The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Christian Metz, to argue that the structure and content of film narratives positioned their audiences to think and feel in particular ways (see Turner, 2003, pp.85–9). Against this, other scholars in media and cultural studies argued that such a view tends to depict audiences as passive recipients of the ideological content of film, and fails to recognize that audience research demonstrates that people retain considerable freedom in interpreting and making use of film in ways quite different from those intended by its producers or implied in the text of the film itself. These wider debates about how we think about and study media and popular culture remain important in setting the scene for how scholars of religion approach their work in this area.

The emergence of the study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life

The earliest academic literature exploring the relationship between religion, media and popular culture began to be published in the early 1970s (see, e.g. Butler, 1969; Cooper and Skrade, 1970; Hurley, 1970), and typically focused on how religion was represented in popular film or how film engaged with theological questions about the meaning and purpose of life (both issues which remain important in the current film and religion literature). This literature began to broaden in the 1980s as some writers started to think about other forms of media and popular culture, and the phenomenon of televangelism attracted particular interest in how religious groups were using media (see, e.g. Hoover, 1988). But it was not until the 1990s, that academic interest in this field consolidated and began to increase both in quantity and quality. In the early 1990s, the American Academy of Religion agreed to establish Religion and Popular Culture and Religion, Film and Visual Culture groups at its major annual meeting, which were later followed by the formation of a Religion, Media and Culture group. Work undertaken through these groups led both to a special issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 1996 on religion and American popular culture, and later to an influential edited book, Religion and Popular Culture in America (Forbes and Mahan, 2000). During the same period, a collaboration between Scandinavian and North American media scholars led to the first international media, religion and culture conference being held in Uppsala in 1993. This subsequently evolved into a bi-ennial international conference that, along with regular seminars run by the International Study Commission for Media, Religion and Culture, became the leading network through which scholars in this field met and discussed their ideas (Hoover and Lundby, 1997; Hoover and Schofield Clark, 2002; Mitchell and Marriage, 2003). Since the mid-1990s there has been a significant increase in the numbers of edited and authored books exploring issues of religion, media and popular culture (see Schofield Clark, 2007), with this literature now sufficiently well-developed for a second wave of publications to begin to reflect on what this academic literature has and has not achieved (Johnston, 2007; Lynch, 2007). This has also been supported by the emergence of specialist journals such as the online journals of Religion and Film and Religion and Popular Culture, as well as the more recent journal, Material Religion.

Within this growing literature, two relatively distinct bodies of work has emerged. The first of these is concerned with studying media and popular culture from the disciplines of biblical studies and theology. Much of this work has focused specifically on film. Biblical scholars have been particularly interested in the ways in which biblical characters and narratives have been represented in film (see, e.g. Baugh, 1997; Stern et al., 1999). But they have also explored how particular biblical texts might help critical reflection on theological

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themes addressed in specific films (e.g. Jewett, 1993), how sensitivity to film texts might assist processes of biblical interpretatation (Kreitzer, 2002), how films form part of the reception history of biblical texts (Christianson, 2007), and how film theory might help us to analyse how characters are constructed in both film and biblical narratives (Exum, 1996). Theologians have also been interested in treating films as resources for theological reflection, although there has been some debate as to whether popular film can really be a suitable focus for serious theological work (see Jasper, 1997). Given that film narratives deal with themes such as suffering, violence, evil, meaning and redemption, a number of theologians have argued that they can stimulate theological discussion of these themes as effectively as any other piece of high art or literature (Marsh and Ortiz, 1997; Deacy, 2001; Deacy and Ortiz, 2007). The popularity of film amongst students has also made it an attractive method for raising theological questions in the classroom which can then be explored in more depth through other academic theological texts (Marsh, 2007). Another branch of theological interest in media and popular culture seeks to move beyond this kind of textual study to analyse the nature and structure of contemporary society. This missiological or practical theological work uses cultural analysis to diagnose the conditions of contemporary life in order to reflect on how best the Church might respond to these. A seminal text of this kind has been Tom Beaudoin’s (1998) Virtual Faith, which considered missiological implications of the idea that young adults, increasingly alienated from institutional religion, were instead turning to media and popular culture as resources to construct their own personalized theologies around principles of authenticity, flexibility and creativity. Beaudoin (2008) has since refined this work further, developing a more reflexive approach to thinking about why theologians come to study popular culture, and how this academic activity can both disclose insights about the cultural contexts in which theologians work and serve as a form of therapy on the theologian’s own sense of self.

