Quoting God: How Media Shape Ideas about Religion and Culture

by Claire Hoertz Badaracco (Editor)

Quoting God charts the many ways in which media reports religion news, how media uses the quoted word to describe lived faith, and how media itself influences―and is influenced by―religion in the public square. The volume intentionally brings together the work of academics, who study religion as a crucial factor in the construction of identity, and the work of professional journalists, who regularly report on religion in an age of instant and competitive news. This book clearly demonstrates that the relationship between media culture and spiritual culture is foundational and multi-directional; that the relationship between news values and religion in political life is influential; and that the relationship amongst modernity, belief, and journalism is pivotal.

Genres: Religion

Paperback

First published May 5, 2005

Reviews

[Susie Meister · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is interested in the cultural identity of God as ascribed to the Unknown by secular forces such as global news and mass media. Includes essays on a variety of ways religious culture has become intertwined with secular culture, blurring the lines between the sacred and profane. Concepts include: religious imagination on the journalism of people of faith, the ambivalent relationship between fundamentalism and modernity, and the Appalachian resistance to outsiders (including missionaries, social workers, and government). Claims the relationship between religion and media is not a dialogue, but a "series of overlapping conversations." (263)

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is honestly a pretty forgettable book, which is too bad because the subtitle makes a promise that I would have liked to see fulfilled more strongly. This book is a collection of essays on media and religion, aiming to foster better understanding across the often-described (if less often proven) divide. For scholars of religious studies, it perpetuates some of the problems – fuzzy definitions, equation of religion with "faith" and other Western Protestant concepts, etc.

Intro: Badaracco describes media and religion as "multilogual" and "blurred, indivisible, and inherently connected" (2). This echoes arguments by Silk and Lule that news media, although often stereotyped, if not derided, as secular, are in fact beholden to a set of religious values operating under the surface of the reporting and writing. She also astutely points out, contrary perhaps to our assumptions, that *neither* religion nor news media are democratic. News media may prize democracy and use their reporting to uphold democratic values, but like religion, they "rely on the construction of an imaginary loyalty to a larger group" – the economic infrastructure of capitalism (4). (Of course, one could argue any group serving a gatekeeping function is inherently not democratic, but that's a question more of practices than values). In any event, the relationship between the two spheres is "foundational" to either the consolidation or fragmentation of society, so scholars of religion and journalists should get along better than they do (6-7).

Here's my Big Question reading this book. News media obviously rely on words, texts, discourse, and studying its interaction with media made sense in this vein so long as the academic conversation was also all about discourse and symbolism. But now that we're talking lived religion and material culture and decentering the mind-body dualism of Descartes and the definitions of religion based on them (like Geertz's) ... how do we then study media and religion? Certainly, there is material culture here. There's also a social component that we can trace back to mythological storytelling that is embodied, not merely thought. Materialism in the old Marxist tradition has insights to make, especially in an age of hedge fund ownership. I wonder about focusing on the "patterns and practices" of journalism when it interacts with media. These are embodied, ritualistic elements born from the interaction of real people with real people, not simply words spun out of the air. Reporters are influenced by the storytelling tropes and habits of both thought *and* action they inherit from teachers in classrooms, editors in offices, and their own engagement with other stories by other reporters printed on paper (or transmitted through and to computers and clicked on etc etc). In short, news media are more than words, and reporters do more than talk and listen and write. There are physical processes at work, and there are ... mythological? ... processes at work, too.

Badaracco briefly mentions "material culture," but never expands on it. What does she mean by it? How is it relevant to this book? She doesn't say. But she does talk about the importance of the storyteller role in the creation of national image, citing Anderson. For Americans, news media help perpetuate the image of God as "pretty American" because "religious imagination pervades contemporary media cultures, though it takes different forms of public expression" (11), but then she seems to associate material culture with "distorted ways" in which this expression takes place, alongside violence.

In Chapter 1, Schmalzbauer argues that journalists are in fact influenced by their religious imagination – the moral values inherent to their upbringing. That's because "journalistic narratives dramatize an implicit vision of what aspects of reality are politically and morally significant." And of course, there journalistic *practices* and *tools* that are also deemed more significant than others. Anyway, Schmalzbauer claims that Catholics and evangelical Protestants have distinct "imaginations" – communitarian versus individual, sacramental versus biblicist, analogical versus dialectical – that influence the stories journalists of those persuasions are willing to tell. The problem is that the journalists he uses as his data points aren't really journalists, or at least not reporters. They're columnists, so they do tell stories, and they may do some reporting in the service of those stories. But they don't make any pretense of objectivity, so their work doesn't serve as any kind of counterpoint to the assumption that journalists can or should tell stories in an objective mannner. Further, the very question of evangelicals in journalism is more complex than Schamlzbauer seems to recognize. The evangelical mistrust of a suppsoedly secular mainstream media seems to muddy the very notion of an evangelical imagination hiding beneath the surface of reporters. Given evangelicalism's assumptions, *can* an evangelical be unconsciously influenced by their tradition's imagination? Maybe this is a complicated way of asking a very simple question: Is "evangelical journalist" an oxymoron? That Shmalzbauer's data points in this essay are Cal Thomas, Fred Barnes, and Russ Pulliam – opinion writers all – seems to indicate the answer might be uncomfortable to both evangelicals and journalists alike.

The other chapter of interest here is Rebecca Moore's on fundamentalism, which serves mainly to repeat a couple of points that are widely assumed but mostly untrue: that Protestant fundamentalists separated from the world after the farcical Scopes Trial (as opposed to continuing to engage the broader culture but simply being ignored), and that "fundamentalism" is a label only imposed by outsiders on the groups they call fundamentalist (the FLDS enthusiastically adopted this label). She does point out that fundamentalism today works within the technological and social structures of modern society, but that's what it has always done. She makes a good point that the rise of fundamentalism and its reliance on biblical inerrancy coincided with the rise of Catholic papal infallibility, and that these movements are not coincidental, given the reaction of conservatives in both traditions to the pressures placed on traditional epistemology by science and higher criticism.

Overall, it feels like this book never really examines its own assumptions and doesn't really seem aware of the scholarship involving half of the purported topics of the book.