization and the religious agency in mediation that the mediatization theory neglects. One of the central research claims examined is whether religion is mediated through secular institutions and shaped according to the logics of those media (mediatization theory) or whether religious organizations and individuals in fact have agency in setting media agendas. This is a central question that benefits greatly from an empirical analysis. By using empirical data from 1982 and 2008, the authors give a basis for understanding how the representations have shifted over time in the British print media and on television. Although the analysis of traditional media is important, it would have provided interesting nuance to see how social media and new media shifted the discussions that took place in the second content analysis starting in 2008. It would be beneficial to determine how the ability of audiences to engage with media online shifted the narrative in mainstream media, if at all. Since much of the research into the print media took place in digital formats, it is difficult to fully separate traditional media from new media. Despite that reservation, the content analysis provided is helpful and relevant. Of further value, these data are tested through small-scale focus groups that while not producing generalizable data, provide important audience research that substantiates the claims made by Knott, Poole and Taira about the way media portrayals of religion have shifted over a 30-year period.
The chapters build off one another with early chapters providing context in the form of social and historical information about the status of secularization and re-sacrilization in Britain, understandings of mediation and mediatization and the role of multiculturalism. In order to cohesively analyse various aspects of many faiths and of the religious in the media, the authors situate their analysis around several claims about religion, media and society. The most striking claim considered in the book is that media coverage of religion (specifically Christianity) has been marginalized as society has become more secular, media professionals are more secular and thus biased against religion and the media have become a form of religion in themselves. In chapters 3–6, the authors then focus on using empirical data to provide an analysis of these claims, among others, through examinations of the secular sacred, Christianity, Atheism and Secularism and popular beliefs. What was of particular interest in these chapters is that references to luck, superstition and religious mythologies that have been removed from their traditional religious referents were analysed alongside references to conventional, institutionalized religion. The analysis focused on the explication of the religiosity of various news events that took place in the weeks of study during both 1982 and 2008, and these events were outlined and examined through the language used in media. Importantly, quantity of references to a certain theme, religion or idea was not taken to mean that that idea was more significant than it had been previously, instead social and cultural factors were taken into account to determine whether in fact representations had changed since the 1980s. While the chapters examined how media reflect and shape the language of religion, the audience analysis provided important depth in recognizing how effective that shaping actually was. Chapters 7 and 8 then focus on case studies of two news events that were heavily mediated in Britain, the case of Geert Wilders and papal visits in the 1980s and 2000s. These chapters provide insight into the way the media manage stories taking place in society and culture and in fact create larger media events from them.
As a reader, I found the discussions of Islam and its representation as a minority religion particularly interesting. The attention to the way difference had become the common thread in reporting on Islam was situated effectively in discourses on diversity, discrimination, ethnocentrism and Othering. This combined with reception studies provided a hopeful view that the ‘us versus them’ thesis so often perpetuated by the media, including that analysed herein, was not always taken up by audiences and indicated a critical agency among some audiences. The attention to other minority religions in Britain was insightful if only a cursory glance at them. A deeper examination of those traditions as they relate to the research claims that guided analysis would have provided a more nuanced view of each claim and the conclusions this research facilitated.
As a part of the growing and changing field of media and religion, the attention paid to the claim about religions, media logics and agency of religious organizations can lend important insight into the discussions on mediation and mediatization. The local and regional analysis can also provide insight into the fact that mediation and mediatization may operate distinctly in varying contexts. The attention to secularization and the desired privacy of the religious would be much different in the context of the United States, for example. The questions that animate this discussion are interesting and insightful: Who gets to determine the agenda and content of British mainstream media religion? Are religious people and ardent non-believers active users and shapers? Are they instrumental in changing media discourses of religion and the secular sacred, or do media professionals have it all their own way in constructing religion according to the logic of the media? (p. 185)
The fact that this research showed that individuals are allowed to illustrate a particular viewpoint, although within the greater confines of a ‘higher media purpose’, illuminates the true complexity of the interactions of media and religion (p. 186). Overall, this book is a valuable contribution that pays close attention to important debates within the field and makes effective use of contextual and cultural background in combination with analysis of representations of current events, to engage in a strong empirical study with relevant conclusions.