Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round 7): Nabil Echchaibi, Yomna Elsayed, and Kayla Renee Wheeler (Part 1)

Yomna Elsayed

University of Southern California

Outside Al Hossary Mosque in Greater Cairo, crowded young, mostly affluent, Egyptians. Their bodies blocked the entrance to the mosque, while their double-parked cars congested its street (a common sight in overcrowded Cairo). It was short after sunset, the time for the then-popular Muslim televangelist, Amr Khaled, weekly lesson. His lesson was about sincerity, which he intercepted with jokes, storytelling and a teary supplication towards the end. It was the start of the millennium, when Amr Khaled seemed to be attracting a strong following of young Egyptians desperate for enchantment in what seemed like a country ruled with an iron fist, when Mubarak was still in power (apparently, it is now ruled with a “steel-fist”). Khaled’s lively lessons and animated character stood in contrast with the traditional cloak-wearing, state-approved Azhar clerks on one hand, and the Jilbab-wearing, arguably state-approved, fundamentalist Salafis on the other. With his shaven face, tieless suite, and wide smile, Khaled looked more like themselves. He enlivened the same stories they monotonically heard as children with detail and personified the Prophet and his companions—from which Muslims draw their life-style—through affective rhetoric. He was soon named by the Times asone of the most 100 influential people in 2007. This arguably put him in a perilous situation with the Egyptian government that was historically weary of religious figures turning popular. Amr Khaled was therefore judicious in steering away from politics. Nevertheless, in the minds of his adoring fans, this left room for speculation as to a possible double meaning in some of his lessons, and/or choice of stories. Soon, there was a wave of religiosity sweeping Egyptian society especially among upper middle-class Egyptians; gradually, many young men and women started practicing religion publicly. They observed their daily prayers and frequented the mosques, especially Ramdan’s night prayers, while many young females started wearing the headscarf. 

I was one of Khaled’s young fans, a late-adapter nevertheless (if we can liken Khaled to a new technology). Skeptical of religious rhetoric at the time, I was afraid that someone would make me feel guilty about my wavy hair, tight top and jeans. As a Muslim woman I am required to dress modestly and cover my hair. It was not until, I indulged myself in Islamic philosophy and the writings of Al Ghazali, that I decided to cover my hair during my last year of university against the objection of my family. I was proud to have worn it without the influence of religious figures, or family. At which point, I started listening to Khaled, and was surprised at how he did not limit a woman’s expression of religiosity to the way she dressed as some fundamentalist Salafis liked to do. In fact, very few of his lessons touched upon the physical appearance of the Muslim, whereas most focused on their piety and interactions with society. His words about sincerity, his animated storytelling and teary supplications are still vivid in my memory. I remember them now with bitterness. I, like many of his fans, was struck by what many would describe as Khaled’s transformation.

Following the January 25thuprisings, Egyptian media was rampant with hostile accusations of treason against young protesters who were scrambling for voices of support. To the youth’ dismay, Amr Khaled, whom they brought to fame, stayed silent on the subject. He was not alone in that; many popular religious figures followed suit, or worse, attacked the protests as un-Islamic or unpatriotic. Khaled did not speak, until it was apparent that Mubarak would resign and eventually concede. His statements remained ostensibly impartial, urging “everyone” to exercise temperament. However, with so many victims to state brutality, staying on the side-lines was no longer acceptable to his young fan base, of which many participated in the uprising. His popularity, however, did not sharply sink, until a video surfaced for him following the 2013 military coup where he was addressing Egyptian soldiers and providing them with religiously-framed arguments for blindly following commands. To many in my generation, this was the last straw. 

In my research on cultural resistance post-Arab spring, I examinehowthe energies of the Arab Spring have transformed to the participatory, ephemeral and relatively ambiguous spaces of humor, music and creative digital arts. Unable to publicly criticize cultural and political authorities, young Egyptians reveled in their ephemeral digital triumphs over the low hanging fruits of authority, its cultural productions. Amr Khaled, with his watered-down rhetoric, turned from a religious heart-throb to yet another state-media talking head. The prudence that worked for him pre the uprisings, worked against him following the military coup, after countless victims were lost to police brutality. Hence, it came as no surprise that the once admired figure of Khaled on one hand, and the once revered self-proclaimed Salafi Sheikhs on the other, became the object of ridicule in memes and parody videos of online youth. While some may see those parodies as signs of dystopic cynicism, I see them as a sign of maturing sensibilities that reject any attempts at misleading them into previous complacency. Not surprisingly, this was also paralleled by a rejection of favorite childhood entertainment figures, such as Mohammed Sobhy, for their moralistic rhetoric and state support. 

However, this rejection of religious figures should not be mistaken for a rejection of religion altogether; to say so would be disregarding a central aspect of life in the Middle East. It, however, signaled that those young adults were now consuming religion in a much more critical fashion. As someone trained in cultural and post-colonial studies, I continually emphasize that part of the acclaim that the Arab Spring uprisings received from western media analysts and commentators was not only inspired by its promises of political reforms, but also—what some viewed—as a promise of subsequent social reformations to an inherently flawed ‘other’. Such discussions of religious reformations, trying to replicate the Christian reformations, are both patronizing and counterproductive and have little to do with the societies these populations live in, as Shadi Hamid from the Brookings Institute once asserted. An uprising against an old order does not necessarily translate to an uprising against its heritage and tradition; it could rather simply imply a rejection of one appropriation of that tradition but not the other. 

While traditional religious spaces may have been viewed as part of the institutions social movements were trying to resist, this resistance may have only been to the state-abiding aspect of these institutions; other aspects such as the religious rituals or promotion of social justice and advocacy may continue to be sources of inspiration to some of the activists. In my research, I have seen youth both emphasizing continuity with tradition side by side to, discontinuity or resistance to some of its state-abiding aspects. So their relationship to tradition, and childhood texts is better described as a negotiation, a site of struggle over the role of religion in their social and political lives; this relationship still exists, however, on their own negotiated terms, ones that do not sacralize individuals all while respecting difference.

Last Ramadan, marked in my opinion a sad, yet telling, ending to the phenomenon of Amr Khaled, when he appeared in an adfor army-produced chicken, emphasizing the  need to consume healthy food products, aka army produced ones, to enable proper worshiping in the month of Ramadan. The criticism on social media was predominantly sarcastic. To young adults, the irony was self-evident, yet one mixed with disappointment over what could have been a possible meeting point between tradition and change.I can now see Egyptian and Arab youth weaving this connection in their participatory spaces, breaking the sanctity of individuals on one hand, all while rediscovering what brings them together as Egyptians, Arabs or Muslims. 

Nabil Echchaibi

University of Colorado Boulder

I began my work on religion immediately after 9/11, that fateful event that has ushered in a perpetual state of emergency and fear about Islam and Muslims. I was writing my dissertation on second and third-generation French and Germans of North African descent and how they navigated the political philosophies of assimilation and integration in their countries through media production. Up until this moment, these minorities had confronted a relentless form of cultural and institutional racism in which religion didn’t figure so prominently. French North Africans, for example, were referred to as “les Maghrébins” or “les arabes”, terms that were replaced overnight with the ominous label of “les musulmans”. This new ascendancy of militant Islam in the West precipitated a public scrutiny of Islam and exacerbated anxieties about the motives of Muslim minorities. Questions multiplied and quickly turned into paranoid interrogations of the loyalty of Muslims and the compatibility of Islam with modernity. 

Suddenly, Muslims were called to provide theological answers to questions about jihad, niqab, hijab, sharia, and suicide bombing amidst a media climate of deep semantic and cultural confusion about the meaning of these words and their relevance in a Western secular democracy. 

I became interested in the sources Muslims both in the West and in the Middle East were urgently consulting to confront the suspicious tenor of these allegations. Although these emerging questions about Islam pertained as much to politics and Western foreign policy as they did to religion, Muslims turned to various forms of popular religion to ask their own questions and challenge the narrow premise of fixed binaries and regressive traditions. Oil monarchies of the Gulf flooded satellite television with religious programming, some of which inaugurated innovative forms of preaching and religious entertainment in the form of reality television, game shows, and music videos. The political ramifications of this Islamic revivalism through networks manipulated by Saudi Arabia was hard to miss, but I was also intrigued by the novelty of this style and the large following it commanded around the world.  

Popular preachers like Amr Khaled, a former accountant, pioneered a creative breed of religious programming with an effective mix of religion and entrepreneurship. He later adapted Donald Trump’s The Apprenticeto a program about Islamic charity. Moez Masood, a former advertising producer, created a slick twenty-part television series in which he toured the streets of London, Cairo, Jeddah, Al Madinah and Istanbul interviewing Muslims about spirituality, romance, homosexuality, drugs and veiling. And two British Muslims launched a record label company that specialized in devotional music and Islamic entertainment. Critics of this popularized form of preaching called it “air-conditioned Islam’ or “Islam light”, accusing its producers of simply mimicking or importing the religious performance genre that helped popularize American evangelical Christianity through the adoption of modern media and popular culture. I began, instead, to explore the aesthetics and rhetorical import of this televised and digitized Islam in a way that did not dissociate it from the rich history of sermonizing in the Islamic tradition. To me, this phenomenon had more to do with a historical tension within Islam over religious knowledge and its transmission, which made many Western accounts of these preachers too shallow and predictable. Television and the Internet only complicated an oral/aural/visual tension in the devotional experience of Muslims and I wanted to capture that continuity.   

The point of my research was not to argue that there was nothing new in these emerging forms of mediated Islam. Rather, I wanted our analysis to also adopt a historical approach which contextualized the complex theological, ethical, and cultural dimensions of mediation and circulation within Islam. This part of my research has largely benefitted from the work of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Mahmood Mamdani, and others who argued, persuasively, for an intimate engagement with the intellectual and political history of Islam in order to recognize the vitality of Muslim efforts to re-articulate their religious traditions and adapt them to their modern condition. This is not simply a return to a bounded notion of tradition, although it is for some, but a negotiation of traditions to make sense of the world.   

Drawing on postcolonialism and decolonial critiques, my recent work focuses on emerging material expressions of an Islamic strand of cosmopolitanism that is deeply invested in this effort of sensemaking. I call this ‘Islamopolitanism’, a combination of popular religion and an intellectual engagement with what it means to be modern and Muslim today. Specifically, I ask how our analysis of new Muslim digital spaces and aesthetic formations can reveal emergent cultures of Muslim cosmopolitanism, a cultural sensibility and a way of dwelling in the world intimately born of the complex tensions between religious universalism and particularism, cultural mixity and purity, and authentic piety and neoliberal commodification. I argue that this form of Islamopolitanism is primarily rooted in a cultural aesthetic rather than a political conviction. Its proponents call for a remix of Islamic culture that arguably resists the nativist visions in the dominant narratives of Muslim identities. 

It is precisely this epistemic disobedience against the duality problematic of modernity and tradition that is still absent in our accounts of Muslim lived experiences. Moroccan postcolonial thinker and novelist Abdelkebir Khatibi insisted on demystifying both Western and Arabo-Islamic logocentrism in favor of a double critique that springs from tradition but only to create new ideas, new questions, and new ways of knowing. I invoke Khatibi’s postcolonialism in my research because it resists narratives of melancholy, victimhood, shame, malaise, loss, or existential uprootedness. Instead, his invitation was to find a discourse of possibility, an epistemology of suspicion, an idiom of Muslim syncretism, and a path toward intellectual independence. 

Other Muslim thinkers call for a similar open engagement with the particularism of Muslim cultures, local intellectual and political histories, and religious doctrines to deliver Muslims from the long grip of the slogans and the blackmail of Western modernity. In his provocative thesis that postcolonialism has ended, Hamid Dabashi argues that we have reached a moment of epistemic exhaustion that marks the “implosion of the ‘West’ as a catalyst of knowledge and power production.” The Arab uprisings of 2011 were, according to Dabashi, only the beginning of this new defiance. Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who advocates for decolonizing the history of philosophy, also calls on Muslims to keep Islam an open project, a doctrine in movement ready to drop all forms of identitarian chauvinism and to listen and absorb other voices inside and outside its tradition.     

Islamopolitanism is an open-ended project that shares these sensibilities and aspirations. I explore the work of performance artists, activists, devotional musicians, and authors who have developed sites, aesthetics, and cultural tastes to interrogate the mediation of Islam and the making of Muslim subjectivities beyond the limitations of traditional Islam and secular modernity. My aim here is also to expand the object of study in Islam beyond simply the visibly pious adherents of this faith. In fact, what are we studying precisely or who do we focus on when we label our research as work on Islam? My own approach is concerned with unpacking the complexity as well as elusiveness of the Muslim subject. As Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttal remind us in their writing about cities of the South and their dwellers as subjects ‘en fuite’ (on the run), I want to theorize Muslims as subjects en fuite- in the sense that they “always outpace the capacity of analysts to name them.”

Kayla Renée Wheeler

Grand Valley State University

 Throughout jumaah at the Annual Muslim Convention, I awkwardly tugged at my khimar. Unlike the times I had spent doing fieldwork in predominantly Arab and South Asian mosques, I wasn’t worried about making sure my neck and flyaway hairs were covered.  Instead, I was repositioning my khimar to make my slicked down baby hairs visible and to show off my dangly earrings. I wanted to fit in. I was surrounded by Black women in every possible head covering imaginable: berets, kufis, turbans, hoodjabs, and Shayla khimars.  Their wax print and bogolan maxi skirts made them appear to float elegantly down the rows, their layering techniques would have made Bonnie Cashin jealous.  They were performing what anthropologist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer calls, Muslim cool, a form of embodied resistance that privileges Blackness.  I had finally found home.  

My experience at the Annual Muslim Convention was one of the few times where my loosely tied khimar and 3/4-length sleeve shirt had not been met with side eyes from Muslim aunties.  None of the aunties at the convention chastised me for not dressing modestly or “Muslim” enough, something that often happens in the small college town mosques that I visit across the U.S.  These critical aunties, who are quick to call my outfits inappropriate and even haram, are invested in what I call “hegemonic Islam,”  which is Sunni-centric and privileges Arab expressions of Islam as the most authentic based on the belief that geographic or cultural proximity to Prophet Muhammad’s native land dictates one’s religiosity.  Hegemonic Islam is naturalized as “true Islam” and marginalizes those who do not fit within its framework.  It proves problematic for African-American Muslims who can only trace their natal history to the Americas.  Hegemonic Islam is inherently anti-Black because it devalues practices and beliefs created within African-American Islam.  

I developed the term, hegemonic Islam, in my dissertation, which explores how Black Muslim women use YouTube fashion and beauty tutorials to create alternative images of the ideal Muslim woman.  I traced the development of hegemonic Islam back to postcolonial movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) beginning in the 1960s, during which Muslims critiqued Western political and cultural dominance across the world.  Many sought to create an alternative shared identity for Muslims that would transcend social class and geography.  One way this shared identity was expressed was through dress.  Regionally specific clothes and styles, such as the abaya and thobe, were transformed into the only authentic Muslim dress.  This new shared identity created a new social hierarchy, where Arab Muslim cultural practices are placed at the top and African-American Muslim practices are at the bottom.  Wearing clothes that had once been specific to the MENA region became a sign of one’s commitment to Islam, instead of the materialist West. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer calls this pious respectability, where it is assumed that the more “religious” a Muslim becomes, the more they will shift aesthetically towards MENA.  I am interested in exploring how Black Muslim women have used fashion to reimagine pious respectability and resist hegemonic Islam.  

In my book, I explore how Black Muslim women in the United States have historically used fashion to construct alternative femininities that disrupt Eurocentric beauty norms and create transnational networks of belonging based on a shared identity as Black Muslims.  Through my research, I explore how the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Imam W. Deen Mohammed community’s (IWDMC) emphasis on racial uplift via entrepreneurship and patronizing Black businesses have been essential to building what I call the Afro-Islamic Diaspora fashion industry.  These organizations host charity fashion shows, house bazaars at annual conventions, and build women’s only spaces where women and girls can learn how to sew and design, providing women with the opportunity to monetize their talents and promote Black self-determination.

I situate my work within Islamic fashion studies.  The field is underdeveloped because scholars have historically understood fashion to be a product of the Christian West, originating in the Renaissance during the rise of early capitalism when people moved to urban areas and sought ways to individuate themselves.  These fashion origin stories create a binary between the West as a site of modernity and the East as being stuck in the past, which replicates Orientalist tropes.  This leads to scholars viewing Muslim women’s covering practices as static and geographically bound, but that is not reflective of what is happening on the ground. What fabrics, colors, and silhouettes are considered trendy is constantly shifting.  Five years ago, Khaleeji hijabs were “in”, now it’s turbans. It has been important for me to avoid looking for motivations as to why Muslim women cover—they are often numerous and fluid.  Instead, I am interested in examining what clothes communicate to others, what bodies are produced through dress choices, how definitions of modesty are constructed, and how objects become “Islamic”.  This approach prevents me from fetishizing Muslim women and their clothing.

It has been interesting watching the rise of modest fashion within the mainstream Western fashion industry.  2015 seems to have been a major turning point in the industry.  Not only did high-end brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce & Gabbana, and Monsoon begin selling Ramadan collections, many of which were only available in the Gulf region, more affordable brands like Nike, Uniqlo, and Macy’s have created permanent lines.  In general, the fashion industry has embraced longer hemlines and higher necklines.  On a personal note, it’s been so exciting to ditch my collection of cardigans and leggings that I used to use to make outfit more modest because so many brands now cater to my tastes.  While the move from body con dresses to maxi shift dresses could be a result of the cyclical nature of fashion, I think it’s also a recognition of Muslims’ growing global buying power.  The fashion industry is finally seeing Muslims as consumers.  

From my research, I’ve learned that the mainstream Western fashion industry’s embrace of Muslims as consumers has had negative consequences.  Independent Muslim designers are being pushed out by fast fashion brands that can make their products quickly and at significantly cheaper prices.  Many of the clothes sold by fast fashion brands like H&M are produced by Brown Muslim women in Indonesia and Bangladesh who work in unsafe work environments at low wages.  Mainstream fashion advertisers have slowly begun to use Muslim models who regularly cover in their marketing campaigns.  However, these models are primarily young, thin, visibly able-bodied, light-skinned, and non-Black.  I cannot deny the importance of positive representation of Islam for young Muslim children’s self-esteem, especially considering the rise of anti-Muslim, which disproportionately affects visibly Muslim women.  However, these advertisements reproduce the image of Islam as a “Brown” religion, contributing to the marginalization of Black Muslims.  They also uphold Eurocentric beauty standards, leaving many Muslim women outside the realm of fashion.   

The new focus on modesty in the mainstream Western fashion industry is mirrored by an uptick in scholarship about Muslim women’s dress that focuses on Muslim women outside of MENA.  While I have been happy to see the decline of veil historiographies, which dominated the field of Muslim dress studies in the 1980s and 1990s, I am disappointed that the scholarship still privileges women living in Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, Indonesia, and Iran.  When Muslims living as religious minorities are discussed, race and racial difference are often ignored.  The United States provides a unique case study because there is no racial or ethnic majority among Muslims, but there is a clear racial hierarchy in terms of defining Muslim authenticity.  Despite Black Muslim women, specifically African-American women associated with the Nation of Islam and the Imam W. Deen Mohammed community, making it “cool” to cover as early as the 1920s and creating and building a fifty-year old fashion industry, they’ve largely been ignored by scholars.  I hope to correct that.

Yomna Elsayed holds a PhD in communication from the University of Southern California. In her research, she examines the interplay of popular culture, social change and cultural resistance. Her dissertation examined how popular culture mechanisms, such as humor, music and creative digital arts, can be utilized tosustain social movements all while facilitating dialogue at times of ideological polarization and state repression. 

Nabil Echchaibi is chair of the department of media studies and associate director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching interests include religion, popular culture, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and Islamic modernity. His work has appeared in various journals and book volumes. His opinion columns have been published in the Guardian, Forbes Magazine,Salon, Al Jazeera, the Huffington Post, Religion Dispatchesand Open Democracy.

