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For most people in a modern society, the media are now the primary place where they encounter religion. Far more people watch a religious news report, a film about a saint, or a viral clip of a preacher than ever set foot in a place of worship, and this single fact reshapes the whole relationship between faith and the public. The media do not merely report religion from the outside; they actively shape how it is understood, frame which religions seem threatening or benign, supply the images by which believers and unbelievers alike picture "religion," and increasingly become a medium of religious practice in their own right. This lesson examines the representation of religion in news and entertainment, the long tradition of religious broadcasting, the transformation worked by social and new media, the question of religious literacy in a secular media culture, and the underlying sociological debate about whether media coverage hastens or merely registers secularisation. The recurring evaluative thread is whether the media are, on balance, a threat to religion (distorting, trivialising, secularising) or an opportunity (extending reach, enabling new community, giving faith fresh visibility).
Key term: Media — the means of mass communication, including print (newspapers), broadcast (radio, television, film) and digital platforms (websites, social media, streaming, podcasts), through which information and images are circulated to large audiences.
Key term: Representation — the way the media construct and present a subject such as religion, which is never a neutral mirror but a selection and framing that shapes how audiences perceive it.
The most important single theory for this topic is the mediatisation of religion, developed by the Danish scholar Stig Hjarvard (2008). Hjarvard argued that religion has not simply used the media; rather, the media have increasingly become the central institution through which religion is encountered, so that the media now supply the dominant frames, narratives and images of the sacred — often displacing the churches as the public's main source of religious ideas. He identified three forms this takes: religious media (content produced by religious bodies themselves, such as a church broadcast); journalism about religion (news coverage, which tends to frame faith in terms of conflict and controversy); and what he provocatively called "banal religion" — the diffuse, low-intensity religious and supernatural imagery that saturates popular entertainment (ghosts, angels, psychics, horoscopes, fantasy and superhero mythologies, horror), feeding a vague spiritual sensibility detached from any institution. This third category is the most original and the most unsettling for the traditions: it suggests that the media do not merely report on religion but actively produce a religion of their own — a free-floating, consumable spirituality of vampires and guardian angels that has its emotional pull precisely because it asks nothing and belongs to no church. Hjarvard's controversial thesis is that, on the whole, mediatisation is a secularising force: it simultaneously relocates religious authority from the institutions to the media and dilutes rich, demanding traditions into a thin, marketable, à-la-carte spirituality.
Key term: Banal religion (Hjarvard) — the everyday, fragmentary religious and supernatural imagery diffused through popular media and entertainment (angels, ghosts, horoscopes, fantasy), which sustains a vague spirituality detached from, and arguably corrosive of, the institutional traditions.
Key term: Mediatisation of religion (Hjarvard) — the process whereby the media become the principal institution through which religion is communicated and experienced, supplying its dominant images and frames and tending to relocate religious authority away from traditional institutions.
Religion in the news is overwhelmingly framed in terms of conflict, extremism and scandal — terrorism, clerical abuse, culture-war controversies — because these fit the news values of negativity, drama, threat and the "elite person" that journalists instinctively select for, while the everyday, charitable and contemplative life of religious communities rarely qualifies as news at all. The result is a systematically distorted picture in which religion appears far more violent, divided and newsworthy-when-failing than it is in the lived experience of most believers. The most cited British evidence is the Cardiff School of Journalism study (2008), led by Kerry Moore, John Petley and others, which analysed a decade of UK press coverage of Muslims and found it overwhelmingly negative, with the dominant frames repeatedly associating Islam with terrorism, extremism and cultural threat, and very few stories portraying Muslims as ordinary citizens. The theoretical lens most often applied here is Edward Said's concept of Orientalism: Western media, Said argued, characteristically construct Islam and "the East" as an exotic, irrational and menacing Other, against which a rational, civilised "West" defines its own identity. Such framing, critics argue, does not merely reflect existing prejudice but actively manufactures it, normalising Islamophobia and shaping public attitudes and even government policy on immigration and security. A vivid flashpoint was the controversy over the Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (2005–06), which crystallised the clash between a Western media culture that prizes the freedom to satirise and a Muslim conviction that depicting the Prophet is a grave offence — and showed how, in a globally networked media, a local act of publication can detonate worldwide. The defence of the conflict frame is that the news cannot responsibly ignore genuine instances of religiously motivated violence; the rejoinder is that selective, decontextualised coverage tars whole communities with the actions of a tiny minority, and that the relentless negativity is itself a kind of editorial choice.