This missiological branch of theological study shares more in common with the second main body of work to have emerged on religion, media and popular culture, which is primarily interested in theorizing and investigating lived religion. Important contributions have been made to this work by scholars in religious studies who have explored how concepts used elsewhere in this field might be used to analyse media and popular culture. Religious scholars have therefore discussed how film can be understood as a form of cultural myth (Martin and Ostwalt, 1995), sports events as a form of ritual (Price, 2005), dieting as a form of religious practice on the body (Lelwica, 2005), and the construction of consumer products such as Coca-Cola as a form of religious fetish (Chidester, 1996). Related to this work is the use of functionalist definitions of religion to examine whether particular forms of media and popular culture serve purposes typically associated with religion such as generating community, meaning, providing ritual and sacred space, and producing religious experiences. Robin Sylvan (2002) has, for example, argued that certain genres of popular music can be understood as religious in this functionalist sense in that they provide particular theologies, offer experiences of shared community at gigs and through fan networks, and generate experiences of transcendence through practices of listening and dancing. Whilst this functionalist approach has been a useful stimulus for thinking about the religious and sacred uses of media and popular culture, it also has significant limitations (see Lynch, 2006). Emphasizing the ways in which forms of culture operate in religion-like ways risks focusing our attention on particular issues (e.g. how culture produces community, meaning or ecstatic experience) and may turn our attention away from aspects of people’s cultural lives that are in reality far more important for them, such as using a clubbing night out to meet friends or

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to find sexual partners. Similarly, functionalist definitions of religion can import theological assumptions into what appears to be social scientific analysis (see Lynch, 2009b). A good example of this is the idea that popular culture can be a source of religious experience, when what constitutes an authentic religious experience is essentially a matter of theological judgment. This means that when Robin Sylvan (2005) writes about the post-rave dance scene as a site of religious experience, he is not so much a neutral observer of the scene, as someone implicitly attempting to develop a theology of club culture which values particular clubbing experiences as having a sacred or transcendent significance.

Contributions to the study of media, popular culture and lived religion have also been made by writers from other disciplines. Sociologists of religion have been interested in how media and popular culture serve as mechanisms for the transmission and development of religious ideologies and identities (Partridge, 2005; Lovheim, 2007). Scholars in media studies have been interested in the religious uses that audiences make of popular media (e.g. Schofield Clark, 2005), the production and use of media to different religious ends (e.g. Hendershot, 2004), and the ways in which media act as a public space for the construction and discussion of particular religious questions and concerns (Lundby, 2006). The work of some anthropologists of religion has been influenced by the wider turn in anthropology to understanding the significance of media and popular culture for the everyday life-worlds of people in economically-developed societies (see, e.g. Miller, 1998, 2008). This has led anthropologists of religion to examine the ways in which people produce and consume religious media, as well as how the sensory engagement with media and popular culture forms part of religious subjectivities and shapes religious adherents’ sense of public space and wider society (Meyer and Moors, 2005). Finally, scholars working in art history, and the study of visual and material culture, have also undertaken important work in studying the role that images and objects play in everyday, lived religion (McDannell, 1995; Morgan, 2005). Turning away from the traditional religious pre-occupations of art historians with the analysis of high religious art, these scholars have focused their attention on how people use religious images or objects that art historians have tended to think of as worthless kitsch. For example, Warner Sallman’s portrait of Christ, one of the most re-reproduced images of the twentieth century, falls below the aesthetic standards demanded by the attention of traditional art history, but nevertheless has had a significant role in people’s religious lives as a focus for devotion, source of personal and family memories, and gift given at important moments of struggle and change (Morgan, 1998). Scholars of visual and material culture have therefore drawn attention to the religious significance of everyday objects – pictures, clothing, family bibles – which form the stuff of lived religion yet have often been invisible to analyses of religion which focus narrowly on statements of belief and formal ritual.