Kayla Renée Wheeler is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Digital Studies at Grand Valley State University. Currently, she is writing a book on contemporary Black Muslim dress practices in the United States. The book explores how, for Black Muslim women, fashion acts a site of intrareligious and intra-racial dialogue over what it means to be Black, Muslim, and woman in the United States. She is the curator of the Black Islam Syllabus, which highlights the histories and contributions of Black Muslims. She is also the author of Mapping Malcolm’s Boston: Exploring the City that Made Malcolm X, which traces Malcolm X’s life in Boston from 1940 to 1953.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round 6): Brandy Monk-Payton and Patrick Johnson (Part 2)

Brandy Monk-Payton:

I’m so glad you mentioned Aretha Franklin’s homegoing ceremony.  I grew up in a Southern Black Baptist church environment and the entire event was so visually and sonically familiar. While I was only able to catch bits and pieces of it, I’m thankful that Black Twitter was able to provide me with a rundown online. Participatory culture in a digital era is enhanced by racialized social networking practices.  

The appearance of the church within many Black media objects is such an important observation. While you focus on nineties sitcoms in your research, I can’t help but think of a figure like Tyler Perry. I wrote an essay for the edited collection From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi) titled “Worship at the Altar of Perry: Spectatorship and the Aesthetics of Testimony” that attempted to account for the fandom (especially southern black churchgoing female fandom) around hugely successful African American media maker Tyler Perry through the framework of religion. I argued that Perry transformed the cinematic experience into a sermon with his on-screen parables. While Perry is not an actual pastor, it seems that Black religious leaders have a fan culture unto themselves - certainly the African American mega-church preacher is a mainstay in Black culture that garners much adulation. 

Your use of haunting to describe how Blackness resonates across popular media forms is intriguing. The TV programs that you mention seem to always be present in Black cultural discourse as specters. Scholars such as Alfred J. Martin are bringing them back into focus as valued objects of study, because they are frequently obscured in traditional archives of television programming history. Additionally, Black fans have notoriously been excluded from examinations of fandom (see Rebecca Wanzo’s important essay “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies” in the journal Transformative Works and Culture). 

The recent Emmys broadcast commented on these mainstream erasures with Michael Che’s bit “Reparations Emmys” in which Black TV sitcom actors like Marla Gibbs from The Jeffersonsand Kadeem Hardison from A Different World were given Emmys for their influential roles in iconic Black-cast television programs. African American communities have been exposed to these legends through a kind of televisual “inheritance” that you speak of passed on from generation to generation.   

Patrick Johnson:

When Che gives Kadeem Hardison his Reparations Emmy for his role as Dwayne Wayne, he tells him, "I don't think you realize how many young brothers you actually inspired to go to college." My study's participants echoed these sentiments, citing A Different World as a key influence on their ability to see themselves as college students. In the 24 years since the show's series finale, it has remained the primary scripted televisual representation of Black college life. There is a generation of Black folks (myself included) who probably made some major life decisions informed by their A Different World fandom and who proudly identify as alums of the show's fictional Hillman College. Emmy-winning writer and producer Lena Waithe, who named her production company Hillman Grad productions, described her affinity for A Different World and The Cosby Show in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross. "I was just lucky that I was a kid watching it, seeing not myself yet in A Different World. I was seeing who I wanted to be and I saw so much of myself and so much of what I wanted to be in those shows. What television did for me is that it taught me how to dream, it taught me what to dream about." In this sense, fandom, like religion, can be understood as aspirational, providing the guidelines for the kind of person one hopes to become. 

Brandy Monk-Payton:

The Cosby Show is such a difficult text to engage with now. And Bill Cosby himself represents a kind of crisis, ideologically and affectively, in Black fandom. I think in part because of the way in which Black icons make meaning, spiritually, with Black audiences. The symbolic power they can hold over culture really puts us in a tough position when/if they fall from that position of “grace.” The Boondocks episode that critiques R. Kelly (and R. Kelly fans) perfectly depicts such a crisis.

I’m interested in what you think of these Black Americans deemed exceptional across fields (television, music, sports) and examples of how we have participated in their elevation.  

Patrick Johnson:

As a basketball fan, coming of age during the 1990s, there was no player more important than Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Crying Jordan meme, dad jeans, and "the ceiling is the roof" aside, Jordan remains a largely unassailable figure amongst basketball fans. While like Beyoncé, Jordan clearly appeals to a broad spectrum of people, there is a special place within Black culture for "his Airness". Writing about Jordan in the early 1990s, public intellectual and theologian Michael Eric Dyson identified "a religious element to the near worship of Jordan as a cultural icon of invincibility" and argued that Black youth made a particular "symbolic investment in Jordan's body as a means of cultural and personal possibility, creativity, and desire". The Black youth of the 1990s have grown into adults who remain fiercely loyal to Jordan and are particularly invested in him remaining a cultural icon. Make any earnest attempt to discuss the greatest basketball player of all-time and you quickly learn that there is little room for arguments that do not have Jordan firmly at number one. In the words of Krs-One, for many fans Jordan is not only number one but "number one, two, three, four, and five." In recent years, most conversations about the GOAT involve comparing Jordan's credentials against those of Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James (whose King James nickname is perhaps too on the nose when it comes to religiosity and sports). At some point in the debate, the pro-Jordan fan offers MJ's perfect 6-0 record in the NBA finals (compared to James' 3-6 record) and his intangibles such as his "heart" and "killer instinct" as evidence of his superiority. The latter traits, while not quantifiable, are nonetheless felt by the fan. The anti-LeBron argument will often come back to a single moment in his career when he was viewed as "quitting" on his team, perhaps the ultimate sin that an athlete can commit. What on the surface seems like a conversation about who is the better ball player is really one about faith, about which player you can believe in. 

Brandy Monk-Payton:

I’m wondering if this all comes down to a reconceptualization of faith to account for how Blackness signifies in popular media culture...how Black folk make meaning and create symbolic worlds to believe in as we navigate discrimination and oppression. The hope, across generations, that is put in representation (especially as epitomized by our icons) becomes vital.

Patrick Johnsonis a Ph.D. candidate in the Social and Cultural Studies program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include critical media literacy, Black fan studies, cultural memory, and the residual circulation of past media.

Brandy Monk-Paytonis an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her research on theories and histories of African American media representation and cultural production has been published in the journals Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, The Black Scholar, and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. Other work has appeared in various edited collections and is forthcoming in the anthology Unwatchable(Rutgers University Press). Her first book project examines Black celebrity in late twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S. public and popular culture.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round 6): Brandy Monk-Payton and Patrick Johnson (Part 1)

Brandy Monk-Payton:

I’m so excited to be part of this series of discussions with Patrick! Thanks to Diane, Sarah and Henry for the invitation. My research is located at the intersection of Media Studies and Black Cultural Studies. Specifically, I am working on a manuscript emerging from my dissertation that explores the aesthetics and politics of Black celebrity across television and digital media. I’m especially interested in logics of public exposure and the construction of racial notoriety. 

A sense of religion has always undergirded our experience with stardom. The title of Richard Dyer’s seminal book Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society(1986) references the godlike quality that we attribute to screen personalities. While I am not a scholar of religion, I often think about fame in relation to the act of worship. It’s a topic that dovetails with Kathryn Lofton’s useful book on Oprah Winfrey. In Oprah: Gospel of an Icon(2011), Lofton examines how Winfrey’s image and brand are predicated on popular forms of spiritual empowerment. Participatory culture here transforms into a commercial experience of reverence towards a divine figure.

Enter Beyoncé Knowles. Now I’m not inclined to get into debates about the beloved pop star, lest the Queen Bey’s very vocal Beyhive (her community of most devoted fans) begins to buzz. Yet it seems that Knowles exemplifies celebrity worship and, even more so, a particular type of Black celebrity worship. 

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah writes about her pilgrimage to a Beyoncé concert: “I am not a Beyoncé fan but I felt like crying tears of joy all three times I saw the Mrs. Carter show. Because while other pop stars may sing about throwing some glitter on it and making it rain, only Beyoncé could literally soar over us, climb up over our heads and our real lives, climb over her kingdom, to actually throw down over us what looks like bits of pollen, golden confetti, and make it rain bits of her dream all over her fans who love her so, and who would do anything for their Queen.”

I have never been to one of her concerts, but I know many people who have, who describe it in some way, shape, or form, exactly like the above. Indeed, Beyoncé has devoted followers in her “kingdom” and on the face of it, this is no different from any other adored musical artist. Yet this icon, this Black icon, carves out a sacred space in the public imaginary with every performance. I’m reminded of her April 2018 appearance at Coachella (coined “Beychella”), which turned the site into a large-scale HBCU football halftime show. That performance included a rendition of the Black national anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”  

While her appeal is widespread, I would argue that she mobilizes histories of Black expressive culture in order to generate collective memory amongst her African American audience. The interaction between Beyoncé and her fans resonates in terms of folk traditions as epitomized by the Black church.   

The discourse of racial iconicity hinges on both veneration and denigration, per Nicole Fleetwood. It is the communal and oftentimes ritualistic aspect of the veneration amongst Black fans that I find most fascinating.    

Patrick Johnson:

First of all, I would like to thank Henry, Sarah and Diane for putting together this series. I have really enjoyed learning about everyone's work. As a scholar whose research does not explicitly engage religious studies, these conversations have been particularly fruitful for helping to expand the terms in which I understand my scholarship. My work sits at the nexus of television studies, Black cultural studies, and education. My dissertation looks at how 1990s Black sitcoms such as Martin, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Living Single, A Different World,and Moesha function as a form of heritage and inheritance for Black millennials. I am broadly interested in understanding what the relationships between Black music cultures and television can tell us about Black cultural memory. I employ the concept of haunting to think through not only the resonance between Black media forms but the ubiquitous nature of the televisual past within Black popular culture.  

One of the major points of intersection between my work and that advanced through religious studies are around issues of inheritance and collective memory. Most of my study's participants, who were between the ages of 18 and 24 at the time of the study, worked under the assumption that most Black people have some awareness of the aforementioned 1990s Black sitcoms. While participants had varying orientations to the programs (many with strong negative critiques of the shows, especially Martin's gender politics), they expressed feeling that they had to at least contend with them. Most of study's participants described inheriting their 1990s Black sitcom fandom from their grandparents, parents, or older siblings. The ability to be conversant in the shows, knowing the characters, catchphrases, and major storylines enabled them to participate Black cultural conversations that connected them to previous generations of Black folks. They understood their literacy in the shows as granting them access to both imagined and actual Black communities. This brings to mind a quote from a participant in Jonathan Gray’s study on The Simpsons who stated, “Even though I don’t watch this show, I don’t like this show, uh, I have to know about it to a certain degree…otherwise I will be excluded from the conversation of my friends” (p. 71). In this sense, I wonder how might religious studies help us think through the fandoms that can almost be read as compulsory. 

The Black church has been a central institution in Black life. As a result, there is a certain literacy that many Black people have with the Black church regardless of their religious affiliation. Beyond the Black cast, the Black church is often employed in Black sitcoms as one of the many signifiers that connotes Blackness to the audience. The success of scripted shows like OWN's Greenleafand Bounce's Saints and Sinners as well as reality shows such as the Preachers franchise, proves that there is an appetite for programming that centers the Black church within its narrative structure. 

However, as I think about the convergence of religion, participatory culture, and Blackness, the Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin's homegoing service is perhaps the show that cogently brings together these elements. The service with all it's pageantry provided space for Black people to collectively laugh at some of the ridiculousness that took place. Through social media and our offline discussions, Black people engaged in what Beretta Smith-Shomade (2016) describes as playful piety. Our running commentary on fashion choices, singing ability, and audience reactions should not be read as incongruent with religiosity but instead reflecting a means through which we "enjoy the foibles, fallacies, contributions, and even grace of black religious ways of being" (p. 321). This infusion of humor was part of celebrating Aretha Franklin's life and achievements. 

 I am interested in any site where multiple eras of Blackness come together, and the homegoing service would definitely qualify as such. Haunting has been useful for thinking about the “always thereness” of not only certain figures and cultural artifacts but the seemingly antiquated ideologies that continue to resound in the present. We can look at the service and think about Bishop Charles E. Ellis III’s interactions with Ariana Grande or Rev. Jasper Williams’ rebuke of Black Lives Matter and understand them as representing regressive ideologies that linger when left unconfronted. However, the mediated and spectacular nature of the service ensured that their problematic behavior and statements would not remain within the confines of the sanctuary. Rather their actions were subject to scrutiny by Black folks in real-time via social media.

Patrick Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Social and Cultural Studies program in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include critical media literacy, Black fan studies, cultural memory, and the residual circulation of past media.

 Brandy Monk-Payton is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her research on theories and histories of African American media representation and cultural production has been published in the journals Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, The Black Scholar, and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. Other work has appeared in various edited collections and is forthcoming in the anthology Unwatchable(Rutgers University Press). Her first book project examines Black celebrity in late twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S. public and popular culture.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round 4): Tisha Dejamanee and Deborah Whitehead (Part 2)

Tisha: 

Debbie, I love your take on food storage blogs! And I completely agree that these ideas about women being compelled to return home to shore up the family unit are flourishing in the wake of the culture of high anxiety that currently prevails in the face of the increasing fragility of the American Dream. I’ve mostly approached this topic from the perspective of neoliberal individual responsibility – the notion that now that the American public is increasingly distrustful of the role of the State, corporations and medical authorities that women are increasingly called upon to step up and take on the labor that was once outsourced to these social institutions through homeschooling, cooking from scratch and doing extensive individual research into alternative health practices. 

However, I am also very interested in how you see the process of mainstreaming working to reshape communities around shared knowledge that potentially disrupt the boundaries of traditional political and religious affiliations. For instance, I see food blogging as a practice that increasingly unites women across the political spectrum and, while the narrative is often very intimate, political discussion is tacitly forbidden. Apolitical language clearly serves the commercial purpose of not unnecessarily excluding the blogger’s potential audience, but it also suggests that the blogger’s influence is predicated upon her political silence. After the 2016 election, I noted a few examples of food bloggers who broke the code and used their blogs to share strong feelings about the election outcome and this created a lot of agitation among readers. Are there any points at which you note similar ruptures between secular and religious communities emerge in the exchange of knowledge around prepper culture, or how does discussion of religion insert itself into these blogs? 

In response to the first question that you had for me about ambivalence, the way you discuss prepper culture as explained in terms of ‘empowerment’ and ‘confidence’ is pretty accurate to my understanding of how ambivalence works in postfeminist culture. That is, the rhetoric of choice can be used to justify any act as (post)feminist. Part of this is due to the influence of individualism – there is no discussion of domesticity and food preparation as a gendered outcome of structural or broader cultural pressures, or as labor that is systematically devalued yet obligatory; the only thing that matters is whether the individual interprets such work as empowering or fun. This is not to say that food work cannot be empowering or fun or pleasurable, but that pleasure is increasingly defined as the political end goal in and of itself and it is up to the individual to work out how they will justify and manage all of these pleasures, rather than organize collectively to fight for structural change.  

In response to your second question about authenticity, I was really fascinated about your article on ‘emotional fraud’ in the Christian mommy blogosphere. I think the examples you discuss are really great ways to think about the blurry lines that arise from the ways that bloggers are expected to confess and to share highly personal details about their emotional and domestic lives (and, I do think there is a gendered distinction in the blogosphere here), and the ways these same details form the basis for monetary and emotional payoffs. While most of the fraud that I have encountered in the food blogosphere has been of a less spectacular scale – say, stolen recipes, enhanced photography, and fake cheer (the controversy surrounding Thug Kitchen is a more notable exception of identity fraud) – in my experience there is an acceptance that bloggers can both share meaningful affective content and use these personal details to support corporate partnerships. ‘Hate’ blogs – for instance the GOMI community – are an interesting example of this because they offer scathingly honest critiques of the lifestyle blogosphere (for instance, referring to blogger’s children as ‘content generators’) while also serving as a testament to the seductiveness of blog content. However, this reading relies on a ‘buyer beware’ kind of model of response to the blogosphere – that is, the reader should be savvy to the kinds of renegotiations of identity and truth that are prevalent across the blogosphere, and understand that most popular blogs are aspirational and curated. While I agree that shades of truth don’t necessarily negate the affective impact of content on the reader (as you conclude in your article), I wanted to hear more about how faith shapes the response of readers and the ways that content is framed within the mommy blogosphere? 

Deborah :

 Thanks Tisha; I appreciate your questions about the politics of participatory culture.  Like you, I often observe a “code of silence” among women bloggers and readers when it comes to political affiliation – the old cliché that it’s not polite to talk about politics or religion applies in the blogosphere too!  Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule.  Survivalist and prepper bloggers whose anxiety levels peaked during the Obama years and in the run-up to the 2016 election tended to be fairly explicit about their support for Donald Trump.  As “Survival Mom” Lisa Bedford put it after the election, “many (not all!) in the prepper community have breathed a sigh of relief”; but she cautioned her readers that there were still good reasons to keep prepping, including natural, personal and social disasters (hurricanes, floods, job loss, riots, etc). In the post-election climate, while survivalist and conservative preppers may feel able to relax a bit, the election has had the opposite effect on those on the left end of the political spectrum.  A new community of liberal preppers is on the rise, characterized by both their political leanings and their desire to learn how to prep, and bloggers like Lefty Prepper Mom spend their free time reading the same LDS websites as do conservative preppers, learning Mormon techniques for food storage and emergency preparedness though they do not themselves identify as LDS.  But even though conservative and liberal preppers are united in their admiration for these particular aspects of the LDS tradition, they don’t seem to be interested in engaging with Mormons or Mormonism beyond appropriating their food storage practices, nor are they interested in engaging with one another across political boundaries; the Liberal Preppers Facebook group, for example, a closed group with over 3500 members, says in its description that it does not “knowingly accept conservatives and/or Trump supporters, into this group​.”  If anything, then, the 2016 election has seemed to harden political boundaries within the larger and increasingly diverse prepper community.  

It’s in the evangelical women’s blogging communities that I’ve seen some of the kinds of disruptions you mention.  Evangelical women’s blogs can be understood as a subspecies of evangelical women’s ministries more generally, sharing a desire to convert and lead other women in the faith, as well as a subspecies of the secular mommy blog, documenting family life and sharing personal reflections, recipes, crafts, etc.  The explicitly religious nature and purpose and the overt religious content of evangelical women’s blogs make them distinctive, but it is still true that like the food blogs you have analyzed, they tend to shy away from overt political discussion, perhaps out of a desire to maintain influence as you say, perhaps also out of a fear of alienating potential converts. This belies the fact that the blogs’ subject matter of women’s bodies, sexuality, marriage, and family is, of course, highly political; the rhetoric of “family values” has been used to advance a number of political positions, movements, organizations, and candidates over the past three decades, as well as to advance a particular notion of the patriarchal Christian family as the most basic unit of the modern nation state.  

A small number of evangelical Protestant mommy bloggers have built personal brands by cultivating decidedly apolitical stances, building large social media followings, authoring books, participating in Christian women’s ministry tours around the country, and even having their own HGTV shows.  The controversy that has erupted around Jen Hatmakerfor speaking out in support of same sex marriage and openly criticizing Trump and his policies (leading to condemnation from other evangelicals, criticism of women’s ministries more generally, and her books being pulled from a major Christian bookstore chain) is a striking example of the power of what Hatmaker has called “the Christian machine” to manufacture a disciplined silence around political issues among women in the evangelical community.  Yet Hatmaker is not alone; evangelical bloggers Beth Moore, Sarah Bessey, Austin Channing Brown, and others have contributed to what some have called an “evangelical crisis of authority” by using their powerful platforms to give voice to those not typically represented in evangelical institutional leadership structures in the U.S., which tend to be dominated by white men.  And so, to answer your question about how faith shapes content and reader response in the evangelical blogosphere and how that might be different from the “caveat emptor” attitude expressed in food blogs or hate blogs, I think it has to do with the question of religious authority – the notion that these women possess a kind of authority to teach and lead other women in the faith, one that may be outside denominational or institutional structures, but a kind of authority nevertheless; and because of that, personal misrepresentations, lies or omissions, or departures from church doctrine or practice, are seen with a unique kind of gravitas.  We’ve been talking a lot about politics and silence and authority, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the question of authority in the food blogosphere, as well as whether you’ve seen any political commentary in food blogs around topics other than the election, for example around food politics, sustainable agriculture, food deserts, GMO foods, labeling, and so on? 

