I’ve been invited by The Eagle magazine, produced by St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane, to write an introductory article for their next edition. I’ve just sent the following off as a draft. It’s in serious need of editing, but I’m leaving it up to editors to do that. After all, it’s their job.

Why should we think about mass media?

Churches seem to have a variety of attitudes towards media technologies and popular mass media. Some try, in vain, to attract young people by using PowerPoint presentations alongside sermons or to display responsorial psalm verses. Others use videos for film nights or Alpha courses. Popular media, such as on TV or the Internet, is kept out of Church discussions (except for youth group events), and ministers extol the virtues of reading over TV in their lives. Christian media, such as bible magazines and CDs of new music, is either welcome and promoted as an alternative culture for the young, or rejected as individualistic and devoid of sound doctrine.

Yet among academic circles there is growing research into the intersection between mass media, religion and popular culture. This article provides a general examination of the themes discussed in this emerging research, and the reasons why theology should meet with media and culture.

We are in a period of “media convergence”, a time when one form of mass media is superseded by another as the dominant cultural medium. The development of Protestantism rode on the back of one such period, when the printing press became Europe’s most effective mode of creating and disseminating knowledge and information. The late twentieth century saw the rapid rise of television as the new dominant medium. Now, at the turn of the century, television’s place as our primary source of cultural information is being challenged by computer-mediated communication, including the World Wide Web, email and file sharing.

Just as printing did five hundred years ago, audio-visual media like TV and the Internet have exerted their power to not only change how we think, but the places and times we talk about, and make decisions about, how we live as a society. Mass media, television in particular, has become the main forum for social discourse, and the place where our views on politics, government, gender roles, family life, and even religion, our exposed and discussed.

Remember the Enlightenment: that era of philosophical thought that was started by Descartes’ famous words, “I think, therefore I am,” when scientific rationalism dominated all of our social institutions. The great product of the Enlightenment era was the secularisation of culture. Thinkers in this period saw religion as a barrier to truth, democracy and pluralism, and the result was the divide between Church and State, and the relegation of religious thought and practice to churches and seminaries, out of the public sphere.

I believe that the rise of audiovisual media as the dominant public media in our culture has led to the demise of secularisation, in two ways. Firstly, audiovisual mass popular media have added ritual dimensions to the communication of information, to the point of resacralising popular culture. We see this in the news reports of responses to the fall of the Twin Towers after September 11, images of public prayer vigils, with candles and prayers pasted on billboards next to photographs of victims. We also see it in the Big Brother spectacle, where contestants leave the real world by crossing a bridge over cheering, almost delirious, fans, toward the BB house as legendary heroes make their way to Mt Olympus. Audiovisual media re-form and re-create religious symbols and narratives in their endeavour to portray the world’s story.

Secondly, audiovisual media have allowed religious institutions to re-enter the sphere of public discourse. On the one hand, politicians assert the secularisation ideology by telling outspoken bishops and priests to “stick to spiritual concerns, and leave the politics to us”. Yet when we see our Prime Minister appear at a Hillsong gathering we realise how much politicians rely on support from religious groups to maintain electoral support.

The role of religious institutions in public life of late modernity thus depends on how they involve themselves in the discourses played out in mass media. Evangelical Protestant churches appear to thrive in the mass media market, not only because they seem to have fewer ethical concerns about borrowing from popular culture in their evangelism (such as the marketing of Christian mobile phone covers, or iPod shuffle cases in the shape of a cross), but also because their mythologies and doctrines are aligned with the codes and narratives arranged in mass media.

For evangelicals, the gospel is seen as a dynamic and creative concept. The dualistic theology of evangelicalism marries well with symbolism and narratives of television. Evangelicals hold a utilitarian view of media, and an emphasis on the individual as a social unit, in the same way that TV does, and focus on experiential and emotional communication of faith.

Mainline churches, however, are viewed as “boring” and “irrelevant”, constrained by the formulations and regulations of a print-based culture, by a generation who have new aesthetic standards shaped by a culture of sound and vision. This generation see the world they live in as rejected by these churches (perhaps rightly) as consumerist and devoid of meaning.

A paradox now exists in the West. Those societies that have established national churches (such as in Western Europe) find declining church attendances and an increasingly silenced institution in public life. On the other hand, those nations founded on the church vs. state divide (such as the United States, and to a lesser extent Australia) find that religion flourishes in a pluralist, autonomous social sphere.

So why should we think about mass media? We can take a cue from the Gospels. In them we see a Jesus who uses parables to explain God’s purpose for the world. These stories are free from ecclesial jargon, and use popular themes and symbols of an agrarian society to give a picture of the Kingdom of God. And in telling these stories Jesus takes theological debate out of the temple and into the streets and lanes, defying the authority of the religious elite.

Two thousand years later, people use mass media to construct a religious identity, outside the confines of religious institutions and their doctrines. The authority of the Church is challenged by the popularity of Supernatural, Touched by an Angel and Sunday Night Safran, that explore religious issues in a language and format that is by far more accessible and attractive. People alienated by the old forms of religious expression on a Sunday morning are finding safe places to explore new symbols, stories and ways of being in community in the virtual world.

The future of the Church is dependent on its willingness to enter this place, to explore the conversations played out therein, and entertain the notion that it is no longer the single authority on religious life in this country.