From this brief overview of issues explored in this second body of work, it is clear that there is a considerable overlap of interests between scholars in these disciplines in understanding the place of media and popular culture in lived religion. Whilst these different disciplinary backgrounds mean that these scholars sometimes draw on different traditions of theory, or different methodological approaches, to pursue their interests, there is also considerable common ground that makes this an essentially multi-disciplinary field of study. At the micro level of individual’s religious life-worlds, these scholars are interested in exploring the role of media and popular culture in the construction of religious identities and subjectivities – how they make religious life-worlds possible. This can involve thinking about how media and popular culture feature in the ways in which people imagine and negotiate their relations with other people within and beyond the boundaries of their family, friends, and broader

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social, religious and political communities. At a macro, social level, these scholars are also interested in the ways in which media and popular culture are implicated in wider patterns of religious change, framing the ways in which different religious and secular ideas and activities interact, and are bound up with the structures and processes of late capitalism, globalization and new forms of religious trans-national networks.

Key questions for the future study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life

As this work on lived religion, media and popular culture has developed and consolidated, a number of important questions have emerged which are still to be resolved. First, in what ways are particular forms of media and popular culture implicated in transforming contemporary religion? Discussion of this question has focused increasingly on the theory of the mediatization of religion, which has been explored in most detail by a network of Scandinavian media and religion scholars (see, e.g. Lundby, 2009). The wider theory of mediatization suggests that as particular social forms became increasingly dependent on the media in the twentieth century, both in terms of the ways in which they are practised and the ways in which the public is aware of them, so those social forms become increasingly shaped by the particular logics of those media. A good example of this is contemporary party politics, in which politicians’ engagement with their public audiences is now so dependent on broadcast and print media that politicians’ ideas are increasingly constructed as soundbites tailored to the delivery formats of those media. Theories about the mediatization of religion thus consider how the increasing importance of media both in the lives of religious communities, and for public awareness of religion, changes the nature of lived religion itself. The presence of religious resources, rituals and networks from across the world on the internet could therefore play a role in undermining traditional religious authorities, weaken people’s ties to local religious communities, create more opportunities for people to engage with alternative spiritual practices such as Wicca, and strengthen networks of people with similar religious views across wide geographical areas. The availability of a wide range of fatwas and Qur’anic reasoning online can, for example, expose Muslims to much broader resources of Islamic thought than would normally have been accessible to them simply in their local community or mosque, which can not only open up new ways of thinking but also require new practices of religious discernment in judging which online sources to follow (Echchaibi, 2008). Similarly the role of the internet in making it possible for people with similar views to come together across continents has not only energized new religious networks such as trans-national atheism, but also consolidated networks of progressives and conservatives that accelerate tensions within religious institutions (for example, over issues of gay sexuality in the Anglican Communion). Whilst there are some interesting examples of the ways in which media may be transforming religious practices and institutions, theories of the mediatization of religion also need to be treated with some caution. The idea that media transform religion suggests a linear process in which media act on religion, but religion does not act on media. This is clearly too simplistic, however. The role of media in lived religion is not determined simply by the nature of the media itself, but is also shaped by prior religious assumptions and practices. The development of a kosher mobile phone network for ultraorthodox Jews in Israel is a good example of how media use is in this instance shaped by prior religious convictions about purity and the demands of the Torah (Campbell, 2007). Rather than demonstrating a one-way flow of influence, media and lived religion exist in a complex

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web of patterns of influence in which religious life-worlds both act upon, and are acted upon by, different forms of media (Schofield Clark, 2009). A further area for debate with theories of the mediatization of religion concerns the suggestion that the media transformation of religion is a modern phenomenon. Lived religion has always been a mediated phenomenon, though, in the sense that religious adherents’ relations with each other and their sacred figures are made possible only through particular images or objects, whether texts, images, music, food or even the medium of bodily experience. In this sense, clear distinctions between what is ‘religion’ and what is ‘media’ can become somewhat problematic. But recognizing that religion always has been mediated raises the possibility that the influence of media on lived religion may not simply be a modern phenomenon but one that can also be traced in other periods of history – such as the importance of mass-produced, printed books in shaping the cultural and intellectual conditions for the Protestant Reformation. Whilst theories of the mediatization of religion are unlikely to be accepted wholesale by scholars of lived religion, understanding the ways in which these theories do and do not work will help us to think more clearly about the complex place of media in lived religion.