Tisha: 

Thanks for sharing these interesting examples. A theme that I think is prevalent across the texts we examine is the nostalgic valuation of certain kinds of knowledge in response to a culture of high anxiety – around politics, around natural disasters, around State failure, around the changing social and demographic landscape of the U.S. In the food blogosphere, I see a direct parallel to the valorization of prepping in the ways that self-sufficiency is based around the desire to deconstruct and recreate food in the individualized domestic sphere, for instance through learning intensive production processes such as grinding one’s own flour or baking marshmallows from scratch. What I find really interesting about the example of the Liberal Preppers is that a lot of this anxiety is explicitly channeled into the kinds of community that form around such knowledge exchange; that a closed liberal community is required to make these discussions ‘safe’. 

 In contrast, I would characterize the food blogosphere as driven by the impetus for expanding one’s influence. Part of this takes place through the ways that food bloggers set themselves up as authorities on cooking, which almost inevitably involves exaggerating the performance of a normative, girlie femininity – through the intimate chatter, self-deprecating commentary, and the foregrounding of family and domestic life. As such, while the community itself is not necessarily closed, the construction of a digital femininity usually is. This is one of the most troubling aspects of the nostalgic romanticization of traditional knowledge – it often simply operates as code for gender and racial conservatism. 

 To answer your question about sites where food politics becomes explicit in the food blogosphere, there are certainly several examples. Many of them revolve around the ethical and environmental impacts of veganism, which is one of the most popular subgenres of food blogs. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan Project is an important example of critical social activism through blogging about food, while many other vegan blogs make explicit the social issues that have led them to veganism (interestingly, just as many vegan food blogs are likely to emphasize their apolitical, judgement-free stance). Jack Monroe’s Cooking on a Bootstrap blog became widely circulated as a British austerity blog, and Monroe has used this platform to publish explicit political commentary on U.K austerity policies and various other social movements. Multiple other examples exist of blogs that frame food choices in terms of consumer politics, although these rarely acknowledge structural deficiencies in the mainstream food system. In general, I see blogs that seek to deal with politics as outliers that may resonate with particular audiences but are not generally rewarded within the mainstream structures of visibility of the blogosphere.

As we close this blog conversation I’m interested to hear your thoughts on how, as scholars, we assess the political potential or impact of the blogosphere. I think your example of disruptive evangelical women’s blogs offers an interesting way to think through the general contradiction of the lifestyle blogosphere, which is that they offer women a platform and a place to document, circulate and add value to their experiences while at the same time this visibility is often contingent upon their performance of a correct kind of femininity or gendered cultural authority. You’ve alluded to this in your previous posts, but I was wondering whether you could speak more explicitly on what kind of potential you think religious blogs have to shape or change gender roles within religious communities? 

Deborah:

 Tisha, I think you’re absolutely right that the nostalgic desire to recover knowledge around cooking, homekeeping, prepping, mothering, being thrifty, etc. that we see in the blogosphere and beyond is often bound up with political anxiety, gender and racial conservatism and a romanticized view of the past – one in which “traditional” white working class “culture” is unproblematically celebrated and preserved. One could also look at home design blogs and the current craze for “farmhouse style,” most famously exemplified by the long running HGTV show “Fixer Upper” and its flannel shirt, jeans and boots-wearing married hosts, Chip and Joanna Gaines, to see this nostalgia evident in contemporary home design.  Words like “rustic” and “homey” and “rural” are frequently used to describe farmhouse style, which “eschews modern sensibilities and goes back to a simpler time” with its ubiquitous weathered wood finishes, exposed beams, barn doors, shiplap, galvanized steel, mason jars, black and white color schemes, and buffalo plaids, and its values of “simplicity” and “practicality” and “warmth,” evoking a new American Gothic for mass consumption.  Joanna Gaines’ aesthetic has been copied, channeled into several home design show spinoffs, and marketed as a Target line; the look is aspirational, yet achievable, we’re told, as long as we’re willing to “peruse, meander and collect” to meaningfully curate our homes as perfect combinations of “hand-me-downs and flea market finds combined with newer pieces.”  It is not difficult to see Chip and Joanna Gaines and their many imitators and admirers of farmhouse style as literally engaged in rummaging through and reassembling the past for present consumption, all while foregrounding particular normative conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, and nation.  

I appreciate your question about religious blogs and gender roles; it’s a complicated one and returns us to the question of the political potential of participatory culture.  Back in 2005 at an inaugural gathering of women bloggers, a controversy erupted as to the political potential of mommy blogs. As Lori Kido Lopez relates the story, one participant commented that “if women ‘stopped blogging about themselves they could change the world.’”  In response, blogger Alice Bradley declared that, in the context of the male-dominated world of blogging in which mommy bloggers were not taken seriously as writers, “mommy blogging is a radical act!”  Does such a statement recover the second wave feminist rallying cry that the personal is political, or does it reflect the postfeminist rhetoric of choice and pleasure and visibility as a substitute for organized political action?  

When it comes to the religious blogosphere, the question is refracted through the lens of authority and tradition.  On the one hand, I agree with you that the price of visibility in the blogosphere is too often the performance of “proper” gender roles and, I would add when it comes to religious blogs, the performance of institutionally or communally sanctioned religious belief and practice.  The religious blogosphere is, of course, incredibly diverse, and my observations here are confined only to the evangelical and LDS blogs I’ve studied.  Jen Hatmaker and other evangelical women have spoken about the presence of a “pink ghetto” in evangelical Christianity that limits women’s opportunities to participate in ministry or leadership roles, constraining them both offline and online into a “less threatening,” Instagrammable, “hey girl” performance of femininity, one that eschews taking stands on controversial issues.  When Hatmaker spoke out in support of same sex marriage, the furor around her (which she has said included death threats) was not just about the specifics of this particular issue, but about the fact that she’d chosen to, as a female influencer, speak publicly about it.  “Being on the wrong side of the evangelical machine is terrifying and punitive,” Hatmaker has said, so it is not surprising that most evangelical women are reluctant to take it on, and therefore that despite what I earlier mentioned as a “crisis of authority” within the tradition generated by social media, the possibilities of institutional change remain similarly constrained, at least for now.  Heidi Campbell’s analysis of 100 religious blogs reached a similar conclusion, finding that religious bloggers more often affirmed than challenged traditional sources of authority in their respective traditions, because bloggers’ online practices are so deeply embedded in and connected to their offline practices and beliefs.  

 On the other hand, I find the kinds of examples of youth activism and political engagement that Henry Jenkins and his colleagues have collected in By Any Media Necessary to be inspiring.  I am particularly intrigued by the notion that in an era of increasing distrust in political organizations and institutions, political change has become, through social media, something that is part of everyday lives instead of just being confined to discrete events like organized rallies or protests.  Seen from that vantage point, moments of disruption in the blogosphere where political views are surfaced in normally carefully guarded apolitical, “everyday” spaces become very significant.  For example, in October 2016, Christian women’s ministry superstar Beth Moore, who had “spent her career carefully mapping the boundaries of acceptability for female evangelical leaders,”tweeted her outrage at then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2005 Access Hollywood tape, and the way that some male Christian leaders rushed to excuse it as “locker room talk,” to her 900,000 followers, arguing that the evangelical community needed to “wake up” to its pervasive sexism and its frequent willingness to overlook sexual harassment and abuse of women.  Blogger and author of Jesus Feminist Sarah Bessey started the hashtag #ThingsOnlyChristianWomenHear on a whim in April 2017 to “amplify the voices of women who have too often been silenced” in the church; more conversations, including #ThingsOnlyBlackChristianWomenHear, have followed, highlighting experiences of misogyny, sexism and racism.  These actions by Moore and Bessey and many others are helping to generate the evangelical community’s own #MeToo movement. One could also look at the way in which many religious (and secular) lifestyle bloggers and Instagrammers interrupted their daily posts this past April to denounce the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” immigration policy that resulted in separating parents from children at the border, explaining that as mothers themselves, they could not stay silent on this issue, and urging their readers to take action by calling their congressional representatives and donating to legal aid organizations for refugees.  Such disruptions are risky and controversial even among one’s followers, and generate both praise and criticism.  But perhaps, in the context of religious traditions which do not ordain women or where women’s leadership roles are tightly controlled and constrained, they represent small steps toward a kind of participatory politics grounded in the power they have as influencers and organically connected to their identities as women, mothers, and people of faith.    

Tisha Dejmanee is an Assistant Professor in Communication at Central Michigan University. She has authored several journal articles on issues where the fields of gender studies, popular culture, politics, new media and food intersect. Published work relating to the themes discuss in these posts include "‘Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play” (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1527476415615944)  and “Consumption in the City: The Turn to Interiority in Contemporary Postfeminist Television”

Deborah Whitehead is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Senior Resident Fellow with the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder.  Her research focuses on intersections between religion and philosophy, gender, popular culture, and media in the U.S.  She is author of William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture (Indiana University Press, 2016) and several articles on James, religion, gender, media, and popular culture.  She is currently working on a second book on U.S. evangelicals and new media, forthcoming with Routledge.   

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversations (Round 5): Whitney Phillips and Jason Bivins (Part 3)

Jason on fanaticism:

Let me propose a bit of a shift here in my final section. What can we learn about religion, technology, and identity from the Indianapolis 500? Several lifetimes ago, in 1997, a moderately successful radio host named Mike Pence had a bone to pick with the “mainstream media.” Pence, who, before becoming Vice President, would go on to serve in the House of Representatives as a proud ally of the Christian Right and the Tea Party, was fond of describing his show as “Rush Limbaugh on steroids.” And on May 23, 1997, Pence was irate that the local media was reporting diminished crowds at that year’s Indy 500. Sound familiar? Pence was riding a wave that was a long way from breaking, and still has not.

As I try to measure the distance between that year and this year, I haven’t found much that’s revealing in all the oceans of pieces about Mike Pence’s “servant leadership,” or the future of the “evangelical vote.” I have been thinking instead about the links between persecution complexes, religion, and crowds. The Trump era gives me a lot of data, after all, and new insights into earlier moments, some of which have to do with films and which help us think freshly about the over-determined category “fanatic.”

Think about a Trump crowd. Not just a rally but an inauguration, or a Charlottesville march. The slogans. The defiant embrace of a singular identity. Things we regularly ascribe as fanaticism, filled with the kind of all-or-nothing furor of a boozy NFL game. Trump publics understand themselves to be memories, and brands, and they come into being to the extent that they can posit a negative public, one that is collectivist, radical, and anti-religion. That’s a standard right-wing move dating back to the Haymarket riots and the first Red Scare. Against the brightly colored cords of memory stretching back to Boston Harbor, a dark history roils with “hate-filled” or “divisive” leftists: communists, antifa, or the Black Panthers. Other fanatics.

It’s worth noting how contemporary anti-left discourse is shaped by a few very specific cinematic imaginings of what it means to be an American, and who counts in public life (spoiler alert: it’s white people). Think here of Forrest Gump. In that film, Tom Hanks’ simpleton, running Zelig is morphed into one segment of historical footage after another, from an awkward meeting with John F. Kennedy to a talk show panel seated next to John Lennon to ping-pong diplomacy in China. Many filmgoers loved the corporatist nostalgia constructed here, though less was made of the film’s reactionary historical memory, where returning Vietnam vet Gump disdains hippiedom (what hath the counterculture wrought of his sweet Jenny?) and belittles the Panthers (“Sorry I had a fight in the middle of your Black Panther party”), portraying radical politics as officious, anti-feminist, and spiteful.

Gump was temporarily the poster child for Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” a cynical manipulation of whitewashed American history and a vacuous celebration of a cultural community that will not stomach any boat-rocking. But somewhere between the post-apocalyptic enthusiasms of The Road Warrior and the Opus Dei-fueled The Passion of the Christ, whose fetish for historical “accuracy” manifested in the degree to which it could granularly document the suffering Messiah’s broken body like a Rocky film’s mauled, swollen faces, Mel Gibson got political. Or rather, long before viewers learning of his anti-Semitism understood that he was not simply play-acting “crazy” in the Lethal Weapon franchise, Gibson’s two Clinton-era “historical” films – Braveheart and The Patriot – were co-opted into American politics.

A year after the “Gingrich revolution” of the 1994 midterm elections, a widely-documented and discussed upsurge of (mostly) white male masculinity emerged in (mostly) suburban America. First was the increase in war-games as recreational activity, including not only Civil War reenactment or Renaissance Fair jousts but paintball, Green Beret cosplay, and prepper training at gun ranges, in the woods, or at separatist compounds, each sharing a concern that the “tyranny” of big government was no longer able to be checked by the integrity and wholesome good will of “the people.” Some of these ideas are as old as America, and they are also bedrock for the alt-right. But Braveheart framed them for millions of Americans, grumbling about “Hillarycare” or gangsta rap or NAFTA, the fictionalized slice of Scottish history standing in for any American viewer’s felt experience of hardship, of Embattlement. In time it became perhaps the most powerful template for what, in my current work, I call Life As Action Movie (LAAM).

Briefly, the film focuses on Gibson’s portrayal of Scottish hero William Wallace. It opens with a portrayal of kilted, brawny men laboring contentedly, attending fairs, falling for pale maidens, and performing manly feats. This carefully manufactured scene prepares the viewer for outrage at the weaselly Robert the Bruce, playing both sides of the fence but ultimately giving comfort to the Crown, whose armies would rob sweet Scotland of her freedom. After one too many village raids and the execution of his wife, Wallace and his merry men enter into a kind of protracted guerilla warfare, whose resonance with the 1990s anti-statist militia movements was as unmistakable as it was seldom remarked. Wallace is eventually tried and executed himself. At the movie’s conclusion, as Gibson grimaces and contorts on the rack of tyranny, a sniveling, foppish magistrate leans into his face and tells him he need only say “Mercy” to be spared a grisly death. The magistrate announces “The prisoner wishes to say a word,” whereupon Wallace, defiant to the last, wails “FREEEEEDOOMMM!!!”

The film depicts a national identity that takes shape via navigation of the freedom/tyranny dyad. Important to the appeal of the LAAM template is the caterwauling self-evidence of the idea of “freedom” as Gibson hollers it from his torture instrument. Freedom does not require elaboration. Freedom’s absence is torture. In this we detect an affective resonance with the fervor and violence of Trump crowds, with their collective effervescence, their violent rhetoric, and their isolationism. These crowds are unabashed in their rearward glance. Their vision of America, like the Scotland of the mind, is sentimentalized, homogenous, and very pious.

But what is the lack for which these crowds compensate? Perhaps, those sympathetic to Hillbilly Elegy tell us, it is the precarity of neoliberalism that has suburban crowds all angsty. Try again. It is fury and disbelief at the presence of other American bodies, whose legitimacy they cannot accept. Bodies whose difference inspires a fanaticism, much though academics will cluck their disapproval at so clunky and disdainful a category.

Fanaticism is what happens when Americans cannot – will not – think about what public life actually demands in an actual society. Inside this condition, a condition we must think and act our way beyond, words like “freedom” and “religion” produce an enthusiasm that deflects attention from the difficult projects of rethinking what a public is. Because what has become so agonizingly obvious in the Trump era is that the long con is the fiction that politics as such doesn’t matter. If government is only out to get us, and if politicians can’t be trusted, then we’d be better off not hoping for incremental improvements of law and policy but finding the one truly magnetic candidate who can vicariously fight for us. Crowd-sourced, mediated feeling is the remainder.

So the lack isn’t so much the lack of opportunity to register one’s voice in public, to make representatives accountable to the coalescence of citizens in the polis, as it is the felt lack of certitude fading into the future, of the insulation citizens crave manifesting as naked isolation, one that is porous at that, continually pricked by the pain and hardships and desires of others, so much that we cannot tune them out; we thus compensate for these feelings by being louder than others.

What the “economic anxiety” crowd seem not to realize about the emotional intensities of religious identity – which is always also racial and gender identity – is that Trump is not some Hail Mary designed to get coal jobs back, no matter how many articles tell us so. The sense of crisis behind collective emotional shrieking, these shared protestations defending the flag and the cross, are always connected to the very neoliberalism they contest. The sense of permanent crisis is fundamental to capitalism, not only because of its own precarity nor even just because of how unlikely it is that we make it (the oldest American dream), but because the crisis is the inverse of the promise that everything will work out. This promise demands the expression of the kind of surplus feeling on display among our fanatics, because we know it is false. In selling us the promise, neoliberalism sells us the very lack that demands that promise; it sells us the boredom and flatness of the secular so we will crave the enthusiasms that are packaged for us.

As Mel Gibson is stretched eternally on the rack, and Nazis march in Jefferson’s Charlottesville, and we develop apps to measure the coalescence of emotion on Twitter, we must wonder: what kind of American public sphere are we willing to defend? Despite all of the chatter holding that the Tea Party, and exurban Trump supporters, and even the alt-right form some sort of recrudescent populism – the “deplorables” simply articulating their “economic interests” against tone-deaf East Coast elites – the bodies in America’s streets since the November 2016 election confirm that an alternate national anthem could be The Clash’s “I’m So Bored With the USA.” Certain Americans enjoy the luxury of boredom, which is the phenomenological experience of the market sine qua non, since boredom keeps us yearning for the next fix, the next distraction from ourselves. But from Portland to D.C., from Ferguson to Charlottesville, from the stock exchange to the Bundy Ranch, America has also become another Clash tune: “White Riot.”

Whitney on fanaticism:

Questions about crowd size, persecution, and boredom all factor into my experiences with fanaticism online, particularly in the context of fanatical conspiracy theorizing, or fanatical shaming, or fanatical support for certain political candidates and causes.

The pressing issue for me in these cases, however, isn’t that participants actually are fanatics. It’s that often (and this recalls my previous response), it’s not clear who really is and who’s pretending to be for who knows what reason, humor or manipulation or hate or some idiosyncratic combination therein. This brings us back, of course, to Poe’s Law, which my co-author Ryan Milner and I describe as a monster skulking in the darkness; “it’s always just standing there, menacingly” we write in our book The Ambivalent Internet. In these cases, details like how many people are participating, who is doing so out of sense of genuine persecution, and to what extent being bored, or at least, having too much time on one’s hands, factors into the discussion, often remain unknown and unknowable.

This doesn’t stop many people, most conspicuously journalists, from trying. Here’s an example: earlier this summer, I got a DM from a reporter at a large national publication looking to write a story about shaming culture online, and how it’s gotten completely out of control (given the nature and focus of my work, I do a fair number of these kinds of interviews). He pointed to the recent firing of James Gunn, who Disney had hired to direct the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Some concerned citizen had poured through years of Gunn’s old tweets, because it’s 2018 and that’s what it means to be a person now, and discovered that Gunn had once tweeted a handful of pedophilia jokes. They were, obviously, gross. This resulted in OUTRAGE by THE PEOPLE, which is what triggered Gunn’s firing; and wasn’t this proof of PC and shaming culture running amok? The reporter wanted to get my take, i.e., agree with them, with a smile, nod, and soundbite.

The problem was, this wasn’t real. Not exactly, not as it was being framed. Outrage had followed Gunn’s firing alright, but as was quickly revealed (and is what I was suspecting would come out, given so much precedent), that outrage was precipitated by extremist groups, who have for months, for years, orchestrated similar attacks on prominent liberals. I say the outrage was “precipitated” rather than “manufactured,” here, because it’s not clear how many of the responses constituted coordinated astroturf, and how many were posted by individuals who didn’t know about the smear campaigns, and who were genuinely disgusted by Gunn’s statements. This mix would have become even more difficult to parse after the early media coverage started rolling in, bringing untold thousands of additional participants into the fold.

The Gunn case was multi-pronged: not only did it target a specific individual, it played into the narrative--a favorite of far right extremists and more mainstream conservatives alike--that liberals are hysterical, hypersensitive snowflakes. Look at them scream bloody murder over a couple of jokes! (For a case that pulls exactly this page out of exactly this playbook, see this example from 2014; the same things keep happening, and happening, and happening, as I chronicle in the first part of this report).   

It’s not just smear campaigns that raise similar questions of motive. From Pizzagate to QAnon to countless narratives in between, the underlying issue--reiterating the above--is that observation is not confirmation online. There is often no way to parse what is sincere from what is satirical, what is deliberate disinformation and what is someone’s good faith effort to tell the truth, at least their version of it. Efforts to point at particular unfolding controversies and declare emphatically that this is an example of X are, as a result, almost guaranteed not just to misrepresent the story, but to do someone else’s media manipulation legwork. To what end? Unfortunately, the answer is often “who knows.”

