Reviews
Between Sacred and Profane: Researching religion and popular culture
Gordon Lynch
I B Tauris, 256pp
Modern universities are home to a proliferation of academic research on those aspects of culture which have until now eluded the gaze of serious scholarship. This includes a growing interest in the relationship between religion and popular culture, and the ways in which the mass media, global communications and the entertainment industry shape and are shaped by religions.
Gordon Lynch has brought together an informative collection of essays by scholars at the forefront of this emergent inter-disciplinary field. Although the contributors’ main concern is to reflect on academic methods, the collection also acts as an excellent introduction to the field and identifies important questions which continue to challenge its parameters and assumptions.
The first four essays offer a general overview, while others include reflections on theological, ethical and spiritual perspectives and on definitions of religion and the sacred. There is a helpful concluding summary by Lynch. The first essay by Lynn Schofield Clark identifies reasons why this is a significant area for research, including some of its social implications. She cites Pepi Leistyna’s argument that working class men such as Homer Simpson are portrayed in US sitcoms as ‘bumbling, blustery, anti-intellectual subjects of humor’ because, ‘in this time of increased economic disparity, job loss, and employment insecurity, such depictions reinforce the notion that lower-wage workers are to blame for their own situation’.
This suggests the ethical and social motivation behind some of these essays, which is reinforced by contributions from Robert Beckford and Anthony B. Pinn, who explore the relationship between race and popular culture with regard to the formation and expression of religious identities. Pinn argues that rap music and hip hop culture invite scholars to examine more closely their theories about African American religious experience, while Beckford reflects on his formation as a theologian and documentary filmmaker in the context of black British culture.
Tom Beaudoin explores the relationship between ethics and the scholar’s personal enjoyment and spiritual investment in popular culture. He considers the suggestion that the influential work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault may have been a personal working out of his own questions of identity and spirituality, and he points to the need for scholars to develop a self-reflexive capacity which allows them to take account of how such subjective perspectives influence their work.
Elaine Graham considers the relationship between theology and the study of popular culture, calling for a renewed appreciation of the role played by culture and cultural practices as ‘both the product of, and the context for, human being, making and imagining’, which invites an appreciation of the practice of theology ‘as one of the activities by which human beings build worlds of meaning and significance, and experience themselves as creative, moral and purposeful beings.’ Pete Ward applies some of these insights to questions of eucharistic practice, exploring the relationship which connects doctrine and culture in the performance of liturgy.
There is much to interest and inform in the collection, as well as areas which require greater analysis. For example, the lack of a historical perspective leads to some over-generalised claims. Graham suggests, ‘In the days when Christianity was the predominant world view in the West, a broad consensus would have existed between the Church and the creative and performing arts’, but I doubt if there has ever been such a consensus. If we consider the iconoclastic controversies, medieval folk religion or the differences between Catholic and Protestant approaches to art and imagery, we might conclude that popular culture has always been a site of what Michel de Certeau refers to as ‘bricolage’ in the face of authoritative religious texts and authorised practices.
In an interesting reflection on the definition of ‘religion’ in the study of religion and popular culture, Lynch suggests that there is ‘a kind of stickiness associated with the sacred’ which forms communities around a sense of compulsion or authority associated with the sacred, while also causing some to reject the sacred object as oppressive and inauthentic. This perhaps explains why established religions often have such a hold over people’s lives, but it fails to take account of the ways in which religions also sometimes form collective identities around a critique of the sacred – for example, in the religion of Israel and its opposition to the Canaanite cults, in early Christian resistance to the pagan cults, and in some modern forms of Protestantism, Judaism and Islam.
Lastly, a number of the essays grapple with the question of normativity: what counts as authoritative with regard to knowledge? The contributors are aware of the challenge posed by such questions, yet I am left feeling that this is a field of study which is as dynamic and diverse as its topics of study, but which lacks a shared direction and purpose. Without a common theological vision, and without any acknowledgement that some aspects of popular culture may need to be understood as the creative responses of creatures to their creator, cultural studies such as these risk circulating within horizons which are closed to the desire for transcendence and meaning which may be implicit in the subjects they study, and even in their own scholarly motives.
Tina Beattie
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