The Center for Media, Religion and Culture completed a study funded by the Ford Foundation on the ways religion is represented, experienced and understood through the media today. The project, entitled “Finding Religion in the Media,” explored the extent to which religious belief, practice and action—particularly that directed at social reform and social change—can be generated in and through the media sphere.
The research included three primary efforts. First, it located the evolving religious-media marketplace and developed a taxonomy of contemporary sources, locations, and practices of mediated religious meaning-making. Some of this turf is obvious. The formal media and the institutional sources of religious information remain visible in the public sphere. The informal presence of religion in popular and entertainment media was also charted as part of this process. The research then looked beyond these to less visible developments and locations of religious mediation, including a necessary emphasis on the digital and online environments, which are increasingly important to diverse demographic interests and activism, such as that of youth, women, immigrant, disability and LGBT interest communities. Second, the research looked at the evolving practices of user-generated media in order for our taxonomy to reflect the ways in which such activities become established in the media sphere. And third, based on these descriptions, the project moved on to in-depth studies of representative cases. Interviews were conducted with the producers of key online sources to address questions of the ways that religious interests and impulses must accommodate themselves to the demands of these new media forms and contexts.
The “third spaces” concept has been central to the Finding Religion in the Media project. As developed by Hoover and Echchaibi, this concept serves as an interpretive tool to highlight what we call a “thickening” of the religious experience beyond dichotomous definitions of both religion and media categories. Digital spaces have opened up opportunities to theorize the production of meaning across hybrid spaces. Digital media reflect and narrativize life experiences and the center has done so by looking specifically at case studies of the way religion and the religious is articulated and contested online. The research was framed around the novelty of technologies that leads us to adopt a hierarchical indexing of what constitutes an authentic experience of belonging and belief, outside of dichotomies of traditional/modern, physical/digita, and real/proximal embodied experience. The impulse to define how and why we communicate, drawing boundaries between various technological media leads to problematic understandings of complex user identities. The third spaces concept argues that theories of ritual, religion, media and communication benefit from an analysis of how meaning is produced and performed at the borderlines of a complex ecosystem of media ensembles and hybrid spaces.