Key term: Orientalism (Said) — the systematic way in which Western culture, including its media, represents the (especially Islamic) "East" as an exotic, backward and threatening Other, thereby reinforcing stereotypes and asymmetries of power.
Entertainment media tell a more varied story, and a good answer maps the spectrum. Devotional and epic films — The Ten Commandments (DeMille, 1956), The Passion of the Christ (Gibson, 2004) — present religion reverently, though The Passion drew criticism for its violence and alleged antisemitism. Searching, ambivalent treatments — Scorsese's Silence (2016), on the agony of faith and apostasy under persecution, or Of Gods and Men (2010), on Trappist monks who stay despite mortal danger — use film to probe doubt, suffering and divine silence with real seriousness. Satirical and hostile portrayals — Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), banned in places and denounced by clergy, or Bill Maher's Religulous (2008) — mock religious credulity and fanaticism. The Life of Brian furore is a useful case study in the freedom-of-expression-versus-respect tension that runs through the whole topic. It is worth adding that the most pervasive religious content in entertainment is not the overtly biblical film at all but the implicit theology woven through ordinary drama and fantasy — the redemption arcs, messianic heroes, and battles of good against evil that structure everything from superhero franchises to children's animation. This is Hjarvard's "banal religion" in action, and a sophisticated answer notes that the media shape the public's religious imagination at least as much through this diffuse background as through any explicitly religious programme.
| Mode of portrayal | Examples | Typical effect |
|---|---|---|
| Devotional / epic | The Ten Commandments; The Passion of the Christ | Reverent, affirming, sometimes controversial |
| Searching / ambivalent | Silence; Of Gods and Men | Nuanced; treats faith and doubt seriously |
| Satirical / hostile | Life of Brian; Religulous | Sceptical, mocking; raises free-speech tensions |
| News framing | Cardiff Muslim-coverage study (2008) | Conflict-focused; risks stereotype and Islamophobia |
Britain has a long tradition of religious broadcasting rooted in the public-service ethos of the BBC. Songs of Praise (BBC, from 1961) remains the country's longest-running religious programme, broadcasting hymn-singing and human-interest stories of faith, and over the decades it has broadened to feature a wider range of communities. Thought for the Day (BBC Radio 4, from 1970) gives a brief daily religious or ethical reflection within the flagship Today programme; its slot has become a recurring flashpoint, with the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association arguing that the exclusion of non-religious speakers privileges faith, and defenders replying that a distinct religious voice is precisely the point. Drama has offered some of the most sympathetic recent portraits — the BBC comedy-drama Rev (2010–14) won praise for its honest, humane depiction of the frustrations and small graces of parish ministry. The wider sociological question is whether such broadcasting can do anything to arrest religious decline, or whether watching worship on a screen is a poor substitute that may even accelerate it — a question taken up below.
A different model developed in the United States, where the deregulated, commercial broadcasting market gave rise to televangelism — the large-scale use of television by independent preachers such as Billy Graham, and later the "prosperity gospel" broadcasters, to reach mass audiences and solicit donations. Televangelism demonstrates religion's capacity to exploit media technology with great success, building audiences of millions; but it also concentrates the topic's anxieties — the commercialisation of faith, the cult of the telegenic personality, recurrent financial and sexual scandals, and the worry that the medium reshapes the message, favouring emotional spectacle and the hard sell over doctrine and discipline. The contrast between the British public-service model and the American commercial model is itself a fruitful point of comparison: the first treats religion as a cultural good to be curated, the second as a product to be marketed, and each shapes the religion it broadcasts accordingly.