A second important area of study that is opening up concerns the role of the senses and aesthetics for the uses of media and popular culture in lived religion. Much of the early literature on religion, media and popular culture tended to treat media and popular culture as texts which contained meanings that people engaged with in different ways. What was often missing from this was the recognition that people’s involvement with media and other cultural practices does not take the form of a disembodied encounter with information, but embodied processes of sensory and aesthetic engagement with images, sounds, objects, spaces, smells and tastes (see Morgan, in press). The study of religious visual culture is not therefore simply the analysis of religious images, but of the religious practices of seeing, through which these images become a part of people’s everyday religious worlds (Morgan, 2005). Films of Hindu myth, for example, do not simply convey information to Hindu viewers, but may for some become a means of practising darshan, the experience of divine encounter through gazing on the image of the god (Dwyer, 2005). Anthropologists, religious historians and scholars of visual and material culture have played a leading role in raising questions about how the religious uses of media and popular culture are bound up with sensory and aesthetic regimes that people learn in particular religious contexts (Schmidt, 2002; Meyer, 2008). Their work has suggested that religious groups are therefore important not only (or even necessarily) in providing intellectual formation in relation to their particular beliefs and dogma, but in informally teaching new adherents how to see, feel or hear the divine through particular images, objects and sounds. The experience of feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit through the Gospel music of a black Pentecostal worship service is thus dependent on having learned how to recognize and experience the movement of the Spirit through particular changes in the music’s timing, pitch and volume. This attention to the sensory and aesthetic regimes through which religious adherents make use of media and popular culture thus offers the potential for us to move beyond thinking about how people use these resources to construct conscious, narrated religious identities, to thinking about the place of media and popular culture in religious subjectivities based not only on thinking, but feeling, sensing and experiencing.

A third area of work requiring further study is that which examines media and popular culture in terms of the whole circuit of cultural production and consumption. The notion of the circuit of culture was first proposed by Richard Johnson (1986/7), a leading figure in the CCCS, who argued that research in cultural studies sometimes lacked a broader sense

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of cultural systems and processes. Johnson suggested that cultural studies researchers would therefore benefit by thinking about their work in terms of studying different stages of the circuit of cultural production and consumption. His ideas were later developed in a key textbook, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Du Gay et al. 1997), in which the authors suggested that the circuit of culture involved processes of production, forms of representation in cultural texts and objects, the use of these cultural products in the formation of social identities, the wider ways in which these cultural products were used and consumed, and the structures which regulated how these forms of culture were produced, distributed and used. The point here is that these different points of the circuit of culture do not exist in isolation, but in complex patterns of inter-connection. For example, the decisions that media producers make about the representation of the content of their products is not simply their own autonomous decision, but influenced by their perceptions of what their audiences want as well as financial and other regulatory structures which encourage or prohibit particular forms of content. In the study of religion, media and popular culture, scholars have tended to pay attention to particular points in the circuit of culture. The study of religion and film is a good case in point, in which a considerable amount of work has been done on the representation of religious characters and narratives in film. There has been much less work done, by comparison, on the processes by which films relevant to religion are made, the ways such films are consumed by their audiences, and the legal, financial and cultural regulatory structures that shape these processes (see Lynch, 2009a). As we have seen, researchers interested in media, popular culture and lived religion, particularly in media studies, anthropology and visual and material culture studies, have done much more work on cultural consumption. But there is still relatively little work done on the processes by which media and popular culture relevant to religion are produced, or complex systems of cultural production, consumption and regulation as a whole. Part of the challenge for the field is methodological. Students and scholars in religious studies, for example, are not usually trained in the range of empirical methods that are needed to examine processes of cultural production and consumption in real-world settings, which means that ideas about the ritual or mythological functions of media and popular culture are generally left at the level of theoretical assertions rather than being examined through real-world investigation. Again, people trained in religious studies do not necessarily know how to access information about media and culture industries which is more familiar to those working in film and media studies. This suggests the value of cross-disciplinary training and collaboration, both for new students in the field and for more experienced researchers.

A final area of study that is just beginning to attract more sustained interest concerns religion and virtual realities. Electronically-constructed virtual worlds have become an increasing part of many people’s cultural lives through the expansion of the video games market (annual income from which now exceeds that of Hollywood film), and the online virtual world of Second Life. Religion can be found up in the expanding world of consolebased and online video games, both in the form of religions invented as part of the worlds constructed for fantasy games and in the form of games designed and marketed for niche religious audiences, such as the Evangelical video games, Catechumen and Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Video games have also been designed to encourage the development of particular kinds of spiritual practice, such as The Night Journey, produced in conjunction with the video artist Bill Viola, which seeks to encourage an attitude of contemplation in the game player. Different forms of religious institution and practice can also be found in the virtual world of Second Life, which includes not only meeting places for a wide range

