65 – Religion, Emotion and the Media

Editorial

For more information, visit our website at www.sofn.org.uk ISSN 1460-5244 © SOF 2004 sof 65 May 2004 Contents 3 Editorial Articles 5 Tabloids of Stone, by Andrew Weltch 7 Controversial Film Christologies, by Jo Pearson and Paul Overend 13 The Secrets of the Passion, by Michael Morton Feature II A Bluffer’s Guide to Celluloid Christologies Book Reviews 16 David Pattison reviews You are The Light, by John Martin Sahajananda Conference Reviews 17 Westar Conference Report, by Patti Whaley Regular 20 Postbag 21 Postscripts 23 Radical Theology Series - Part 10:The Sea of Faith Religion, Emotion and the If the stories and mythic narratives of religions once determined the values and aspirations of individuals and communities, today it is the media that do so. Interpreting the world in which we live, establishing the agendas of politics, offering and questioning moral frames of reference, the media have assumed the role of teacher and mediator, usurping the roles of rabbi, imam and priest. They may be far more effective in reaching into the households of almost all Westerners, and by satellite across the globe, but their methods and agendas are quite different.

Where religions tell ancient stories, sometimes in new ways and with new insights, that help us to reflect on the nature of reality and the human condition, the media are dependent on the latest notions, or even real-time action, whether it is global news or ‘reality TV’. To compete in the media simplifications miss the complexity and subtlety of the issues in the quest for attention- grabbing headlines Media opportunity for a dialogue that might reach understanding. TV replaces the ideal of shared values with the portrayal of controversy, and is in danger of fostering extremism.

This could be less true of newspapers and magazines, their textual nature providing an opportunity for more lengthy exploration; yet we find headlines, even in the broadsheets, that play on simplicities. ‘Witchcraft row over Anglican priest in Pagan sex rite’, read The Daily Telegraph (11 June 1995) of an interfaith service which was co-celebrated by a Pagan priestess and a Sea of Faith clergyman. Even the then - Archbishop of Wales, Dr. Rowan Williams, was accused of ‘dabbling in Paganism’ when on 5 August 2002 he was made a Druid of the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod in Wales. The newspaper failed to recognise the distinction between druidry and paganism or that the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards has no direct links with paganism — or indeed, that another of its honorary members, the Queen, is Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Such examples miss the dialogue between traditions and the rediscovery of cultural identities in all their complexity.

The media reduce complexity to evocative, Rowan Williams overloaded media market, the various media sensationalise their stories, competing for the most eye-catching headline, the most shocking plot, the wittiest take on things, but rarely the most reflective analysis of the human condition.

The nature of TV is such that simplicity and clarity are preferred to complexity and subtlety. In the place of reflective analysis by informed parties, whereby a common story of events can emerge, TV substitutes the cheap ‘consumer participation’ option. Immediate reactions are invited from people in the street, the audience, or by email, resulting in a cacophony of uninformed opinions. Televised ‘debates’ use representatives of polarised opinions, but the views of thoughtful people are ignored. Complexity is reduced to slogans, sound bites and the airing of prejudice.

In such a context of simple opposites, there is no if inaccurate, simplicities. For example, with news cameras reporting a strange array of religious customs and practices at the Indian Kumbh Mela festival, Indian religious traditions are reduced to a simple exotic Hinduism for the consumption of Westerners fascinated with the East. Repeated front-page headlines have associated Christian evangelicals with millenarian fundamentalism (and the support of the State of Israel) and the whole of Islam with extremism and terrorism (whilst ignoring the ‘seizure’ of Arab lands by Israel and the USA).

Such headlines fail to recognise the diversity of Islamic cultures and the peaceful co-existence of different faiths in many places throughout history, or the fact that the scriptures (which many believe that evangelicals read ‘literally’) do not support the selective interpretations of the few. Such media simplifications miss the complexity and subtlety of the issues in the quest for attention-grabbing Sof 65 May 2004 headlines that replace thoughtful reflection with manipulated feelings, and provoke emotional, knee-jerk responses. Such media caricatures and stereotypes foster prejudice and feed global conflict.

The media use simplicities, caricatures and stereotypes, because of commercial pressures. By simplifying ideas in order to provoke an emotional response, the media are able to generate sales and thus attract advertising revenue.

According to Stjepan Mestrovic (see Pearson, SOF 60), it is this linking of ideas with emotions that characterises the capitalism of the media age. The consumer buys into ideas for their emotional satisfaction. Whether our response is pleasure or outrage, a simple emotion is easier to market than complex arguments. The consumed ideas are then internalised by us, transforming our values and intellectual horizons. The use of the word ‘terrorism’ in a media story, for instance, evokes outrage, but bypasses moral and political questions for immediate emotional reaction. For example, the association of the term ‘terrorist’ with those who have had their homeland occupied, takes away their claims to their home, fails to engage with the religious basis of claims to a ‘promised land’, and overlooks the United Nations’ repeated failures to assist peace in the Middle East.