If broadcasting is a one-to-many medium, social media are many-to-many, and this changes religion at the level of identity rather than mere information. Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have produced a generation of religious influencers who build large followings by sharing devotional content, testimony and accessible theology, often with no institutional credential at all. Hashtag activism — the #PrayForParis or #PrayForX response to public tragedy — brings spontaneous religious expression into the mainstream of public feeling, while online communities offer vital support to converts, to religious minorities in hostile environments, and to those quietly exploring a faith they are not ready to declare in person. Identity here is increasingly constructed and performed online: a young Muslim woman may negotiate her faith publicly through her feed; a "deconstructing" evangelical may process doubt in a podcast comment thread. The sociologist Mia Lövheim's research on young bloggers shows authority shifting decisively from the pulpit to the peer network, with credibility earned through authenticity and relatability rather than ordination.
The risks are the mirror image of these goods. The very openness that empowers the marginalised also gives a platform to extremism and radicalisation, to religious hate speech, and to doctrinal distortion unchecked by any tradition of learning. The echo chamber and algorithmic curation feed users an ever-narrower diet of confirming content, hardening identities into hostility toward the out-group. And the commodification of religion intensifies: the postmodern sociologist David Lyon, in Jesus in Disneyland (2000), argued that in a media-saturated consumer culture religion increasingly circulates as a set of detachable images, symbols and experiences to be sampled and consumed at will, "deregulated" from the institutions that once controlled them — the believer becomes a spiritual shopper assembling a personal package from a global media bazaar. Whether this represents the liberation of religion from stale institutions or its dissolution into consumerism is, once again, exactly the evaluative question the examiners want weighed. Lyon's own assessment is characteristically ambivalent: the deregulation of the sacred is not simply secularisation, because the spiritual impulse plainly persists and even flourishes — but it now flows around and beyond the churches rather than through them, surfacing in pilgrimage-as-tourism, in wellness and mindfulness apps, and in the religiously inflected fan-cultures of popular media. The media, on this reading, do not abolish religion so much as relocate and recombine it, and the candidate who can hold that nuance — neither "the media are killing religion" nor "the media are saving it" — is doing precisely the synoptic, evaluative work the dialogue rewards.
The internet has changed the relationship between religion and media more profoundly than any previous technology, and the scholarship here is essential. The foundational distinction is Christopher Helland's (2000) contrast between "religion online" and "online religion." Religion online uses the internet as a noticeboard — official church websites, sermon archives, denominational news — a one-way digital extension of existing institutions that leaves religious authority intact. Online religion uses the internet as a space of practice and participation — virtual worship, interactive prayer walls, discussion forums, communities that exist primarily or only online — where ordinary users generate religious content and the traditional gatekeepers lose control. The distinction matters because the two have opposite implications for authority: the first reinforces it, the second disperses it.
Key term: Religion online vs online religion (Helland) — "religion online" is the use of the internet to disseminate information about existing religion (one-way, institution-controlled); "online religion" is participatory religious practice and community native to digital space (interactive, user-generated).
Building on this, Heidi Campbell (When Religion Meets New Media, 2010; Digital Religion, 2012) developed the influential "religious-social shaping of technology" approach. Against any simple story of technology either rescuing or destroying religion, Campbell argued that religious communities are active agents who appropriate, adapt, resist and re-shape new media in line with their values and histories — an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community filtering the internet, an evangelical megachurch embracing live-streaming, a Muslim community debating online fatwas. Technology does not simply act upon religion; religion negotiates with technology. The Swedish scholar Mia Lövheim has likewise studied how young people, and especially young women, construct religious identity online, where authority is increasingly bottom-up.
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