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of traditional and alternative religious groups, but also virtual forms of real-world religious pilgrimage sites (such as a virtual Mecca). As the forms of interaction on Second Life become more complex (e.g. with the introduction of live voice communication), so richer possibilities emerge for different kinds of religious practice. These include practices which may not be available in a person’s local community, such as opportunities to have a same-sex wedding in a progressive, virtual church. As the methods of interface with these virtual worlds also become more complex, this also raises possibilities for more sophisticated forms of aesthetic engagement with these virtual worlds. Future work in this area may consider in what ways existing religious power-structures and aesthetic regimes are imported into these virtual worlds, and in what ways these worlds make possible new forms of religious organization and practice.

The wider study of religion and contemporary society

As we have seen, then, the period since the 1990s has since undergone a significant expansion of academic work on religion, media and popular culture, which has made important advances in how we think about this field as well as raising important areas for future study. Thinking about media and cultures of everyday life in relation to religion is not simply a niche area of academic work for those with interests in cultural studies, but also has the potential to add to our understanding of some of the most important issues facing the study of religion and contemporary society.

First, the study of media and popular culture can help to clarify how religious groups and ideologies survive and even thrive in the cultural conditions of late modernity. The secularization thesis proposed that as societies became increasingly modernized, so the social significance of religion would decline. In Western Europe, there is considerable evidence to support this thesis. Yet at the same time, it is clear that this process of decline is uneven and that whilst some religious institutions are dying out, others are able to survive, find new members and influence wider public life. Some previous attempts to explain why some religious groups fare better than others have focused on the attraction of conservative religious beliefs in a cultural climate of risk and uncertainty, or on demographic trends (particularly birth rates) in specific religious communities. Another possibility worth considering is that the ability of religious groups to survive and thrive in late modernity is related to their ability to generate sub-cultural worlds of media and popular culture through which adherents feel part of a wider collective, learn and maintain particular sensory and aesthetic regimes for encountering their vision of the sacred, and find reinforcement for particular ways of seeing and acting in the world. This may be especially pertinent for the ability of religious groups to retain their younger members. There is considerable potential, then, for thinking both about how such religious sub-cultures operate, including analysing the ways in which they succeed and fail in maintaining hegemonic views of the world and how religious authority is reinforced or challenged through them. Understanding such sub-cultures in a wider social context might also give us greater insights into how some religious groups are more able than others to maintain a core of active adherents in a cultural climate that they experience as indifferent, or even hostile, to religion.

A second key issue for the study of contemporary religion is the relationship between religion and the wider public sphere, including the place of religion in relation to public institutions such as government, education, welfare and the legal system. The new atheism is part of a wider phenomenon of secularisms that seek to maintain clear boundaries

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between religion as a matter of private concern, and public life characterized by rational ways of thinking and arguing that are not conducted along the lines of narrow confessional assumptions. At the same time, many religious groups are attempting to maintain or expand their involvement in the delivery of school education, the recognition of religious conscience and beliefs in the legal system, and respect for religious sensitivities in public arts and media. Tensions around these issues in many Western societies have been fuelled by the growth of some religions linked to migration, notably Islam, associated liberal fears about the resurgence of fundamentalist religion, tensions within liberal thought between values of tolerance and equality of opportunity, as well as other sources of social and political grievance. These contentious issues about the place of religion in contemporary public life are particularly fought through the media. The media has become a key site for public awareness of religion, as fewer people have direct contact with religious institutions, and also provides a context for this debate to take place through news coverage and other interactive media. Media outrage over particular interventions in this debate, such as the pilloring of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, by some British tabloid newspapers for suggesting that there should be some recognition of Sharia law within the British legal system, also exemplifies how the media actively constructs shared beliefs around national identity, otherness, and the dangers of particular forms of religion. Understanding how the media represents, and makes possible, particular forms of interaction around the place of religion in public life is therefore another key area for study.