It is certainly the case that there are fanatics on the internet. What is equally certain is that people perform fanaticism on the internet, for all kinds of reasons, to all kinds of effects. The result of not knowing very much, and worse, not even knowing what exactly we don’t know, is distressing. It means that everything we say grows monsters. At least it can--with that possibility always just standing there, menacingly.   

Conclusion:

Ultimately, I’m not sure I delivered on Whitney’s promise that I would provide any “religious studies grounding” in our conversations. But what’s clear to me, and I hope clear to readers, is that I was really energized by my engagements with Whitney and her incredible work. Together I think we’ve succeeded at delivering some snapshots of our own interests, from our distinctive perspectives, and in that the kind of collage portrait that can emerge through interdisciplinary jamming.

Contrast and combination often lead to fresh thinking. And even if they don’t, maybe they’ll provoke or annoy you in new ways. Pizzagate and Forrest Gump. The alt-right and James Gunn. Trump and trolling (okay, you already knew about that one). These combos and categories not only catalyze our thinking about religion and media, they mediate our exchanges with each other, too.

Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Digital Technologies at Syracuse University. She holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus) from the University of Oregon, and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is the author of 2015's This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press), which was awarded the Association of Internet Researchers' Nancy Baym best book award. In 2017 she published The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity Press), co-authored with Ryan Milner of the College of Charleston. She is also the author of the three-part ethnographic study "The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Far Right Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators," published in 2018 by Data & Society. She is working on a third book titled You Are Here: Networked Manipulation in the Digital Age.

Jason C. Bivins is a Professor of Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. He is a specialist in religion and American culture, focusing particularly on the intersection between religions and politics since 1900. He is the author of Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion (Oxford, 2015) a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015. He has published most actively in the area of U.S. political religions, the subject of his first two books, Religion of Fear: The Politics of  Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2008), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2008, and The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (UNC, 2003). He is currently working on his next monograph in political religions: Embattled Majority, a genealogy of the rhetoric of “religious persecution” in public life. He is also writing about Jack Kirby, the “King of Comics,” for Penn State Press’ Religion Around series.

How Do You Like It So Far? Podcast: Anushka Shah on Civic Entertainment

In this episode, we get the chance to talk to Anushka Shah, who works as a researcher at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab. More recently, she has started a project called Civic Entertainment that explores the intersection of civic engagement with television, radio, digital entertainment and film. This project researches the media effects of fiction on thought and behavior change and explores how methods of social change available to citizens can be best represented in entertainment media. It also investigates the representation of protest and activism in current popular culture. She also runs a production studio in Mumbai called Civic Studios that creates civic entertainment content for Indian audiences. Shah tells us about the inspiration she, and other Indians, have gotten from popular media, and how she brought civic participation with entertainment together. She helped to organize a conference on Civic Entertainment held recently at the Godrej India Culture Lab.

To learn more on civic entertainment in India, check out this account of the activism around Rang De Basanti and this account of the mobilization around Indian Pop Idol.

Next week, we are joined by Rohan Joshi from All India Bakchod, which performs “news comedy” in the Indian context. We will share a portion of Joshi’s remarks at the Godrej Civic Entertainment event, where he spoke about Captain America as a model for Indian civic participation, and we discuss news comedy as a form of civic entertainment.

And, by the way, how do you like it so far?

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round 5): Whitney Phillips and Jason Bivins (Part 2)

Jason on fear:

Every so often you write things that you secretly hope will become outdated. We want people to read our stuff, of course. But when scholars write, as I do, about religio-political formations that they find deeply challenging and in places anti-democratic, it’s not unreasonable to hope that the culture will change in ways that steadily reduce their presence and influence. Ten years ago I published a book called Religion of Fear, in which I posed the question: how did impulses and ideas that lurked at the margins of cultural discourse in the 1960s become mainstream by the 2000s? My answer was to look at the influence of several different cycles of evangelical popular entertainments, specifically at their fearful depictions of American politics.

Clearly, the movement of outlandish and fearful into the mainstream isn’t finished yet. Who can even keep up? Fervid imaginings of the Deep State, sinister secularists, or radical leftists who want to abolish Christianity through mind control – all this is so commonplace now that we wonder if we’re losing our collective ability to be outraged by such claims. By talking about the strange normalization of outrage, catastrophe, and horror – not Hurricane Maria or the day’s latest mass shooting by a white male – we’re focusing in on the ascendance of a particular religious response to “the fucking new.”

While we live in the thick of progress narratives – the providential variety, or the secular pluralist variety most prominently – we find that to engage religion in America is necessarily to be confronted with fantastical and fearful narratives. And these narratives – whether mass entertainments like The Walking Dead or Left Behind, or more subcultural fare – depend on symbolic violence done to innocent and guilty bodies alike. In my own work, I explore the eroticism that’s part of these imaginings, and the attractions of demonology generally. But there are also more overtly political implications.

In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger described violence as an ontological breaking into and breaking down of the “communal World” as it appears to custom: “This act of violence, this decided setting out upon the way to the Being of beings, moves humanity out of the hominess of what is most directly nearby and what is usual.” We might think of this passage when reckoning with religious enthusiasm, and with how the production of disturbing fear-talk is a sign of civic disaffection in a time of political crisis. But that hardly accounts for the real violence of Pizzagate or Charlottesville, does it?

Perhaps because of that intellectual limit, I’ve found myself turning more often in my current work to fiction as a way of explaining public life. In “The Canterbury Pilgrims,” Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the American propensity wherein “a cold and passionless security be substituted for human hope and fear.” And in “Passages from a Relinquished Work,” he meditates self-referentially on Cervantes, the first novel, and thus the opening of modern self-reflection on some level, preoccupied from his authorial position in mid-19th century America with Quixote’s and Panza’s tacking between “auguries” and “anxieties.” How might these Hawthornean notions capture the strange comforts of fear in a time that is actually so decidedly scary?

They do so partly by keeping things in our head, those things which in frightening us so deeply confer on us a real vitality that boring old neoliberal democracy can’t. And they also allow for the more obvious pleasures of vicarious killing, as with all those Obama puppets in nooses. The ceaselessness of the chyron becomes the fuel for the trapping and the expulsion alike. Consider John Edgar Wideman, who wrote in his novel Fanon about how “Three new stories in the news catch my eye – faith-based prisons, cell phones with tracking chips, a man arrested for raising a tiger and an alligator in a Harlem apartment. The same story really. The Big Squeeze at both ends, so nothing left alive inside people’s heads.” American politics takes shape in the relationship between death and life, fantasy and the Other.

We can’t make sense of this condition simply by pointing to religious fear as reason’s other. What seems salient to me is not just the moral urgency of fear, which is the obvious point, but also its epistemological urgency. What is at stake is not simply identity, or moral principle, but a form of knowing, of filtering out ambiguities, of rescuing a message from the depth dimensions of language. The vibrancy of the fearful and the apocalyptic subsists comes through its assessment of what it identifies as evidence. This doesn’t simply mean theological claims that, for example, ISIS rockets are biblical plagues of locusts or that Hillary was (is?) the Whore of Babylon. More than this, the emotional focus of fear, its necessary urgency, comes through moments of exposé that we convince ourselves confirm our righteous outrage. The exposure of hypocrisy and secrecy, the proof that the monster everyone else denied is really there, gives us authenticity in precisely those places where the self – and thus the world – begins to wobble just a bit.

If Foucault was right, over a half century ago, that the apocalyptic is “the world’s old reason engulfed,” what if we confront seriously the idea that many millions of Americans find excitement and promise in a glorious, Action Movie burning out rather than the insignificance of ordinary unhappiness?

Whitney on fear:

When I was a graduate student (I earned my PhD in 2012), I used to joke on conference panels that I was the Darth Vader of the conversation--everything I studied was always such a bummer (understatement), from Facebook memorial page trolling to “media fuckery” (as participants then giddily called it) to a range of identity-based antagonisms on and around 4chan’s /b/ board. Since then, my work has taken on an even more ominous cast, as focus on media manipulation and online antagonists--I don’t use the word “trolling” to describe any of this behavior, for reasons I articulate regarding Donald Trump here--has brought me into the orbit of online extremists and others committed to weaponizing information, sowing discord and mistrust, and generally undermining participatory democracy.

So I’m pretty well positioned to say, and I do not think this will come as a surprise to anyone, that there are a lot of things to be afraid of on the internet, from harassment to extremism to manipulation to hoaxes to mis- and disinformation and all the ways those things can have an immediate, embodied, irreversible impact on people’s lives.

Much of this fear--or at the very least, this loathing--stems from a rejection of the lives, worldviews, and behaviors of (those who are seen as) bad others. This is an understandable, indeed I would argue natural and appropriate, impulse when considering the violence and harm enacted by white nationalists and supremacists, and others whose sole motivating impulse is indeed to watch the world burn. But the reaction to bad others can be just as visceral when the “badness” of those others is debatable; when it’s not fear of being harmed, of traumatized, or dehumanized, but fear of being...disagreed with, or asked to take responsibility for one’s own actions and choices. (I’m looking at you, anyone who’s tried to disappear into the wallpaper with the excuse that “I was just trolling” when called out for harmful behavior).

Wherever the fear--and/or loathing--may originate, these are always instructive moments. At least, that’s what I tell my students in the Cross-Cultural Monsters course I’m currently teaching. To do so, I refer to Mary Douglas’ exploration of dirt and taboo, and how ideals about what constitutes clean, or pure, or normal are the logical preconditions of any declaration that something is dirty, or tainted, or aberrant. Focusing on what that bad thing is--or what that bad thing is regarded as being--provides immediate insight into what that culture or community values, believes, and normalizes. Monsters, in short, help us understand who the upstanding citizens are. (I used this framing to explore subcultural trolling from around 2007-2014, with the added complication that, hmm, the same people standing in mainstream quarters--with a particular focus on journalists at Fox News--lamenting the existence of trolling were often…..doing the same things as trolls, certainly in the trolls’ and journalists’ mutual exploitation of sensationalist news stories and racial/racist tensions during the Obama era, raising the question of exactly what people were criticizing, when they criticized trolls).  

I bring this up, first, to offer a means of taking inventory of what norms people are pointing to, privileging, or otherwise reifying by spotlighting the badness of others--however well-deserved that designation may (or may not) be.

I also bring it up as a segue to what I fear the most online. White nationalists, supremacists, abusers, manipulators--they are all high on my list, with the “loathing” quotient very well represented. But occupying its own special category is the fact that online, because of Poe’s Law, because of context collapse, because of rampant decontextualization, we often have no way of knowing what kind of monster we’re dealing with. A person spreading outrageous, harmful conspiracy theories might genuinely believe them. They might be trying to mess with reporters. They might be a Russian disinformation agent. They might be part of a computational propaganda effort, of which they might or might not even be aware. They might not be a person at all. Crafting an effective response--Do you debunk? Do you ignore? Do you call the FBI?--hinges on knowing which is which. But more often than not, we can’t know--complicated by the fact that when several, or dozens, of hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people are spreading the same information, there are several, or dozens, of hundreds, or thousands, or millions of possibilities as to why. Even the most effective intervention for some could do nothing for others--or could backfire. Could create entirely new categories of monsters.

Like all fear, mine is revealing. It’s also confusing. The fear, the aberration, is uncertainty, and the discomforting fact that observation is not confirmation online. That would make certainty and empiricism the norm, certainty the norm--but are they? Were they ever? Has that always just been wishful, privileged thinking? Is this what the world is actually like? Whatever the answer is, I do not know what to do about it. And that scares the hell out of me.

Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Digital Technologies at Syracuse University. She holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus) from the University of Oregon, and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is the author of 2015's This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press), which was awarded the Association of Internet Researchers' Nancy Baym best book award. In 2017 she published The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity Press), co-authored with Ryan Milner of the College of Charleston. She is also the author of the three-part ethnographic study "The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Far Right Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators," published in 2018 by Data & Society. She is working on a third book titled You Are Here: Networked Manipulation in the Digital Age.

Jason C. Bivins is a Professor of Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. He is a specialist in religion and American culture, focusing particularly on the intersection between religions and politics since 1900. He is the author of Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion (Oxford, 2015) a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015. He has published most actively in the area of U.S. political religions, the subject of his first two books, Religion of Fear: The Politics of  Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2008), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2008, and The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (UNC, 2003). He is currently working on his next monograph in political religions: Embattled Majority, a genealogy of the rhetoric of “religious persecution” in public life. He is also writing about Jack Kirby, the “King of Comics,” for Penn State Press’ Religion Around series.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round 5): Whitney Phillips and Jason Bivens (Part One)

Whitney:

Because this blog series on popular religion and participatory coverage could be taken in so many directions, and because Jason and my respective backgrounds go in several of those different but overlapping directions (with his work focusing on religion, politics, and culture in the US, and my work focusing on online antagonism, digital folklore, media manipulation, and digital ethics), it took us a few exchanges to decide how we would approach the conversation. The thing is, while the subjects of my research have certainly engaged with religion and religious people, often disparagingly, sometimes violently--thinking in particular of the anti-Semitic and Islamophobic elements of far right extremism--I am not a scholar of religion. So how to combine our interests? Ultimately we decided to reflect on three concepts prominent within the study and practice of religion, and just as prominent, though not always as directly acknowledged, in media and communication studies: faith, fear, and fanaticism. Jason will jump right in with faith, and lead each subsequent exchange as well, to provide the religious studies grounding needed for context.

Jason on faith:

I’m very excited to have been invited to participate in this forum. Aside from my admiration for the scholars convening the participants, my own scholarship on political religions has long benefited from cross-disciplinary exchanges. But as I think about my own interests in relation to Whitney Phillips’ fantastic thoughts on internet trolling and monsters, I wonder (as I often do) just what the disciplinary formation of Religious Studies really is. In a typical anthology or scholarly panel, such uncertainty is very nearly boilerplate. We spend an awful lot of time reminding each other that “religion” is a constructed category shaped from multiple biases and presumptions, that the field’s emergence bears the imprint of colonialism, that there is no settled method, and so forth.

As someone interested in public life and politics, it’s not that I find these self-inventories uninteresting. But they don’t exactly stimulate fresh thinking for me, especially in terms of my longstanding interest in making sense of religious discontent with American politics, that changing same. I’ve always tried to look beyond standard formations – party, denomination, lobby – out of a sense that those framings conceal the big story, the big shapes, as occluded as these sometimes can be. Media Studies (especially those at the intersection of affect and technology) has provided me with much more stimulation in the last decade-plus, particularly as I have focused in on religion’s emotional articulations in public discourse (in crowds, online, in entertainments).

Stodgy, placeholding terms like “faith” conceal emotional multitudes. I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about fear and outrage, which Whitney and I will jam on. Here, though, I want to spend a bit more time thinking about just what my subject is, and how it might relate to Whitney’s.

I was once obsessed with the HBO series Deadwood, which – in its institutional histories woven into melodrama – did for the late nineteenth century West what The Wire did for post-industrial Baltimore. Stunned by the irresistibility of what character Charlie Udder called “amalgamation and capital,” the residents of Deadwood strove to make sense of the new technologies – mining tools and pumps, railroads, and telegrams – that now produced and ordered their lives. In one memorable scene, sniveling worm of a mayor E.B. Farnham panicked at the presence of George Hearst in Deadwood, complaining to local godfather Al Swearingen, “It’s Hearst. Hearst! Is he Caesar, to have fights to the death for diversion? Murder his workers at whim? Smash passages in the fucking wall? A man of less wealth would be in fucking restraints.” Swearingen replied soberly, “We’re in the presence of the new.” Farnham: “Fuck the fucking new! Jesus Christ, Al. Is it over for us here?”

This scene stuck with me as a way of thinking about how not just religious selves but modern selves and categories are formed in response to moments of overwhelmedness by industry and technology. I’ve found it suggestive to think about religion as a medium of experience and an object of mediation since, as I try to chase down in writing elusive articulations of “faith,” the weight of media and technology is in many ways the weight of language, its power and purpose only partly a functional one. The steam powered train, the telegraph, constellations of data we imagine grouped together into something called a market, the tweet, all these technologies are so palpable and sensate and yet take us into realms of experience where the empirical is burdened, into realms we might think of as religious in their ineffability – that disembodied voice, those unseen gears, those swirls of paperless exchange.

The power of these collective media can shape the freestanding law of American jurisprudence, the “sincerely held belief” that makes for the generic American’s generic religion, or the crowd-sourced emotion, viral assertions, or chains of distraction that make for our online lives. My interest in faith, then, has been consistently interwoven with studies of politics and discipline and difference. Like many others, I return to Foucault regularly when considering such matters, specifically the 1976 lectures introducing ideas of biopower in a discussion of dispersed populations and industrialization. With biopolitics, Foucault says, we move beyond the disciplinary apparatus and even the surveilling apparatus of the early modern into a period where power moves through not just new bodies but new mechanisms: “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. And their purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined.”

This very generality and abstraction is what places a greater premium on description, on language, on representation for life, literally the making lively of things, the animation, the em-powerment that is ubiquitous in an era of light and movement and circulation. One key to understanding the power that “faith” holds for Americans – aside from symbolic capital or lobbies – is its ability to make us forget our own role in its production, our own imaginative media, or our reliance on its very self-evidence as a category. That opacity, that everywhereness, is what allows it to do such powerful emotional and political work.

Whitney on faith:

The relationship between faith and technology is one I’ve reflected on often, though maybe not with an eye towards transcendence. Or maybe...sort of, as these issues don’t just rear up in response to the latest political crisis, but speak to deep existential, epistemological, and even ontological concerns. What it means when we lose a shared sense of reality; what it means when every single day is filled with so much chaos, so many conflicting truth claims; what it means when it’s just not clear what any of it means, and therefore, what any of us should do in response.

This is where faith comes in, particularly when considering responses to the spread of mis- and disinformation across social media, frequently described as “fake news” or “alternative facts” or other terms indicating that oh god, we’re really in trouble here. The call from many, particularly within journalism, the technology sector, and education, is to ramp up media literacy efforts: to check facts, verify sources, and evaluate the overall truth value of content. That approach, Alice Marwick argues, has within certain circles emerged as a kind of “magic bullet” theory for the digital age (the “magic bullet” refers to an early, frequent straw-person theory associated with interwar anti-propaganda efforts; it maintains, rather morbidly, that media messages go straight into a person’s brain, without any critical reflection or individual agency to stop them, rendering audiences perfectly and immediately under the propagandist’s control, which is not how media works--but that’s a different conversation). As Marwick shows, such efforts implicitly assume that truth is a corrective unto itself, a position that dovetails with the related assumption that the underlying problem is the public’s lack of exposure to facts. On this view, if we could just expose people to what’s true, our problems would be solved.  

Let me be clear, truth is a good thing. I like it very much (as do other scholars who critique traditional media literacy models; no one is saying that truth doesn’t matter, or that actual things in the world are somehow overrated). Critical thinking is also a good thing, as is close textual analysis, and source verification, and assessment of bias, and careful fact checking. All of it is good, in theory.

But in practice, that doesn’t mean it works, or that such efforts serve as a one-size-fits-all solution to the spread of polluted information.

The reason they don’t, not universally anyway, is that fact value--whether something is objectively, verifiably true--isn’t always why someone chooses to engage with or share something. Consider, for example, this 2016 Pew Research study, which revealed that 14% of survey respondents admitted to sharing false stories they knew to be false. That’s not a problem of fact checking. That’s a problem of people having their own reasons for sharing particular kinds of content, from the desire to make their friends giggle to the desire to watch the world burn to anything and everything in between.

In the same vein, whether something is objectively, verifiably true, isn’t always why someone puts their faith in something. I’m not restricting “faith” to religious experience, here; a person can have faith in institutions (or not), or faith in journalists (or not), or faith in the government (or not), or faith in each other (or not). Where one puts their faith--or not--isn’t something that cold hard facts can necessarily penetrate. The effort to counter faith with facts might even backfire. As Marwick argues--and she’s not alone; see the work of Lewandowsky et. al, Tripodi, and boyd, among others--correcting an untruth isn’t just likely not to penetrate the underlying belief structure. It may ultimately entrench the belief.

In short: my facts about something might just make your faith in the opposite thing stronger. Where do we go from there? What do we do when efforts to bridge epistemological gaps ultimately risk burning those bridges?

I don’t know. It’s a matter of faith, and faith is also how we got here.

Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Communication, Culture, and Digital Technologies at Syracuse University. She holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus) from the University of Oregon, and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is the author of 2015's This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press), which was awarded the Association of Internet Researchers' Nancy Baym best book award. In 2017 she published The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Polity Press), co-authored with Ryan Milner of the College of Charleston. She is also the author of the three-part ethnographic study "The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Far Right Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators," published in 2018 by Data & Society. She is working on a third book titled You Are Here: Networked Manipulation in the Digital Age.

Jason C. Bivins is a Professor of Religious Studies at North Carolina State University. He is a specialist in religion and American culture, focusing particularly on the intersection between religions and politics since 1900. He is the author of Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion (Oxford, 2015) a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015. He has published most actively in the area of U.S. political religions, the subject of his first two books, Religion of Fear: The Politics of  Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2008), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2008, and The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (UNC, 2003). He is currently working on his next monograph in political religions: Embattled Majority, a genealogy of the rhetoric of “religious persecution” in public life. He is also writing about Jack Kirby, the “King of Comics,” for Penn State Press’ Religion Around series.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture (Round 4): Tisha Dejamanee and Deborah Whitehead (Part 1)

Deborah:

I’m grateful to Henry Jenkins, Diane Winston, and Sarah McFarland Taylor for organizing this series of exchanges and inviting me to be part of it.  I’m grateful too, Tisha, for the opportunity to learn more about your work; we definitely have many overlapping areas of interest!  I want to focus on three in particular here:  (1) the idea of food preparation as “women’s work” and the ways that female food bloggers both are constrained by this, as you note, but also play with it; (2) the intimacy and sense of community found in blogging, both of which play into the notion of authenticity that is so valued, and commodified, in the blogosphere; and (3) how the concept of participatory culture has been helpful in our work, and how it relates to the study of religion – a thread running through the other conversations so far that I’ll also weave into my thoughts here.  In my own work, I’ve found the concept of participatory culture enormously helpful for thinking about the ways that communities are formed, and unformed, around personal religious blogs, and the values and practices that underlie these processes.   

I’m intrigued by your focus on the intricate relationships between gender, labor, and community in a postfeminist context – one feature of the “ambivalence” you describe. In my own work on food storage blogs, which exist at the busy intersection of food blogs and mommy/parenting blogs, I have written about the idea of food preparation for an emergency situation as “women’s work,” specifically as maternal labor.  “Survival is a mom’s job,” proclaims blogger Lisa Bedford, a natural extension of maternal care for one’s family both now and in the future.  These self-proclaimed “survival moms,” mostly U.S. working and middle class white women, are on the one hand constrained by a sense of pervasive anxiety about contemporary conditions over which they have no control – prepper culture has exploded in the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2008 economic recession and housing crisis – and to which they feel they have no choice but to respond to protect their families and preserve their lifestyle by learning to prepare and store massive quantities of food to have on hand in the event of an emergency.  One could argue that political and economic instability has caused these women to “lean in” to traditional gender roles as a means of survival, generating an idealization of and nostalgia for “women’s work” and for the specific skills of their grandmothers and great-grandmothers who scrimped and saved and gardened and canned massive quantities of food to get their families through the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II.  Many of these survival moms also turn to the practices of food storage and emergency preparedness that have been part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from its beginnings, not by converting but by consulting LDS (popularly known as “Mormon”) mommy blogs and church resources to gain this specialized knowledge.  On the other hand, this retrieval and romanticization of the past, of the LDS pioneer ethic, and of food preparation and storage as maternal labor is often celebrated in (post)feminist terms that the survival moms’ grandmothers would not recognize – food storage provides “confidence” and “empowerment” and “expertise,” enabling women to “worry less and enjoy life more,” as Bedford puts it.  I definitely see a set of ambivalences there as well, and I am wondering if you can say more about what you see as the “ambivalence that more broadly characterizes postfeminist popular culture” and how it relates to the “political potential of food blogs” that you seek to theorize.  

I absolutely agree with your point about how in the enterprise of blogging about domestic spaces, “intimacy becomes a lucrative commodity that is used to connote trustworthiness and authenticity by corporate advertisers.”  In my own work on mommy bloggers, I’ve explored how authenticity is a “symbolic construct” central to self-branding (Banet-Weiser) as well as to the creation of new forms of community based on a blogger’s gradual self-revelation.  I’ve also been influenced by the work of several scholars (Heidi Campbell, Pauline Cheong, Mia Lovheim, Paul Teusner, Lori Kido Lopez, May Friedmann, and others) in exploring how blogging generates new notions of religious authority, religious practice, community, gender identity, motherhood, self-branding, and so on.  But I’ve also been very interested in the dark side of this dynamic, and in what happens when bloggers are exposed as frauds or as having been less than fully forthcoming about their domestic lives. When a blogger’s credibility and readership is based on a presumption of honest self-disclosure, and that trust is called into question or shattered by new revelations, a variety of consequences ensue. In some cases, the result is very much like a religious deconversion process:  readers tell stories following a familiar narrative arc, establishing initial strong commitment and devotion followed by gradual loss of faith, that resemble evangelical deconversion narratives in striking ways.  Though practice is certainly a key part of their devotion (online and offline participation), these narratives, like evangelical deconversion narratives, tend to emphasize the centrality of belief:a reader initially “believed in” a particular blogger but now they do not, and they are left to process the shame, guilt, anger and sadness that result from this loss of faith.  I think a similar narrative arc is evident in the “Get a Life!” SNL sketch that Sarah McFarland Taylor and Henry Jenkins discussed in an earlier post, which portrays the dramatic threat to fan devotion that occurs when the object of that devotion turns out to be all too human.  As Henry has pointed out, the sketch also repeats a familiar narrative of caricaturing fans; I saw the same kinds of critiques leveled at my disillusioned blog readers. Critics called them gullible, pathetic losers; “how could you believe so strongly in someone you didn’t even know?, they scornfully asked.  “I drank the Kool-Aid,” came the woeful response, a direct reference to the 1979 Jonestown tragedy.  Parallels between religious devotion and fan devotion abound in the stories we tell about them and the ones they tell about themselves. In such situations it becomes difficult to disentangle the moral and religious dimensions of authenticity, or even to maintain that such a distinction is a meaningful one:  which is the greater offense, lying to one’s public or being a false prophet (or deity)?  Charles Taylor (1992; 2007) has called authenticity the “moral ideal behind self-fulfillment,” giving rise to a new sense of the self as both private and public and to a new form of “expressive individualism” in which each of us inhabits spaces of “mutual display,” not only consuming but also creating to and for others.  This seems directly related to the elements of participatory culture as Jenkins has developed it:  the awareness of new publics, new forms of networking, identity creation and play, and community.  I’m curious to hear more about how you find the concept of authenticity helpful in your own work.  

Tisha:

When I first moved to the United States seven years ago, a simple online search for a recipe launched me into the world of food blogs – texts that combine personal narratives with recipes and high-quality food images. They are often created by individuals who blog from their households and narrate the mundane details of daily life to their unseen audience as though they are dear friends. In my research, I focus particularly on female bloggers – who comprise the majority of food bloggers – to analyze the ways this media genre illuminates ideas about labor, pleasure, and community. 

The creative and technical skills that are nurtured within the food blogosphere are apparent in tangible cultural goods such as cake pops, food porn and the extensive homewares line produced by The Pioneer Woman and Walmart. However, I also view the creative potential of food blogs as situated in their performance of postfeminist subjectivities that acknowledge both the pleasures of this idealized femininity as well as its internal contradictions. On the one hand, food blogs often exaggerate a girlie femininity that is sweet, infantile and down-to-earth. This takes place through a relentlessly cheerful narrative tone that Amanda Fortini (2011) describes as containing “no serious conflict, no controversy, no cynicism, no snark”; an aesthetic preference that has yielded trends such as unicorn food and gourmet sprinkles; and, the centrality of being a wife and mother, as food blogs glamorize these traditional identities. It is this performance of effortless and innate girlie femininity that leads bloggers to insist that their multi-layered cakes and meticulously photographed meals are amateur creative projects. On the other hand, I see this exaggerated performance of sweet femininity as strategic. It is, after all, an appropriation of the aspirational language that lifestyle media has long directed toward women. Now women are using food blogs to re-deploy these commercialized tropes to attract advertisers that have increasingly begun to partner with bloggers to mine the ever-growing audience of the lifestyle blogosphere. 

This dynamic raises two issues that I think are relevant to participatory culture here. The first is the question of access to participation. In my above generalizations of food blogs, and my descriptions of the determined normativity cultivated by the blogosphere, I do not wish to suggest that examples of rich subversive, radical and alternative food blogs do not exist but, rather, that such examples are rarely rewarded within the hierarchies of visibility and profit within the blogosphere. Although it is true that there is some diversity within the food blogosphere, these user-generated texts remain much more homogenous than might be expected. The second is how to respond critically to an example of participatory culture that so faithfully reproduces, and is often seamlessly reabsorbed into, the high-production quality and commercially-oriented values of mainstream lifestyle media. 

I suggest that in addressing these issues, as well as in making sense of the political potential of food blogs, it becomes necessary to embrace the ambivalence that more broadly characterizes postfeminist popular culture. For example, food blogs draw on the cultural trend romanticizing traditionalism and DIY culture (Matchar, 2013) to showcase and circulate gendered, domestic foodwork that has long been devalued and rendered invisible. At the same time, the professionalization of the food blogosphere has led to the normalization of time-, labor-, and skill-intensive meals that are often portrayed as everyday domestic fare. As another example, these texts can be understood as an archival practice, as they are forms of women’s autobiographical life-writing that are told through the materiality and rhythms of food. Yet, this personal life-writing is often co-written through the networked participation of readers in forms that run the gamut from supportive comments to hate blogs to the whims of digital platform design. 

Ultimately, I turn to the spirit of networked community that is so important to both food and food blogs as a way of clearing a path through this ambivalence. It is true that the particular way that food blogs encourage individuals to provide personal testimony of the lived, gendered experiences of domestic life is intertwined with a “neoliberal moralframework, where each of us has a duty … to cultivate a self-brand” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 56), and that within this framework intimacy becomes a lucrative commodity that is used to connote trustworthiness and authenticity by corporate advertisers. While we have long grappled with a sense that corporate messages are manipulative in the ways that they are explicitly designed to be persuasive, I am nevertheless struck by moments in the blogosphere where the depth of ties within this community are made salient. This has taken place at moments of tragedy within the lives of bloggers, as when blogger Jenni Perillo unexpectedly becomes a widower with two young children or blogger Lindsay Ostrom experiences the loss of her premature baby at 23 weeks of pregnancy. The community support at these moments has been material and emotional, and demonstrated the ways that the virtual friend-audience is mobilized in times of crisis. On a more everyday level, I think about the value of recipes to support special needs such as hypoallergenic and specialty diets that are now made freely available, and digitally indexed and searchable thanks to the knowledge-exchange practices of the blogosphere.

It is clear that food blogs are not utopian digital spaces. Successful food bloggers are often privileged and require substantial existing resources to be influential within the increasingly competitive blogosphere. The generic conventions of the genre do not support explicit political discussion. However, in the same ways that cultural studies scholars advocated for the ability of the audience to critically read popular culture texts, I support the notion that bloggers and blog readers can engage in pleasurable and meaningful, food-centered dialogue and identity play without losing sight of the ways that corporate logics underwrite the spaces and values of the blogosphere. 

I have to admit that I am another media scholar that has not spent a significant amount of time thinking about how religious studies intersects with and could build on my work – although I have noted that a significant proportion of bloggers share their religious affiliations, I have tended to subsume this information within the broader secular terms traditionalism and conservatism in my analysis of the blogosphere. Debbie, I’m very much looking forward to hearing more about your research interests and seeing how you approach similar themes! 

 Dr. Tisha Dejmanee is an Assistant Professor in Communication at Central Michigan University. She has authored several journal articles on issues where the fields of gender studies, popular culture, politics, new media and food intersect. Published work relating to the themes discuss in these posts include "‘Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play” (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1527476415615944)  and “Consumption in the City: The Turn to Interiority in Contemporary Postfeminist Television” 

Deborah Whitehead is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she teaches courses on religions in the United States, Christianity, and critical-theoretical approaches to the study of religion, gender, and culture. Her research interests are centered in Christianity and U.S. culture from the late nineteenth century to the present. She is currently preparing a book on the American pragmatist tradition as well as participating in a Ford-funded project called "Finding Religion in the Media" through CU's Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, focusing on U.S. evangelicals' uses of new media. Her current work focuses on issues of historicity, narrative, identity, the visual, and authenticity in new media.

How Do You Like It So Far?: Margaret Weitekamp on Star Trek and Actual Space History

Reporting from the Library of Congress, where I am currently the Kluge Chair of Modern Culture, I visited this week with Margaret Weitekamp,  curator of Space History at The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. She curates the Museum's collection on the social and cultural dimensions of spaceflight collection, more than 4,000 artifacts that include space memorabilia and space science fiction objects, including the Enterprise scale model used in the production of Star Trek. She is also one of the hosts of a new online class about Star Trek and its influence on science and culture and the author of Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, about easy efforts to generate female astronauts. We discussed why the Smithsonian displays the Enterprise alongside the Apollo Lunar Module, how Hidden Figures might reshape how we think about Uhura’s place on the Enterprise, how Star Trek’s conception of Star Fleet’s mission shifts over time, and whether the first man on the moon was an American or a human accomplishment.

For more on Nichelle Nichols’ experiences as a black woman on board the Enterprise Bridge. check out this video.

"Moha Culture": Toad Worship Regarding a Former President of China (Part Two)

“Moha Culture”: Toad Worship Regarding a Former President of China

by Qiyao Peng

Civic Imagination

Not only can “Mona” culture be seen as a kind of culture jamming, it can also provide a battleground and a source for civic imagination. Jenkins (2016) defines “civic imagination” as “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic institutions or problems” (p. 29). In addition, Jenkins (2016) also stated that civic imagination allows us to think beyond the range of current possibilities. This part analyzes how “Moha” culture provides a new way for people to imagine a better world. 

Zuckerman (2015) suggests that Weibo is more effective to intrigue political participation than those platforms built by other liberal regimes such as Twitter or YouTube. In this case, toad fans in Mainland China usually use WeChat as their main platform. However, most of the toad fan groups were banned because of Chinese government censorship. Zuckerman (2016) also stated that the use of certain languages which can only be understood by a group of people might be an obstacle to intrigue wider participation. By the discursive dissemination of information about “Moha” culture on Chinese social networking sites, people who do not worship the toad can gain access to this phenomenon. However, again because of the censorship in China, the information about “Moha” distributed on Chinese social networking sites is often fragmented and may have an incomplete understanding of the culture. Consequently, the meaning of “Moha” culture has changed and split into several different understandings. Some of the original toad fans believe that they worship the toad because they only wanted to mock and satirize Jiang, while others have admitted that they are using Jiang to satirize Xi. 

The toad fans with different purposes can be categorized into the following two groups. First, toad fans who only see “Moha” as a way to mock Jiang still inform other netizens about the existence of such an unusual former leader and emphasize the presence of government censorship. They treated Jiang as someone with the power to decide who could live or not. 

The second kind of toad fans embodies reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2002). This nostalgia is closely related to Xi Jinping, the current president of China. He showed his affability at the beginning of his first presidential term in 2013. People called him “Xidada” and his wife Peng Liyuan “Pengmama,” which translate to “Xi Boss” and “Peng Mom,” which are endearing terms. However, the afterward strict control of the internet environment and free speech changed this situation. After Xi Jinping made the constitutional amendment that restricted the president’s terms for only two consecutive terms, the situation became more obvious. A growing number of Chinese nationals started to feel disappointed by Xi and attempted to admire the president that was more open-minded, such as Jiang, compared to the current one, Xi. It then created a sense of reflective nostalgia by reminding the audience of their “ache of temporal distance and displacement” (Boym, 2002). As a result, Chinese netizens started to cherish Jiang given their current dissatisfaction with Xi’s governance.  

As previously discussed, toad fans notice that Jiang’s human-like image is very different from Hu Jintao’s (the former Chinese president served between Jiang and Xi) poker face and Xi’s artificial smile. A toad fan said that “I would rather to have a ridiculous president like Jiang rather than an emotionless machine like Xi.” According to a survey, the number of people who liked Jiang is similar to the number of people who disliked Xi (BBC, 2016). It can be seen that with the comparison between Jiang and Xi, the dissatisfaction regarding Xi is even more serious. 

In addition, toad fans want a president who is more knowledgeable and more open-minded than Xi. For example, Jiang received his bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University, a reputable university in China, while Xi only completed a middle school education. Although Xi has a bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, many Chinese citizens believe that he received this degree because of his power rather than his knowledge because he went to Tsinghua based on recommendation rather than an entry exam. Also, Jiang appeared to treat dissidents in a friendly manner during his presidential term. He gave emotional responses to the journalists who have asked harsh questions to him rather than trying to block those journalists. According to Boym (2002), reflective nostalgia usually contains ironic meanings. It can be seen from the analysis above that the core of “Moha” culture is the ironic depiction of Jiang and the indirect criticism of Xi.

However, toad fans also admit that they are not real fans of Jiang; they just use Jiang to express their dissatisfaction regarding the new president. Boym (2002) argues that reflective nostalgia does not include the need to come back to the time or place that people admired. In this case, although toad fans tend to admire Jiang and use Jiang to ironically criticize Xi, most of them still insist that they do not want to go back to the time when Jiang was the president. They admit that there Jiang committed horrible deeds. Reflective nostalgia reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another and has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness (Boym, 2002). In this case, most of the toad fans are aware that even if they can imagine a more open and more liberal society in China based on Jiang’s governing style, they still treat the nostalgia as a hope which can be achieved in the future rather than dreaming to go back to Jiang’s presidency. Therefore, it can be seen that the second kind of toad fans conveys a good example of reflective nostalgia. It also demonstrates that “Moha” culture allows toad fans and other netizens to be able to imagine a better world. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, for a number of the toad fans, the image of Jiang is well-educated and open-minded, which is the opposite of the serious image of Xi. Although the images of Jiang and Xi may not represent the reality, the differences between those two images may provoke toad fans’ doubt regarding the current regime. The ideal image of Jiang provides the model of a more democratic and free society for those toad fans, and also gives them confidence to build a better society for China in the future. 

 Based on the analysis, “Moha” culture can be seen as a kind of culture jamming that provides both the source and the battleground for civic imagination. The way toad fans participate in online interactions helped to attract more toad fans and other netizens. Although toad fans first emerged in order to show their rebellion to the nowadays regime which has a serious image and conveyed an ironic meaning, the fan community is still a steady community that is similar to other fans groups, which can generate collective action. Moreover, they effectively use social media to express their ironic worship of Jiang and they are able to influence other netizens as well. Therefore, it can be seen that “Moha” culture embodies the possibility as a battleground for civic imagination and political participation.  

 References

BBC. (2016, Jul 29). British media: Taunting Jiang Zemin turns into “Jiang Toad” worship.Retrieved fromhttp://www.bbc.com/

Benton, G. (1988). The origins of the political joke, in Powell & Patton (ed), Humor in society resistance and control.Palgrave Macmillan: UK.

Boym, S. (2002). The Future of Nostalgia.Boston: Basic Books. 

CNN Library. (2017, Aug 13). Jiang Zemin fast facts.Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/

DeLaure, M., & Fink, M. (2017). Culture jamming: Activism and the art of cultural resistance.New York: New York University Press.

Huang, Z. (2016, Aug 16). China’s toad-like 90-year-old former president has become an unlikely idol for the country’s millennials. Quartz. Retrieved from https://qz.com/

Jenkins, H. (2016). Youth voice, media, and political engagement: Introducing the core concepts. In By any media necessary: The new youth activism. New York: New York University Press. 

Lam, O. (2016, Aug 24). Defying web censors, Chinese ‘worship’ toads to mark a former state leader’s 90th birthday. Hong Kong Free Press.Retrieved from https://www.hongkongfp.com/

Littlewood, J., & Pickering, M. (1998) ‘Heard the one about the white middle-class heterosexual father-in-law? Gender, ethnicity and political correctness in comedy’, in S. Wagg (ed.), Because I tell a joke or two: Comedy, politics and social difference.Routledge: London and New York.

Morreall, J. (2009). Comic relief: A comprehensive philosophy of humor.Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford.

