Religion has moved well outside its traditional boundaries, becoming widely used in a variety of communication technologies and forms that can be consumed by religious and nonreligious audiences alike, from newspaper stories to books, television shows, films, dramatic serials and advertisements. In increasingly radical ways, religious institutions and leaders have displayed considerable business acumen in using these media products to secure legitimacy, followers, and financial contributions. Furthermore, secular actors have employed religious symbols and tropes as a means of serving their own interests and generating important interrogations of the substantive relations between religion and media.
For scholars who have been researching the new evolving relations between religion and media in a series of key social sectors spread across not only traditional communication technologies but also digital, ranging from politics to marketing, entertainment and news, an issue of critical relevance is the changing “value” of religion, which, being expressed in a variety of registers and contexts, provides potent symbolic resources that can be put to political, economic or other social purpose by both religious and non-religious actors, whether collective or individual (e.g., religious organizations and leaders, political parties, movements and candidates, corporations and marketers, journalists and book authors, screen writers and directors, webmasters, app designers and other Internet producers). Among the most intriguing but least discussed questions are those surrounding the role of religion and of media in these developments, more specifically how religions—with their largely recognizable sets of symbols, narratives and values—are deployed as a form of symbolic currency in the production of media content and products that can respond to a broad range of both religious and nonreligious interests, why this is valued in today’s media marketplace, how we got here, and in which ways media and systems of mediation make these different types of “valorizations”—ascriptions of value—of religions possible.
This Special Issue seeks to address these questions with the aim of contributing to advancing the understanding of the role of religion in today’s culture and society, its virtually inextricable link with the media and its public presence, which is now apparent. It will do so by providing a forum for presenting and discussing recent empirical research carried out by scholars in the field of social sciences and religious studies who have a special interest and expertise in addressing this issue.
Relevant proposals that address the following suggested (but not exclusive) topics will be welcomed:
– Religious communities and leaderships that make use of media—old and new—to perpetuate themselves within a commercial culture;
– The spread of religious symbols, claims and appeals in various types of media products, including newspapers, films, books, TV shows, advertisements and even computer games, that are intended to satisfy nonreligious purposes and interests;
– The “religious” functions (or dimensions) of media technologies themselves, by virtue of which media become locations of constructed realities that mediate and define social relationships.