A third important area for study is the cultural circulation of religion beyond the traditional boundaries of religious institutions and personal piety. Whilst there is a long history of the subversion and re-working of institutional religious symbols in what is sometimes referred to as folk religion, the expansion of mass media in the twentieth century created new ways in which religious symbols and figures could be used and represented against the grain of religious orthodoxy. Schofield Clark (2005) has, for example, described the recent rise of the ‘dark side of Evangelicalism’, in which Evangelical beliefs and symbols acquire a wider cultural life and are used in ways far removed from Christian orthodoxy. Marilyn Manson’s subversive use of Christian imagery in his music, learnt from his teenage years at a private Christian school, provide a good illustration of this. This cultural circulation of religion extends not only to figures and symbols from particular religious traditions, but also to the concept of religion itself. Some of the public commentary, for example, anticipating the introduction of Apple’s new i-Phone used religious allusions to emphasize its significance, depicting it as a miraculous moment of salvation. Notions of religion can also circulate through media and popular culture to refer to practices not conventionally thought of in religious terms, with for example club nights being given religious names, or people referring to sporting venues as shrines or to sports fandom as a kind of religious devotion. What is interesting about such uses of religion is not necessarily whether popular music or sport could be thought of as religious in some sense. Functionalist concepts of religion are problematic in this context as we noted earlier. But the fact that religious language and imagery is being used in this way is illuminating both in terms of what people are attempting to do and say about their cultural practices, often in an ironic and knowing way, through such uses of religion, as well as suggesting what people imagine religion to be. The persistence of religious language and symbols in societies in which growing numbers of people have little formal religious involvement, and in which these religious resources are detached from their institutional moorings, invites further analysis. The unconventional circulation of religion through globalized media and popular culture also creates significant possibilities for conflict. The case of the international

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protests over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad provides a good example of this. The fact that these protests were inspired, not by the original publication of the cartoons in a Danish language tabloid, but by their re-publication in news media in the Middle East intended to stimulate public protest, exemplifies that cycles of cultural representation and protest can occur through complex processes and can be shaped by a range of religious, cultural, commercial and political factors. These protests feed into wider controversies about freedom of speech, artistic freedom, the nature and limits of blasphemy, and respect for religious beliefs that further energizes conflict and debate concerning the place of religion in public life. Understanding more about the nature and effects of the circulation of religion within media and popular culture beyond the boundaries of piety therefore provides another important basis for understanding religion in the contemporary world.

Finally, the study of media and popular culture can also help to illuminate broader questions about operative forms of the sacred in contemporary society. Faced with the plurality of religious and secular life-worlds, some scholars of religion have returned to the concept of the sacred, examining what different religious and secular forms of the sacred shape contemporary life. The notion of the sacred used here is not that of some form of universal religious experience – as suggested by Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade – and which has since been criticized as a liberal, theological account of mysticism. It reflects, instead, a revision of Émile Durkheim’s understanding of the sacred as a social form that shapes communal identity, values and experiences of collective effervescence, and concepts from cultural anthropology in which the sacred acts as a non-negotiable marker of essential values or boundaries (see Antonnen, 2000). As a social force that shapes communities and becomes a basis of social action, the sacred is generated not through some kind of pure inner experience of transcendence, but through social and cultural processes in which the sacred is remembered and made real in people’s lives. Media and popular culture are central to such processes in everyday life. The mass production and consumption of images of gods, saints and shrines is, for example, an important point of connection between many people’s lives and the vision of the sacred in a particular religious tradition. But it is not only religious forms of the sacred that are mediated in such ways. Secular forms of the sacred are also remembered, celebrated and fought over through media and popular culture. One such example is the periodic repetition of news stories concerning the abduction or abuse of children. Whilst the individual cases vary, the feelings which they are intended to evoke suggest that such news stories are not simply providing information, but serving as a kind of ritual for recognizing the sacrality of the care of children. We may well need complex ways of understanding the genealogies and forms of the sacred that shape contemporary life, discovering that religious and secular forms of the sacred are often more inter-twined than might at first appear. But an integral part of this task will also be to consider how these forms of the sacred take concrete form in people’s lives through media and cultures of everyday life.

In summary, then, the study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life is a relatively recent field. Although informed in part by the more serious academic attention paid to the study of media and popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, this work has only grown significantly within the study of religion over the past two decades. We are already at a stage now where there is greater clarity about theories and methods that might help this work, as well some of the important questions that scholars in this area are turning to. Beyond this, though, we are beginning to see a growing recognition by a wider range of scholars interested in lived religion of how issues relating to media and popular culture are bound up with some of the most important questions for understanding contemporary religion. From

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its relatively recent growth, then, the study of religion, media and cultures of everyday life is starting to offer important ways of helping us to understand the cultural grounds on which contemporary forms of religion and the sacred are constructed and contested.

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