Qin, A. (2015, Oct 20). Ridicule turns to affection as Chinese social media embraces Jiang Zemin. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/

RFA. (2016, Aug 17). Toad fans’ celebration for Jiang Zemin’s birthday was banned online.Retrieved from https://www.rfa.org/

Zheng, M. (2016, Sep 1). Scrutinizing Xi Jinping’s political dilemma in terms of “Moha” culture. Botangwang.Retrieved from https://botanwang.com/

Zuckerman, E. (2015). Cute cats to the rescue? Participatory media and political expression. In D. Allen (Ed.). From voice to influence: Understanding citizenship in the digital age.Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Zuckerman, E. (2016). Effective civics. In E. Gordon & P. Mihailidis (Eds.). Civic media: Technology/design/practice.Cambridge: MIT Press. 

 Qiyao Peng is a master candidate at Annenberg school of the University of Southern California. She is interested in online communities and fandom. With a background in mainland China, she is also interested in how Chinese online communities engage in political participation.

"Moha Culture": Toad Worship Regarding a Former President of China (Part One)

Today, I am sharing another paper — a fascinating account of culture jamming and civic imagination in China — which emerged from my spring PhD seminar on Participatory Politics and Civic Media.

“Moha Culture”: Toad Worship Regarding a Former President of China

by Qiyao Peng, University of Southern California

Jiang Zemin served as the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party between 1989 to 2002 and the President of China between 1993 to 2003 (CNN Library, 2017). Born in 1926, Jiang is known as the longest-living former president in China (CNN Library, 2017). During his presidential terms, Jiang was known for his corruption, a rumored affair with a female singer, and his ridiculous statements and behaviors (Zheng, 2016). Therefore, Jiang was not adored by the people during his presidency. However, since 2014, Jiang has become a popular figure on Chinese social networking sites such as Weibo (known as Chinese Twitter), WeChat (online chatting platform) and Zhihu (known as Chinese Quora) and generated many fans (RFA, 2016). On these platforms, Jiang is referred to as a “toad” because of his perceived resemblance to the animal, by a group of people who called themselves “toad fans.” This phenomenon is called “Moha culture,” which translates to “toad worship culture” in English.

This essay firstly explains the meaning and the context of “Moha” culture. Then, it introduces the cultural meaning of the toad in Chinese traditions and its connection to toad worship. Thirdly, this essay analyzes how toad fans can be regarded as culture jammers, and how “Moha” culture can be regarded as culture jamming. Lastly, this essay analyzes how this culture jamming became a source and battleground of civic imagination in the current political context in China. 

“Moha” Culture

The word “Moha” is the pronunciation of a Chinese word “膜蛤”, which can literally be translated as “toad worship” or “admiring toad.” In Chinese, “mo” means admiring and “ha” means “toad.” In this context, Jiang Zemin represents “Ha” because of his resemblance to a toad. People who worship toads call themselves “toad fans” or “toad lovers.” In this essay, “toad fans” refer to this community in general.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figures 1 and 2 represent the most typical images associated with Jiang Zemin on Chinese social media. In Figure 1, the picture shows prominently Jiang’s mouth, flared nostrils and his usual black frame glasses. The “+1s” in Figure 2 represents “add one second to Jiang’s life to extend his life.” This is a common feature in memes of Jiang (Lam, 2016). The “+1s” denote Jiang’s longevity, particularly because of several reports of his death at different times that turned out to be fake reports. Therefore, people started to make fun of the fake news and ironically say that Jiang was about to die, but that people could contribute one second from their own lives to Jiang to keep him alive. In this same instance, Jiang is also referred to as “the elder,” who is old but cannot die. 

In addition to his age and perceived longevity, Jiang is also widely associated with the image of a toad. The nickname “toad” was firstly given to Jiang in 2004 by the members of Falun Gong (a religion that was suppressed by Jiang in 1999) to simply humiliate him (Zheng, 2016). However, after Xi Jinping, the current president of China, came into power in 2013, the purely negative meaning of “toad” when referring to Jiang changed (Zheng, 2016). “Moha” culture firstly became popular because of the popularity of a WeChat public account “Jiangxuanyantaohui” in 2014 during Xi Jinping’s first presidential term, which means “Seminar on the Selected Essays of Jiang” (Qin, 2015). From then on, toad fans emerged and some of them started to use the nickname “toad” in an ironic and even sometimes friendly way to refer to Jiang. 

According to Zheng (2016), most of the toad fans are well-educated young people who are mostly in college. The toad fans have mostly grown up with a limited understanding of Jiang’s governance because most were born after the 1990s. During Jiang’s presidential term, these toad fans were too young to get access to Jiang’s information directly. Therefore, their knowledge of Jiang’s leadership style mostly comes from the descriptions from their parents (Zheng, 2016). In addition, although they might be too young to remember his 14 years in power, they watched and shared videos and photos of his speeches to appreciate his confidence, openness, and occasionally his bad manners (Huang, 2016). In these videos and photos, Jiang sometimes plays the ukulele, dances and sings, and sometimes gives a speech in several foreign languages with hilarious accents, and even combs his hair in political meetings (Huang, 2016). Some of the Chinese millennials admire Jiang for his unscripted public persona, which is hard to see from other Chinese politicians, especially Hu Jintao (the former president of China who served between Jiang and Xi) who had a poker face, and Xi, who usually wears an artificial smile. After getting tired of Hu and Xi’s poker faces, toad fans turn the ridiculous manner of Jiang into a symbol of affability. Therefore, Jiang has a ridiculous but also informal image in most of the toad fans’ minds. 

The Image of the “Toad” in China 

Although the nickname “toad” was firstly used to describe Jiang only because of his physical appearance, people use different expressions about toads to convey more complex meanings. Firstly, it is worth noting that the word “toad” has two expressions in Chinese, one is “Hama” (also known as “Ha” in this context), which is a colloquial and vulgar expression that usually conveys a negative meaning; and the other one is “Chanchu,” which is a neutral word often used in written language. When people refer to Jiang, people usually use “Hama” or “Ha,” the vulgar version of toad, while in Chinese traditional culture, the lucky totem is usually represented as “Chanchu.” Therefore, although “Hama” and “Chanchu” mean the same thing, the difference in expression suggest different implications.

Moreover, the toad has an important figure in Chinese traditional culture. According to Yao (2017), the Chinese have tended to worship the toad since ancient times. The toad is a totem of longevity, wealth, and is considered an auspicious omen. However, although the toad represents positive meanings in Chinese traditional culture, it is never regarded as something sacred such as the Chinese dragon. In addition, in recent fantasy novels, toads are usually represented as the kind of animals with “spirit” and mostly evil. For example, a Chinese saying that translates to “a toad lusting after a swan's flesh” is used to satirize an ugly man who wants to marry a pretty girl. Based on this, toad fans often make fun of Jiang’s unconfirmed extramarital love affair with a pretty female singer. Therefore, it can be seen that although the toad has both positive and negative meanings in Chinese culture, it still represents something negative in everyday life and especially in Jiang’s case. 

In addition, the differences between a toad and a frog should be recognized. The toad was firstly used to represent Jiang. But since frog images are much more widely available online, and given its similarities to toads, the frog (in Chinese “Wa蛙”) is sometimes also used to refer to Jiang by toad fans. Although the toad has its meaning in Chinese ancient fairy tales, most of the literature, such as Chinese ancient poems, hardly used toads in the content. On the other hand, frogs are more often represented in popular culture than toads and are usually seen as cute animals. Frogs are regarded as friendly to humans because they eat pests and their sounds forecast the coming of spring, which represents positive meanings such as hope and rebirth. This aspect of the symbolic meaning of frogs also relates to Jiang’s longevity and to the toad fans’ contribution of “+1s.” Toads, on the other hand, often represent something ominous. The use of frogs in memes about Jiang, then, suggests more about the lack of toad images and symbols to use than the positive associations the Chinese might have to frogs.

Figure 3: Toad

Figure 4: Frog

Another interesting thing is that although people use “toad” to represent Jiang in language, they normally use the picture of a “frog” rather than a “toad.” It can be seen from Figures 3 and 4 that a toad can often be interpreted as much uglier than a frog because of its larger size and its bumpy skin compared to the frog’s much smoother, leaner appearance. The frequent use of frogs instead of toads might be due to the unsightly image of toads not only for toad fans, but also for other netizens who are willing to engage with “Moha” culture. Therefore, the way they normally use a frog’s picture as a substitute for a toad’s picture helps to spread the popularity of “Moha” culture. 

It can be seen that when using a toad and a frog to refer to Jiang, the meaning can be sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Therefore, toad fans tend to use degrading language to represent Jiang to fulfill their desire to kick up the people who have higher social statusthan themselves, which is also a way to make “Moha” culture interesting and more acceptable to broader audiences.

Culture Jamming and Toad Fans

With its ironic nature, “Moha” culture can be seen as a form of culture jamming. According to DeLaure and Fink (2017), “culture jamming” refers to a series of tactics used by activists to critique, subvert, and “jam” the dominant forms of power. These tactics include media pranks, advertising parodies, textual poaching, billboard appropriation, street performance, and the reclamation of urban spaces for noncommercial use (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). “Moha” culture can be seen as a typical example which makes use of the existing sources to challenge mainstream culture. In addition, DeLaure and Fink (2017) distinguished several universal qualities and functions of culture jamming. This part demonstrates that “Moha” culture embodies most of these qualities and functions. 

First, culture jamming appropriates (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). Jammers typically retool existing cultural forms, poaching an image, corporate logo, advertisement, billboard, city wall, or retail space and transforming it into something new (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). Their raw materials are the images, sounds, landscapes, and habitual practices of late-modern consumer capitalism (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). In this case, toad fans usually use existing videos and pictures of Jiang to start their media pranks and textual poaching. They mainly produce videos, pictures, or memes based on Jiang’s interviews and photos. In this case, Jiang becomes a source of adaptations and is being reformed into something new by toad fans. 

The most notable example of appropriation is the toad fans’ adaptation or ironic use of pre-existing Chinese ancient poems and Jiang’s words as their sources to express new meanings. For example, Jiang’s own words or speeches are adapted to satirize Jiang. In an interview with a Hong Kong reporter, the reporter asked Jiang’s opinion about the election of Hong Kong’s governor. After Jiang said he supported the current Hong Kong governor without deep consideration, the reporter then criticized Jiang that the Hong Kong governor was internally determined by the Chinese Communist Party. Jiang was utterly discomfited, he left his seat and emotionally criticized the reporter in three languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and English with his strong accent. He blamed the reporter by saying “You only want to make big news!” and that the reporter was “too young, too simple, sometimes naïve!” and started to show off his relationship with an American reporter Mike Wallace and his ability to deal with hard questions by saying “Do you know Wallace? He is far more talented than you all and I talked to him very happily!” (Qin, 2015). Mike Wallace has interviewed Jiang before and criticized him as a “dictator” (Qin, 2015). Jiang’s words were appropriated by toad fans in memes featuring his face with the words “making big news” and “too young, too naïve.” The memes were then used to satirize other online news reports, and toad fans would use these two phrases from Jiang’s outburst in the comments section. By doing so, the concept of Moha is further spread and becomes known to a larger number of netizens. Also, Jiang’s words regarding Mike Wallace made people think that Jiang was tolerant to dissidents. Toad fans use Jiang’s own word to satirize Jiang, which corresponds to DeLaure and Fink’s (2017) idea that culture jamming occurs when mainstream culture is used and adapted to criticize itself. 

Figure 5 (BBC, 2016)

Second, culture jamming is artful (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). Most of the jammers featured in this DeLaure and Fink’s work are artists of various stripes: painters, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, graphic and web designers, actors (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). Toad fans create new content artfully by adapting Chinese ancient poems for their own use, such as replacing other animals in the poem with “frog”. For example, the poem “the river becomes warm in spring duck prophet 春江水暖鸭先知” from the Song dynasty poet Su Shi was adapted into “the river becomes warm in spring frog prophet”. The original meaning of the sentence is to show the close relationship between the spring, nature and animals. By adapting “duck” into “frog”, toad fans try to satirize Jiang as a prophet who still does not want to give up his power and is informed of everything happening in China. Also, making videos and memes requires specific creative skills. For example, Figure 5 shows a news photo taken when Jiang was enjoying floating on the Dead Sea (BBC, 2016). Toad fans added the title “The floating toad on the Dead Sea” and transformed the news photo into a meme with a simple addition. The artful way of creating content is common among toad fans when “worshipping” the toad. 

Third, culture jamming is often playful (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). According to DeLaure and Fink (2017), in confronting serious issues, culture jammers frequently use humor, pranks, and carnivalesque inversions. The ways toad fans interact with each other are playful and often ironic. This playfulness can attract more people to understand “Moha” culture, which is an effective way to encourage civic participation. In addition, the intentional choice of “Hama,” which is the vulgar version of “toad,” shows toad fans’ willingness to “kick up.” According to Littlewood and Pickering (1998), pleasure can be generated from kicking up and humiliating the person who has a higher social status than you. In this case, to use a vulgar word to refer to Jiang, who is a former president and has a high social status, is a way to jam and challenge the mainstream culture in a playful way. Moreover, Benton (1988) argues that humor is a way of easing political tensions. It can be seen that using humor to worship the toad in a playful way is effective for people to diminish the power of political leaders. 

Fourth, DeLaure and Fink (2017) argue that culture jamming is often anonymous. According to them, culture jammers do not seek personal fame and fortune. This is usually true in “Moha” culture because toad fans who worship Jiang do not like to disclose their personal information, especially under the censorship of the Chinese government. However, this statement is also arguable among toad fans. When interacting with other toad fans on social media, these fans tend to intentionally use self-censored words as if there were someone trying to delete their own content. For example, if they wanted to comment “too young too naïve” to make fun of Jiang, they normally only write “too young…” sometimes with the frog emoji. Then other toad fans might start to comment on that original comment by saying “your body is cold,” which means the original blogger has already died, or “you are now on the shot-to-death list.” Toad fans intentionally exaggerate the outcomes of toad worship, and then emphasize their braveness to break the rule. Therefore, to worship Jiang is a way of showing toad fans’ self-identity and their unique rebellion against the mainstream culture. It can be seen that toad fans are under control by the government censorship, but in the meantime, they try to play with the censorship and highlight the existence of censorship so that other people would notice it. This act corresponds to Zuckerman’s (2015) statement that Chinese government censorship pushed netizens on social media to use metaphors to circumvent censorship, and that those metaphors can remind people of the existence of censorship. 

Fifth, culture jamming is participatory (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). According to DeLaure and Fink (2017), culture jamming might facilitate collective organizing and bring people with similar opinions together. Although there are still disagreements on whether culture jamming facilitates or hinders organizing, the example of “Moha” culture demonstrates the ability of culture jamming to bring toad fans together and facilitate interactions among them. As mentioned before, toad fans have a willingness to interact with each other by using their own language. In addition, Moha culture includes the participation of toad fans to create videos and memes and requires a large number of people’s comments on social media. The interactions among toad fans and the discussion regarding “Moha” culture also benefit from transmedia storytelling. On different platforms, toad fans use their own language to communicate and comment on public accounts. Therefore, the language and the concept of Moha culture can be seen by a large number of people multiple times and reinforce the impression of Moha in their mind. 

Sixth, culture jamming is political (DeLaure and Fink, 2017). Culture jamming challenges existing structures of power, seeking to reveal hypocrisy and injustices, spark public outrage, and promote collective action (DeLaure and Fink, 2017). It is obvious that toad fans usually work together and interact with each other on social media to ironically criticize or degrade political figures, which is a way to challenge both the mainstream culture and the structures of power. 

Seventh, culture jamming operates serially (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). The serial quality to culture jamming means that actions are repeatable (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). In Moha culture, the memes and words can be used in different settings by different toad fans. People serially use similar memes and words to comment on different social issues. By doing so, “Moha” culture maintains its sustainability and improves its possibility of exposure. 

Eighth, culture jamming is transgressive and boundaryless (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). In addition, culture jamming in the twenty-first century can traverse national boundaries and grow into a global phenomenon (DeLaure & Fink, 2017). Although Jiang is a Chinese political figure with little popularity in other countries, the language of “Moha” culture, especially memes, can be seen by people outside of China. Also, there are no criteria to be able to worship the toad; everyone can be a toad fan and every platform can be used to spread “Moha” culture. 

Therefore, “Moha” culture can be seen as a form of cultural jamming and helps to encourage not only toad fans, but also other netizens to participate in politics by discussing political figures.

————— 

Qiyao Peng is a master candidate at Annenberg school of the University of Southern California. She is interested in online communities and fandom. With a background in mainland China, she is also interested in how Chinese online communities engage in political participation.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation: Daniel T Durbin and Joseph L. Price (Part 2)

Joe Price: In liturgical ceremonies an acolyte is an assistant who must perform the ritual in correct ways in order to respect the process and to validate the meaning that lies beyond the function of the action itself.  Like the chess player who abides by the arbitrary—but customary—rule of moving a pawn only one space at a time, the acolyte also follows established guidelines whose origins were similarly subjective.  And while a liturgical acolyte might be oriented by goodness and the pursuit (or affirmation) of salvation, he or she, like the superstitious sports fan, might be acting also with the mixed motives of hope (for spiritual fulfillment) and fear of death or anxiety about one’s existential predicament, unspecified concerns arising out of the strictures of finitude (as Paul Tillich distinguished in The Courage to Be).  

Although sports fans might have jobs that provide the economic resources to secure food, shelter, and (perhaps) comfort, it’s possible that a sense of being called—the root of vocation—motivates them to find meaning in identifying with players or teams whose pursuit of victory can stimulate hope.  For the uncertain outcome of a sports competition provides athletes and fans with an event or a circumstance that cultivates hope: with two outs and none on the ninth inning and down by a run or more, or with fourth down and seconds remaining while losing by five, or down by two with two seconds remaining to inbound the ball at the baseline, a devout fan maintains hope that baserunners will get on to bring the winning run to the plate, or that a Hail Mary pass will miraculously be caught for a winning touchdown, or that a half-court heave will deliver a winning three-point buzzer beater.  Theologian Michael Novak maintains that an athlete or devout sports fan who achieves a victory is able to experience briefly in an anticipatory way a kind of spiritual fulfilment that is sought by acolytes and other religious devotees.

While hope might be sustained (even against all odds) throughout competition, defeat rather than victory might be realized.  In such cases, Novak avers, an athlete or fan is challenged in a nominal way to rehearse one’s possible response to the ultimate defeat—death.   Yet because of the seasonal nature of sports, it’s possible to reinvigorate hope following a defeat.  Tomorrow or next week there’s another game, and with a new season there’s fresh hope for a championship.  In Wait Till Next Year, her memoir of childhood fandom for the Dodgers, Doris Kearns Goodwin dealt with a season’s unsuccessful end by anticipating a new start the next year, much like her Jewish friend who sustained hope during High Holy Days by envisioning “next year in Jerusalem.”

Daniel Durbin: I appreciate your ode to hope in a sports fan’s life, but, let’s face it (ad hominem argument coming up here) that’s pretty easy for a lifelong Yankees fan.  For a Yankees fan, there is always hope (if only the hope of the wealthiest team in the game).

What about your typical, say, Sacramento Kings fan or, until recently, Chicago Cubs fan or (speaking of lives buried in existential despair) Cleveland Browns fans?  Many fans stay committed to teams they know have no chance of winning a championship. At times, being a fan of “lovable losers” or “snake-bit” franchises or the “non-one-percenters” can become an important point of identification for fans.

Some fans know they are not ever going to be pseudo-sophisticates living lives of regal luxury in Louis Vuitton and obscenely priced apartments in downtown Manhattan.  They are proudly “nobodies from nowhere” and the struggles of their often underfunded teams (relative to the big dogs in Los Angeles and New York) embody their own sense of underpaid-but-fighting-the-good-fight-for-family-hearth-and-home self.  They have no hope of winning in this season or next.  But, they continue to fight against a system that, from their perspective, may be stacked against them.  Why?  Perhaps because, on some level, they find a certain heroism in giving their lives for a lost cause.

As you note, the end of the season does mark a moment of death for them.  But, I would like to suggest that it also marks a moment of death for the championship team and that team’s fans.  I think this point is important for understanding the similarities and differences between a sports fan’s and a religious acolyte’s experience.  I will have to take a slightly circuitous route to get there.