But simplicity sells. indignation can be enjoyed from the comfort of a cinema seat by identification with a clear example of persecution in the past do not determine us. It does this, however, in a world in which religious as well as secular narratives still hold sway over individuals but where the tools of the economic market may well determine our collective emotions. The media sell emotions and we consume the products and share in the emotions. Myths of escape from capitalist society may offer attractive, even admirable, individual or communal identities. But by buying into these myths, we support the very marketing machine from which the myths offer their illusory escape.

Far from informing sensitivities, as did many religious writings, the media have stirred up our emotions in a quest for extremes. The success of Mel Gibson’s recent religious film, The Passion, has been ascribed to the fascination of a sado-masochistic drama that would be denied a film censor’s rating were it not about a story of religious submission. Audiences find in the film an emotional intensity that satisfies the addiction of a generation whose inner life has been over-stimulated by media-manipulated emotional fixes - an intensity that may feel religious.

Perhaps, though, the film’s success is rather that indignation can be enjoyed from the comfort of a cinema seat by identification with a clear example of persecution in the past. This simplifies our emotions, and avoids our thinking of the AIDS-ridden villages of Africa where real tragedy unfolds. Compassion is redirected from the living, those with real suffering and need in complex circumstances, and is identified with a simple, stylised and (literally) projected image. Furthermore, our ordinary compassion is blunted by the intensity of media-manipulated feelings, which contribute to ‘compassion fatigue’. We may not even know that we are being manipulated.

In serving capitalism, the media create the inner life that was once formed by religion through stories of identification with the past. The Jewish father says, ‘When the Lord brought us out of Egypt’, to the child at the Passover meal. The ritual of the veneration of the cross summons up the believer’s love for her dying Lord, as the Good Friday Catholic Liturgy re-presents the Passion. But, since Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), such stories have been packaged as products. Merton sold an ideal of detachment and simplicity through his account of his conversion to Cistercian monasticism, in this and other works. The sale of his books not only attracted scores of aspirants and novices to the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Merton was at one time Novice Guardian, but also filled the bursar’s purse and paid for the extensive rebuilding of the abbey for those who looked to share in those ideals. This early marketing of the monastic ideal has been copied often since, even earning the Benedictine ‘Buckfast Abbey’ in Devon the name ‘Fastbuck Abbey’.

Such a marketing of religious ideals is repeated in the contemporary marketing of Celtic spirituality or Paganism, in which a nostalgia for a romanticised past is not just the selling of a utopian dream: it is the selling of a harmony with nature that makes us yearn for a peace denied by urban life. Religious ideas are particularly amenable to this kind of marketing. They offer a hope of integration and wholeness; a sense of either belonging with the majority or of being an outsider alongside the ‘outlaws’ of an indigenous Christian remnant or persecuted pagan past.

But anti-religious ideas, such as the selling of secular ideas of individualism, are also rather too tidy in a largely religious world. Secularism provides the myth that others sof 65 May 2004 Religions that seek to use the media, seeing them as vehicles of communication, are themselves reductive, or will become so. They are also naive if they believe that the media are value-free and without their own agenda — for the media serve the interests and values of capitalism. TV evangelist broadcasters such as Chicago's Paul Rader and Los Angeles' Charles E. Fuller, for example, work with an impressive empire of TV stations and networks. These commercial networks present the message of Christianity in a way that evokes an emotional response and successfully solicits financial support to sustain the networks’ funding and global expansion. TV evangelism reinterprets Christianity according to the interests of the media and the manipulated emotional intensity of media entertainment. Many of the values that have historically been central to Christianity are reinterpreted or replaced by the media’s commercial agenda: charity to meet one’s neighbour’s material needs is replaced by charity to meet the TV network's agenda of creating spiritual and emotional needs in the neighbour for the media’s benefit.

In such a context we can easily lose sight of the debates in which the Sea of Faith, and others exploring religious or humanistic ideas, engage. If we want simple and emotionally convenient answers, we reduce the complexity of religion to simple feelings that bypass complex emotions.

The simple summary that religious beliefs are human creations should not bypass an exploration of the value of those religious beliefs or, indeed, the use of religious beliefs in stirring emotions. Rather, through the exploration of religious stories and mythic narratives, we can come to an appreciation of shared cultural stories, and an insight into how these are used in today’s media age.