To begin, as sports philosopher Bernard Suits and many others have noted, a key factor that distinguishes sports from games is that sports are a purely public affair.  I can play tiddlywinks all day by myself.  I can challenge myself to perform 100 push-ups in five minutes. But, these are not sports.  Sports exist when a sufficient number of followers (a public body) follow the sport as sport.  As with the athletic festivals that defined sport in ancient Greece, sport exists when a public recognizes a competition as creating a significant social narrative.

As a public activity, sport is a rhetorical exercise. From the creation of rules (which are used to persuade a sufficient public of the value of the sports competition) to the promotion of the sport to the performances of athletes as exemplifications of the values encoded in the sports rules to the broadcasting and discussion of the sports event itself, sport exists within the public sphere and functions as a form of public discourse that creates value promoting messages of praise and blame.  These messages use the performances of athletes as examples or proofs of the values expressed in the rules.  Their actions demonstrate the “rightness” of those rules and what is “right” or praiseworthy action within the world created by those rules.  

These ideas are not new.  Plato recognized the goal of sport as creating public discourses of praise and blame in his “Laws” and Aristotle recognized sports discourse as epideictic rhetoric in his “Rhetoric.”

As ritualistic rhetoric, sports can create messages of success and failure in tournaments and competitions.  But, once we create sports seasons as part of the sports ritual, we create a terminal point for the sport.  The sports season ends in death, symbolic death for all those involved in the sport.

The 1960 baseball season had a terminal point when Bill Mazeroski hit a home run to win the World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates over the New York Yankees.  At that moment, the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series and the New York Yankees ended the 1960 season in failure.  Yet, even as Mazeroski’s hit dropped over the left field fence in Forbes Field, the Pittsburgh Pirates of 1960 no longer existed.  The second that game ended, the Pirates of 1960 were, in sports ritual, dead.  They had finished their lives in victory.  But, they were as dead as the 1960 Yankees.

The moment Mazeroski jumped on home plate, the 1960 Pirates were dead and the city of Pittsburgh awaited the birth of the 1961 Pirates.  The victory meant that there was nothing greater for Pittsburgh fans to hope for from 1961.  Their team could not possibly do better in 1961 than they did in 1960.  Moreover, the 1961 Pittsburgh Pirates would not even be the same team.  Age, trades, injuries and circumstance would change the team (as happens with all teams in new seasons).

A fan might hope for a better season from a team “next year.”  But, the rhetorical ritual of death that ends each sports season creates a terminal point in meaning for the team as it exists within the fan’s experience.  And that point, I would argue, gives meaning to fans as it embodies their own rhetorical response to death.\

I may accept my team’s lot in life as an also-ran, a team that has no championship hopes.  It’s annual ritual of failure in public competition may express my own sense of failure at not competing with the “haves” in society.  But, as my team continues to fight to the last out or the final buzzer, even when it has long been eliminated from the postseason, even in the face of ultimate failure and loss, it may embody for me my own struggle, my own courage in fighting to the end of my life though I may end life with only the most modest of accomplishments.

So, even without hope for another season, because, in a very real sense, there is no other season for my 2018 Lakers or Warriors or Dodgers or Rams (or Yankees), sports can create rhetorical meaning for us as we face the most fundamental problem of our existence, our own termination. Our teams can embody our own success and failure, courage and fear as we face our end.  And, as they embody values we praise in facing their seasonal termination, they may create identification with those values within us as fans. With them, we stand courageous in the face of the end.  No hope, yet, no despair.

As Plato said in discussing leading a life of philosophical inquiry, perhaps, in this way, sports can help us “at the end of life cast off the burdens of the flesh [and] stand victorious in the first bout of a truly Olympian victory.” 

Joe Price: I’m always engaged and stimulated by your reflections on rhetoric, especially since (as the son of Southern minister) I have always been fascinated by language, its structure and its use.  Does experience itself create meaning, or is the meaning created in the reflection on the experience per se and the use or rhetoric to tell the story?  Although Mazeroski’s home run—I still cringe when I write those words and taste the tears that I shed that October afternoon—was an event that ended the game and the season, it created a deep sense of joy and meaning for fans and folks in Pittsburgh.  One of my present colleagues, a native of Pittsburgh who deigns to hear me talk about baseball, will gladly tell of joining the celebration in the downtown streets following the Pirates win.  For her like so many Pirates and Yankees fans, the meaning of that event did not die with Maz touching home plate nor with the end of the city’s immediate celebration nor with the drying of my own tears.  The significance and meaning of that game endures in memory, especially in its retelling, for which she uses she and Pittsburgh fans use a different rhetoric than the one that I employ.

Daniel Durbin: Like a funeral, end of season celebrations reflect on a life well-lived, a life that was given in the “heroic” struggle to accomplish the seemingly impible.  The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates are dead.  But, they died in a glorious victory.

And here, perhaps, as T. S. Eliot once wrote, in our end we find our beginning.  For, tradition says that ancient athletic festivals, the very first sports, the sports that gave Aristotle and Plato the content to describe sport, those athletic festivals grew from funeral celebrations.  Athletic festivals were held to celebrate the life of a fallen hero. The athletes’ performances acted as performative exemplifications of the hero’s great deeds.  The end of the competition spoke of the end of the hero’s struggle with fate, the gods, other human beings.  The winner embodied the hero’s valorous struggle and ultimate victory, even in the face of death.

As the son of a Southern minister, you undoubtedly know Paul’s final summation of his own heroic struggle; “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

Maybe, just maybe, Paul remembered the tradition of athletic festivals, here.  Perhaps, he drew on the tradition of sports as rhetorical summations of a finished life’s struggle as he dictated these final words, final reflections on his life.  Perhaps.

Joe Price:It’s certain that Paul was familiar with sports since by the time of his benediction he had readily aligned the athlete’s pursuit of victory with the faithful Christian’s pursuit of fulfilment.  Even so, he identified a qualitative difference between the victorious athlete’s medal as an impermanent wreath and the faithful believer’s reward, which is the imperishable prize of eternal life (1 Corinthians 9:24ff).  By extension, then, he would probably conclude, like you, that the sports fan celebrates temporal teams and their quests while the religious devotee reveres that which is beyond time and space, that which is indestructible. 

Daniel Durbin: Perhaps appropriately, we may let Paul have the final word, here.  For, in his “qualitative difference” between the impermanent wreath of a victorious athlete and the “imperishable prize” awarded the faithful believer, we have the exemplification of the distinction I made earlier in our conversation regarding the difference between sports and religion. For sports to be a game, an avocation, the victory and the prize must remain impermanent, a mark of a passing moment in time when the athlete achieved victory over opponents and the unnecessary obstacles the game placed in her or his way.  For the religious acolyte, the stakes are permanent, imperishable, serious in a way sports cannot be serious without losing their meaning as sports and games. 

Sports can bring a moment of rapture or despair for the transitory achievement of victory.  Religion must often posit the hope of a rapture that does not fade, a joy that cannot fall into despair---a permanent rapture and joy that we cannot achieve in our ever-changing human state.  Sports, at their best, may give us a brief hint of that joy.  But, as with all evolving human discourse, it can only offer the briefest of hints. 

Thank you, Joe, for a stimulating conversation and we both would like to thank Henry Jenkins for opening his blog to this conversation.

Joseph L. Price is a Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies. With a doctorate in theology and culture, he has taught more than thirty different courses, ranging from “The Life and Teaching of Jesus” to “Latin American Liberation Theologies” and from “Cinema and Religion” to “Sport, Play, and Ritual.” Author and co-editor of several theological works, including Tillich and A New Handbook of Christian Theology, he has also published numerous essays and books on sports and religion, including From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion and Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America. Combining his interests in sports, ritual studies, and music, he has sung the national anthem for more than 125 professional baseball games in 20 Major League ballparks and 100 minor league stadiums in 42 states.

Daniel T. Durbinis RTCP Professor of Communication and Director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Dr. Durbin has published numerous articles on sports, popular culture, rhetoric, media, and philosophy.  His current research interests include a rethinking of the entire process of sport as performative public discourse.  He is also writing a book tracing the massive social changes that remade Los Angeles and Hollywood in the summer of 1947.

Dr. Durbin has appeared as an expert in sports, public discourse and popular culture hundreds of times across a wide variety of news media including the CBS Nightly News, the NBC Nightly News, CNN International, BBC-TV, CBC-TV, NPR, the NFL Network, HBO-Sports, KCBS-TV, KCOP-TV, KCAL-TV, KFWB-NewsRadio and BBC Scotland.  Dr. Durbin appears regularly on KCBS-Radio and is often quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and many other news outlets.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture (Round 3): Daniel T. Durbin and Joseph L. Price (Part 1)

Joe Price: I was born with the DNA of a sports fan. I teethed on Major League Baseball and gnawed shortly thereafter on SEC football and basketball.  Like the rhythms of a liturgical cycle, the seasons of these three major sports oriented my childhood and have shaped my life.  Although I have been rooting for favorite teams since my earliest school days, I simply enjoy watching games of players of any age between teams with which I have little, if any, affiliation.  I began to think about the ritual significance of sports fandom, including my own, in conjunction with my studies related to religious devotion, especially the acts and attitudes of worship and the sense and strength of community established among like-minded (or confessing) devotees. 

Initially, my scholarly work aligning sports with religious practices and perspectives focused on the mythic significance of baseball and football. My turn to examine sports fandom grew out of field work that I undertook at several Super Bowls in the 1980s and 1990s.  At the Super Bowl sites I observed fans who frequently displayed their fervor for their favorite team by means of masking—by wearing team colors, by displaying an icon of the team name or mascot, or by sporting the jerseys of a prominent player.  As I interviewed scores of fans who had journeyed to the stadium, they frequently told of sacrifices that they had made and major difficulties that they had encountered in order to attend the game.  Their demeanor and behavior resembled those of religious pilgrims.  And they often revealed the depth of their devotion by indicating that they had invested in their team’s anticipated success by placing bets.  

Daniel Durbin: Over my career, much of my research has focused on first religious discourse and then sports discourse and the ways in which both create communities of acolytes. My focus has been on both as forms of performative public discourse; performative in that each creates meaning through public rituals, rituals that embody discursive narratives of praise or blame for specific actions.  As I am not a true acolyte of any sports team or athlete (a sports agnostic), I am most curious about the ways in which sports can create meaningful public rituals that engender fanaticism, passion, and the reenactment of those rituals as evocations of personal commitment to the athlete, team, sport and/or league.

Joe Price: Although you characterize yourself as a sports agnostic while I unabashedly embrace the identity of a sports fan, we concur in our appreciative use of religious language to provide a conceptual tool for exploring the ways in which sports commitment confirms a fan’s individual identity while it also establishes a sense of community with like-minded and similarly motivated devotees.  

In addition to the masking attire that fans often wear to identify with their favorite team (as I observed with Super Bowl fans), I’m also interested in how sports fans behave superstitiously in an effort to establish and maintain solidarity with their favorite teams.  In general, superstitions often begin by equating coincidence with cause, and in the case of fans, superstitions frequently develop by associating the outcome of games with specific patterns of behavior.  In preparation for watching a game of their favorite team, for instance, superstitious fans seek to repeat specific actions that they recall from a previous, significant victory.  Perhaps they correlate a pregame barbecue and a particular sauce with the outcome, or what mid-game snacks they consume.  Or they might connect the location of their seat in the stands or in front of a TV with their team’s success, or they might think of the clothing that they wore before a loss and thereafter make sure not to wear it again on game day.  In short, although superstitious fans seem to think that their accurate performance of pregame or in-game rituals might influence the game’s outcome, at a profound level they confirm their identity with their team by repeating their superstitious behavior.

Daniel Durbin:I empathize with your interest in fans’ use of “superstitious” rituals to help their teams win.  Though, I think those rituals may have as much to do with deterministic fears as with hope.  In November of 1974, my father watched the first half of the annual USC-Notre Dame football game.  Notre Dame ran up an early 24-0 lead and my dad slammed off the tv set in disgust and went outside to work in the backyard.  A couple hours later, my grandmother called up asking why my dad wasn’t watching the game. USC had roared back to a 55-24 lead. My dad ran into the house and turned the tv back on.  By the time he got the set warmed up, USC had finished its scoring.  He saw only the failure, not the success of one of his team’s greatest victories.  

Having been born barely a few feet from the University of Southern California campus, my dad has been a diehard Trojans fan from, literally, his first memories in life.  But, since that fateful afternoon in 1974, my dad, for 44 years, has refused to watch a Trojans game unless they were so far out in front with so little time left that it would be impossible for their opponents to catch them.  His rationale has been that he cannot be the cause of their losing if he is not watching the game.  And, (in a self-fulfilling prophecy) when he does allow him to watch a game (clean-up time for the Trojans, desperation time for their opponents), their opponents often end up scoring.

Despite some of my siblings’ stated beliefs, my father is a relatively rational man who knows his viewing has no impact on the Trojan’s fortunes.  But, in his team’s best interests, he has held himself to that practice for nearly half a century.

This illustration points out something I think distinguishes sports fandom from religious “fandom”.  As Johan Huizinga and others have noted, sports evolve from games and both are ritualistic practices in which we place unnecessary obstacles between ourselves and a set of goals to give value and meaning to those goals (we place a distance of five kilometers between ourselves and the finish line to give meaning to running a 5K race).  Those obstacles and the rituals that grow from them must, on some level be arbitrary. 5K is the distance solely because we define this as a 5K race.  The pawn only moves one space because it's a pawn.  The rules are arbitrary and this very arbitrariness keeps the games/sports from becoming vocational, that is, from becoming the most efficient means to a necessary or desirable goal, as we would have our vocational choices be.  

The ritualistic experience of the game is distinct from religious “fan” experience in that, for the rituals to remain valuable in the play setting of sports, we must rationally understand that they don’t really have an impact on the game, that they don’t literally make the path to the desired goal easier for our athletes or teams.  In order to take part in the play-activity of sports, fans knowingly engage in (if you will) irrational rituals, rituals that, by definition, have no bearing on the game.  If they did have a bearing on the game, the fans actions would lose the play element that defines games and sports.

This doesn’t work in the same way for the religious acolyte.  The rituals in which a religious acolyte takes part must, from their perspective, have some bearing on their goodness, rightness, salvation, being in order to have any meaning.  The rituals must lead to a definite goal.  Whether they hope the rituals make them better citizens or better people or lead to a final salvation in which they enter into an eternal peace, the religious fan experience must see rituals as embodying meaning.  Sports fans must see rituals as, on some level, being arbitrary and having no real meaning.  Religious acolytes must see their rituals as, on some level, carrying real meaning.  On this level, religious fandom is vocational. Religion, for committed fans, is not a game.

Joseph L. Price is a Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies. With a doctorate in theology and culture, he has taught more than thirty different courses, ranging from “The Life and Teaching of Jesus” to “Latin American Liberation Theologies” and from “Cinema and Religion” to “Sport, Play, and Ritual.” Author and co-editor of several theological works, including Tillich and A New Handbook of Christian Theology, he has also published numerous essays and books on sports and religion, including From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion and Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America. Combining his interests in sports, ritual studies, and music, he has sung the national anthem for more than 125 professional baseball games in 20 Major League ballparks and 100 minor league stadiums in 42 states.

Daniel T. Durbinis RTCP Professor of Communication and Director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Dr. Durbin has published numerous articles on sports, popular culture, rhetoric, media, and philosophy.  His current research interests include a rethinking of the entire process of sport as performative public discourse.  He is also writing a book tracing the massive social changes that remade Los Angeles and Hollywood in the summer of 1947.

 Dr. Durbin has appeared as an expert in sports, public discourse and popular culture hundreds of times across a wide variety of news media including the CBS Nightly News, the NBC Nightly News, CNN International, BBC-TV, CBC-TV, NPR, the NFL Network, HBO-Sports, KCBS-TV, KCOP-TV, KCAL-TV, KFWB-NewsRadio and BBC Scotland.  Dr. Durbin appears regularly on KCBS-Radio and is often quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and many other news outlets.

How Do You Like It So Far? Podcast" Diane Winston on Religion and Reality Television

This week I talk to Diane Winston, professor of Communication and Journalism at USC, about religion and reality television. Are young people getting insights into how to live their lives from reality TV? Contrary to reality TV being seen as a guilty pleasure, Winston's latest book talks about reality TV as the "the lived religion of late capitalism". Reality television tells stories that people feel identified with, or see as cautionary tales. Among other shows, we talk about Survivor, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Castaways, and The Apprentice (and Trump as a “reality television president.” We designed this episode as a tie-in with the Popular Religion and Participatory Culture series running on my blog this month.

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round Two): Alice Marwick and Rachel Wagner (Part Two)

Rachel:I’m not surprised by this confluence in our work, either. Conspiracy theories and apocalypticism aren’t that different – both posit a conviction that one’s own view of the world is correct, even if it strains ordinary credibility and even if it isn’t particular positive. Both set the world into two groups – those with insider knowledge who typically also perceive themselves as morally superior in some way – and those on the outside, who are deemed devious or violent or perhaps just not worthy of survival. Both engage in a kind of mythic construct, taking bits and pieces of the world around us and constructing them (akin in many ways to fan fiction) into elaborate meta-stories in which the interpreter plays a key role. In many of these constructs, God is absent, or so far in the wings or into the future that he doesn’t play a significant role in many of these emerging tales. I find it interesting that conspiracy theories in particular are largely not driven by a presumption that God is shaping the interpreter’s insights or that he is playing much of a role at all in the events.

I do really understand your question about evangelically-inspired literature like the Left Behindseries. There are at least two different kinds of apocalypticism afoot today, and they seem to have different purposes. What I am calling the “biblically-shaped” apocalypticism feeds off the presumptive authority of the Bible, and gets the anchors of its story elements there. So in the Left Behindseries (and other works like it) authors contend that in telling their contemporary stories, they are interpreting the Bible as an authoritative text – one that their readers will agreeis authoritative. These authors and their readers buy into the notion of an apocalypse involving the heavenly God seated on a throne who sends his agent (usually Jesus) to wreak destruction on enemies both earthly and cosmis. For these apocalypticists, the post-apocalyptic wasteland (if it appears at all) is a transitory stop on the way to a refashioning of earth in God’s glorious vision. And of course, their main focus is beyond this world entirely, in the expectation of the otherworldly space of heaven. Humans may have more agency in Left Behind than in some other modes of apocalyptic expectation, but God is still running the show. In the mediated cowboy apocalypses I am writing about, God’s role is much more muted or absent altogether. There is rarely a direct reference to biblical imagery, but there are strong apocalyptic themes. Instead of waiting for a supernatural messiah, the “good guy with a gun” is the one who will bring about a better world. And the imminent post-apocalyptic wasteland is a dark but nonetheless welcoming of a refreshed frontier where the gun will be the sole arbiter of justice. There’s a 2014 NRA ad in which the narrator asks: 

Do you still believe in the good guys? Because you’re surrounded by a world where madmen are famous, and good ones forgotten ... where filthy crimes go unpunished and killers and con-artists prey upon anyone who still follows the rules. The good guys are a lie, they laugh. Everyone’s corrupted.But what do you believe? Do you believe in people who would rather fail honestly than lie to get ahead? ... It takes courage to be free. A special kind of backbone to reject the world that surrounds you ... to believe that there is always a right choice and an honest consequence. That’s what it means to believe in America. It’s time to believe in the good guys again. 

There is no explicit religious imagery here, but there is heavy apocalyptic imagery: moral dualism; the presumption of a degraded world; the expectation that one should “reject” the world at large; and the deeply held notion of a kind of chosenness. There’s also the powerful presumption that the guy holding the gun will play the role of judge. Those NRA members who are also preppers see themselves as types of homegrown prophets, who have the ability to see the future and will prepare themselves for it by stockpiling guns and supplies. There’s definitely an implicit loss of faith here; God isn’t going to provide, so the many cowboy must do so. Apocalypticism, then, can tap into an “otherworldly” space that is distinct from the present world simply by being in the future - not by being in some supernatural plane. And instead of waiting for a savior, they take on that role themselves.

And humans will bring about their owncatastrophes in the cowboy apocalypse; disasters aren’t going to be poured from heavenly bowls of wrath, as they are in the Book of Revelation. Instead, there’s just a generalized apocalyptic worldview that posits human destruction and human survival and human violence as the means to survive. I see the cowboy apocalypse as deeply linked with the earthiness of post-apocalypticism – which of course informs the gritty YA literature you also are interested in.  

But as you note, cowboy apocalypses are not the only mainstream media responses to apocalyptic fears today. There are other forms of storytelling – in America and beyond – that suggest human kindness is the way forward, or that suggest we can avert catastrophe, or we can better survive it, or that tenacity and morality are worth holding onto through the decay. The cowboy apocalypse is one very popular apocalyptic tale, but it’s not the only one. I do, however, believe it’s the only one for which guns are the central motif. Have you read much Catherine Keller? Her Apocalypse Now and Thenis a powerful feminist revisioning of apocalyptic tropes, reclaiming the very notion of apocalypse as a kind of rupture than can openupperspectives as opposed to close them – thus can help us think in new ways about contemporary challenges. The cowboy apocalypses just “close” with their fascination with boundaries and endings, and we definitely need more feminist “openings.” What in particular do you think that feminists can offer us in this conversation? Do you see YA dystopic literature (like The Hunger Games) as feminist? What do you see as the relationship between dystopia, apocalypse, and conspiracy theory?

There’s one last key idea that I want to put out there, in part because it relates to this notion of “closing” and also because it’s key to the intersection between communications theory and the study of apocalpyticism for me. Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark put together a small theory book recently that I find immensely helpful in the work I’m doing on guns as symbols of apocalypticism. The book is called Excommunication: Three Inquires in Media and Mediation. They re-appropriate the religious term “excommunication” to apply it to a new theory of communication. They are interested specifically in the “insufficiency of media,” that is, what happens when media fails: when messages get garbled, or they are undelivered, or when mediation is completely shut down. This they call “excommunication” and they examine some of its most compelling forms. In some ways, we can think of excommunication as the flip side of transmediation. Instead of story hubs growing into many-armed articulations of the same narrative world, excommunication is about stoppages and endings. It’s about breaking connections rather than cultivating them. So if transmediation is about flows and connections, excommunication is about blockages and disconnections. 

For Galloway, Thacker, and Wark, excommunication is what happens when one wants to communicate that “there is nothing more to say.” To put it bluntly, excommunication is a form of communication that shuts down communication. In the book, they deal mainly in abstractions – how does media – when viewed as a network - garble communication? How is contemporary horror like medieval mysticism in inviting us to consider the incomprehensible? What fails to get delivered in different types of mediation? But I’m more interested in a concrete application of their theory, and so I apply it in a novel way and ask: What happens if we think of the gun as a kind of mediation? And more specifically, what happens if we think of guns as ritual objects mediating excommunicationwithin an apocalyptic framework? The gun is a symbolic and mobile perimeter, and for the cowboy messiah it is a means of shutting down – symbolically and at times quite literally – the global flow of peoples in a shrinking world. It becomes a talisman for closure. What’s more, the gun is the sacramental object that can cross through the veil, so to speak, from now to then – from the present world to the world after cataclysm. So the gun is - perhaps paradoxically - also a kind of transmediated object, a relic of participatory culture in its apocalyptic manifestations. Symbolically, guns become a kind of reassurance against global collapse, even as they reek with exceptionalism and the presumption of necessary violence against others. Guns communicate even when they aren’t shooting – by proclaiming the potential to excommunicate, to literally shut the mouth of anyone who crosses the one holding the weapon. The more guns you have, the more you can imagine yourself shutting out a world that doesn’t abide by the “rules” that you wish it would. Apocalypticism (and post-apocalypticism more accurately) enables these cowboy messiahs to imaginatively abide in a future in which the gun can enact its excommunicative purposes without interference. The gun is a silencer. It’s a ritual object. It’s a form of participatory fandom for endings. 

To answer your final query, why is apocalypticism so popular? I can speak mostly for the cowboys I’m interested in – and I believe it’s because mythic responses are the only ones that seem effective for them against global anxieties. The fates of all of us are tightly intertwined, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about that. We share our water, our fuels, our food, our shelter. We share our skies, our oceans, our soil. We are getting closer and closer together through population growth and through communications and technology that enable travel and interface and interdependence. So globalization has a life of its own. That causes anxiety for all of us (which is a partial answer to why apocalypticism is so popular for everyone, even if they aren’t cowboy messiahs). Myths offer imaginative solutions to the problem. Not all myths are as darkly pragmatic as the myth of the cowboy messiahs, who materially engage with their fears by purchasing goods and weapons. But even for those of us who use stories as mere escape, the popularity of apocalyptic stories today reveals our anxieties, as myths always do. Less obvious is how we can cope with these anxieties beyond the stories themselves. What do you see as a way forward from the closures that increasingly define us? Do you see apocalypticism and/or exclusionary perspectives as having mythic effects? Do you see some authors as offering some more rehabilitative options than others? Do our stories increasingly tend to lean toward the presumption of catastrophe rather than recovery? I think this is so, but I would like to hear what you see, and how what you study informs that opinion.

Alice:Let’s start with the big question you posed: What do you see as the relationship between dystopia, apocalypse, and conspiracy theory?

I don’t think that conspiracy theories are intrinsically apocalyptic; however, they are inherently anti-establishment. If someone truly believes a conspiracy theory—that vaccines cause autism, say—they are farmore likely to believe other conspiracy theories. If vaccines actually do cause autism, then the medical establishment, from the CDC down to your local pharmacy, has been sneakily and strategically perpetrating lies. Not only is the medical establishment untrustworthy, so is the mainstream media, which consistently pushes a pro-vax agenda. And the government is obviously in on it, since it regulates vaccines and requires them for public school on the state level. In order for the conspiracy theory to be true, there has to be a whole lot of duplicity and deceit in most of our public institutions. If they’ve been lying about vaccines, it’s worth asking what else they have been lying about? People who study public health are actually really concerned about this; a 2015 study of the political debate over the HPV vaccine(which combined conspiracy theories with a whole lot of scare-mongering about teen sexuality) found that people caught up in the conflict were less likely to trust both government and doctors. 

There are a number of reasons why the extremist right spends so much effort recruiting random people on Discord or Reddit, even around issues that seem only quasi-related to white nationalism (trans rights, for example, or anti-feminism). Partly this is because urgent fears of apocalypse or dystopia are really motivating (which I’ll talk about in a sec). But it is also because “red-pilling” someone on one issue makes it much, much more likely that they will be red-pilled on another. Believing, for instance, that feminists are trying to emasculate men and strategically spread misandry to weaken the White family implies that mainstream media, which the extremist right often believes is furthering a feminist agenda, is spreading hatred of (white) men (and therefore must be stopped, or at least contested). Once you can’t trust the media (and, indeed, believe that the media is explicitly trying to trick people), it’s a quick leap to believing that Jews control the media. The seeds of fundamental doubt in government and media have already been sown. 

For the far-right, I think dystopias and apocalyptic narratives serve as warnings and motivations. I really loved your analysis of race and the cowboy apocalypse; in our research, we see a lot of dystopias around Islamic control of the United States (implementation of Sharia law, criminalizing Christianity, banning Western music, art, architecture, etc.). But we also see language that frames the current US as a dystopia.

Ask yourself, why is America’s culture in the state that it is in? Why has it declined past not only feminism, destruction of the family, and massive obesity, but also into bizarre causes such as transsexual rights? Why is there such a push for massive third world immigration? If we turn on the television, why do we see cultural perversions acted out as if they are normal? Why do many other cultures now make fun of America, when they used to pedestalize it? (from a Medium post called Cultural Marxism is the #1 Enemy of Western Civilization)

To many far-right extremists, the current US is a dystopia, and should be replaced with a white ethno-nationalist state that adheres to an idealized version of the 1950s nuclear family. In this narrative, the white nationalist state is a utopia, with the White man, a uniquely powerful and superior individual, at its head. Feminism will be vanquished and women returned to their rightful place; immigrants, non-Christians, LGBT individuals, etc. etc. will be expelled or criminalized. (It’s not a coincidence that this world reminds me more of The Handmaid’s Tale than anywhere I’d be comfortable living). In other words, the far-right’s utopiais the leftist’s dystopia. And to the extremist right, the left’s control of culture has brainwashed people into thinking that the status quo is the natural state of things. It must be removed before we can move into a utopian white state.

So conspiracy theories erode trust in the status quo, which then makes people more likely to believe that institutions have nefarious motivations, suggesting that Shit Is About To Go Down and we better get together and do something about it. Which, I think, feeds directly into your doomsday preppers and NRA attack ads. This also makes your average alt-right participant feel very special and important for participating in a culture war, when really they’re just talking smack on Twitter and photoshopping Trump and Pepe into video game screenshots.

Rachel:As we wrap this up, I want to hone in on a key point that is shared across our interests - that fans of conspiracy theories and dystopia and apocalyptic media all are fueled by anxiety and by imagination. Proponents of all three envision a sort of imagined, hoped-for turning point when new revelations will bring about a change in the rule of order in the world. They also all seem to be about feeling powerless and lashing out in order to feel more powerful. Whereas biblically-minded apocalypticists have always imagined that one’s enemies will be punished in an otherworldly event of judgment, today’s cowboy apocalypses articulate a belief that the world is about to be transformed here and now, in earthly ways, and  that they will have some kind of special authority in the aftermath. As I’ve said already, one of the most profound shifts I see in apocalypticism is its recent re-centering upon an earthly cataclysm and an earthly future as opposed to a heavenly, supernatural intervention as biblicists tend to propose. Conspiracy theorists and far-right extremists likewise seem to be focused on an imagined earthly future, and just as easily get stuck in a kind of panic, declaring themselves outnumbered and therefore feeling justified in engaging in all kinds of nasty behavior. I wonder if all of this doesn’t have roots in anxieties about globalization? I certainly think the cowboy apocalypse does; it’s all about the symbolic reinstitution of boundaries that protect white American male violent privilege. I see far-right extremists as also about controlling the perceived flow of others who are “different” in some damning way. They too hope for some kind of dark revolution that will place them in power again. Isn’t that what MAGA is about, some kind of nostalgic desire that is imposed on a fraught future? 

So maybe the question I’d like to leave you with now is how this all filters into places that are not necessarily either right wing or extremist. Do you see the same kind of energy at work in any way in circles otherwise presumed “leftist?” So for myself I am asking: Is there any way that the binaries of mainstream earthly apocalypticism also take shape in presumed progressive locations? I suppose one could say that the reluctance of some “left” intellectuals to engage with “right” thinkers is an example of such dualistic thinking, but I don’t think that is necessarily true. After all, one of the ways of resisting racist, misogynist exceptionalism is to reject it outright as a viable worldview. So I think rather I’m asking if the kind of distrust and anxiety inherent in both apocalypticism and conspiracy theories can alsoinhabit leftist thinking in ways that are less obvious at first - for example, when otherwise very socially progressive people presume that people who are homeless or suffer from mental illness (or both) somehow deserve what happens to them. That kind of thinking is a relic of very old theological perspectives that presume God rewards the prosperous and punishes the wicked, thus those who suffer must be wicked. It’s not necessarily apocalyptic in its oldest forms, but it can be. And it’s still alive and well in culture at large. There are other examples, I’m sure, of places where dualistic “us versus them” worldview and anxiety-filled distrust of authority have shaped progressive worldviews too, to the extent that knee-jerk presumptions are more easily made than perhaps when such perspectives have held less social power. To put it another way: If apocalypticism encourages us to think in terms of “good” and “evil,” and if apocalypticism is all over our media at large, are people who think themselves progressive really immune to the implications of this worldview, or do they tend increasingly to exhibit symptoms of this kind of simplistic thinking as well? Of course, the implication here is that the media can nurture types of participatory culture that are not just entertainment, but that can affect people’s worldviews in damaging ways. We needn’t go down the rabbit hole of effects theory to acknowledge that media at least have the capacityto shape, reinforce, and reflect perspectives in real ways. And how can we combat these worst forms of messaging? I think this question has even more salience if we put it in conversation with conspiracy theories of the type you mention, like anti-vaxxers, who show up just as often (or perhaps more?) in presumed left-leaning circles. What is at root in this distrust of authority? Is it about global anxiety in some way? Is it dualistic? Apocalyptic? Something else? We are obviously a very anxious lot today, and we have a lot of anger, a lot of fear, and a lot of desire that things be otherwise than they are - so much so that we expend vast amounts of energy imaginatively investing in fantasies that more readily match our needs. What do you think that is about? And do you see it as a primarily right wing problem or extremist problem, or are there ways in which American culture at large is more susceptible than it used to be to these imaginative manipulations of reality? 

Alice:I like your summary of our conversation—anxiety and imagination. We send our imaginations off into unpleasant places, whether that’s by reading a dystopian novel or checking Twitter, and that doesn’t help our anxiety. But just living daily life is very anxiety-provoking for most people. Economic precarity and constant uncertainty about the future, mixed with very negative environmental news  and political outrage after political outrage – anxiety is a very natural response to the state of the world.

I’ve been musing over the leftist question for some time now. I think during the Bush years, in leftist circles there was certainly a belief that the mainstream media was in cahoots with the government to hush up problematic actions – for example, the New York Times’ complicity in promoting the idea that Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction. Media studies scholarship like Herman & Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consentdiscusses how mainstream news and entertainment media relentlessly promote corporate capitalism and almost never further alternate points of view. Given that until the very recent past the left was very suspicious of the mainstream news media, and often saw them as a mouthpiece of the status quo, it is unsurprising that conspiracy theories circulate through the left as well. Of course, as a leftist media studies academic, I personally see a big difference between, for example, making the claim that sitcoms promote an unrealistic view of middle-class life and portray poverty as a tacky lifestyle choice, thus furthering class inequality; and rumors spread by people like Louise Mensch, who claims that Vladimir Putin had Andrew Breitbart murdered. But as we talked about previously, there’s a very strong link between distrusting institutions like the mainstream news media and the government and believing in conspiracy theories. So yes, I think the left is equally susceptible to problematic information.  The left is also very susceptible to politically polarized thinking – us versus them—which is on the rise across every part of the US political spectrum. 

One set of dystopias we didn’t discuss are capitalist dystopias, while had a resurgence at the turn of the 21stcentury: Infinite Jest,Minority Report, M.T. Anderson’s Feed (one of my all-time favorite dystopias), Max Barry’s Jennifer Government—all focused around a No Logo future of capitalism run amok. This, I think, is the leftist dystopia that predicts an environmental and psychic apocalypse based on rapacious corporations destroying community, individuality, and, you know, the planet.  The move to buying local, shopping craft markets, eating farm-to-table cuisine, which is basically more of a fashion trend than anything that’s had actual environmental impact is, I think, a response to many of these fears and worries. 

So here’s back to the main question: why are we more susceptible to “imaginative manipulations of reality”? Well, social, financial, and environmental problems feel enormous, and the solutions feel puny. Our news culture is a bad news culture, where really positive social changes (like the huge drop in the crime rate across the US) are ignored in favor of endlessly airing every sensational murder case 24/7 and scaring everyone. Our society is increasingly segregated politically, not just in terms of red states and blue states but red neighborhoods and blue neighborhoods. There is less intermarriage across political parties. Fewer friendships. It is far more likely today than thirty years ago that a Democrat can have very little contact with Republicans and vice versa, making it easy to demonize the other party. And, of course, we can’t forget the internet, which has given everyone a soapbox—and a lot of financial incentives to those who can attract attention online. Social media platforms mean that news spreads through interpersonal connections, and you’re much more likely to believe a story if it comes from someone you trust. This makes it extremely easy for hyper-partisan disinformation and conspiracy theories to circulate, because people share them to signal their political and personal identities. We don’t trust the news, we don’t trust people who aren’t like us, there’s a big increase in hyper-partisan media that’s created solely for clickbait, and voila, a perfect climate for disinformation spread.

I think what this conversation has shown me is the power of the stories our culture tells, a key element of both religious studies and media studies. What futures are we collectively imagining? Earlier in the conversation you asked me what feminism can offer us, and I think that feminism - along with critical studies of race, sexuality, class, and ability - can help us think imaginatively about a future we’d like to live in, rather than constantly trying to scotch-tape together a livable existence in the present. I recently saw a wonderful presentation by Woodrow Winchester III  in which he advocated designers using Afrofuturism to create speculative technologies, which, as he says, makes it possible to “enrich the plausible solution space.” By centering different perspectives-- not just the frightened White subject that both you and I are concerned with-- we can expand our imaginative spaces of what the future might look like, and perhaps work towards a future that doesn’t involve an apocalypse. 

Alice E. Marwick (PhD, New York University) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Faculty Affiliate on the Media Manipulation Initiative at the Data & Society Research Institute. She studies the social and cultural implications of social media and is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013) and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (2017).

Rachel Wagner [https://faculty.ithaca.edu/rwagner/] is Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College. Rachel's single-author book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality is part of the Media, Religion, and Culture series (Routledge, 2012). Short pieces relating to this research project can be found in Religion Dispatches and in the Society of Biblical Literature Forum. 

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation (Round Two) Alice Marwick and Rachel Wagner (Part One)

Alice:Hi Rachel! I’m excited to talk with you and see where our interests overlap. My work does not engage directly with religion; I’m definitely on the media studies side of this exchange. I do ethnographic and qualitative research on social media use, and my primary research foci are a) privacy and b) media manipulation and disinformation by right-wing extremist groups. I work with the Media Manipulation Initiative at Data & Society, and we’ve produced some interesting research that touches on religion —one of our postdocs, Francesca Tripodi, spent a year doing ethnographic research among American conservatives and examined their understandings of news. It seems that you and I share interests in pop culture, feminism, and popular tech, so I think we will have a lot to talk about!

Rachel:You may or may not know my previous work on religion and media. I wrote a book called Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and VirtualReality in a Routledge series (2012), in which I outline key issues and problems in thinking about the placement of religious experience in virtual spaces, and what the feedback between the virtual and the “real” look like in terms of religious experience. The book places significant emphasis on the issue of “play” and religion, and is mostly a theoretical introduction to problems and a means by which those who haven’t considered these issues can learn the basics. The final chapter is about participatory culture, looking at how religion is both transmediated and how transmedia can work like religion. I also have numerous articles and chapters in books on religion and film; religion and video games; and religion and technology. I teach about these topics as well.

I am currently at work on a book that I am calling Cowboy Apocalypse. The book is a look at the pervasiveness of apocalyptic mythology in American culture, studying it from a transmediated, participatory culture perspective. Although apocalypse is not singularly-branded or corporately-determined, it has (and arguably always has been) transmediated. In its American context, we can easily find it in our literature (e.g. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; World Made by Handby James Howard Kunstler; Maddaddamby Margaret Atwood; Max Brooks’ World War Z); in our films (e.g. Children of Men; Zombieland; Book of Eli; 28 Days Later); in our television fandoms (e.g. The Walking Dead; Revolution; The 100; The Last Man on Earth); in our reality television shows (e.g. Doomsday Preppers;Doomsday Bunkers; The Colony); in our video games (e.g. Mad Max; Metro 2033; Gears of War;The Last of Us); in our real life games and costumed experiences (e.g. humans versus zombies; Dead Matter; Pulau Zombie; homegrown survivalist “scenario” experiences in the woods; comic-cons); and in our embodied, “real life” mythologies (most notably, the apocalyptic mythology that informs NRA public rhetoric). Some of these apocalyptic mythic enactments are transmediated within specific corporations (the most obvious example include The Walking Deadand Mad Max). But regardless of these internaltransmediated fandoms, we can also say – just as accurately – that the apocalyptic myth itselfis transmediated across numerous franchises, where it exhibits a number of the features of apocalypticism traditionally conceived: expectation of a life-altering events; a portrait of a future transformed earth; the presumption that only some – those in the know – will survive; a dualistic construction of “good guys” and “bad guys;” the presumption that violence is the only means by which survival can be conceived. Another way of putting all this is to say that in America today, the apocalyptic myth is the hub of a self-generating and self-perpetuating set of mediated articulations of the end times that is consuming our popular culture. It is also highly participatory in its most material forms. 

What’s especially interesting, though, is what is missingin these more recent articulations. In traditional apocalypticism (of the sort that Jews and Christians popularized in the time period “between” the testaments of the Christian Bible), the expectation is that God or his agent will intervene in human history to bring about the impending change – which is, in this religious conception, a final judgment. While elements of judgment certainly remain in these contemporary popular mediated forms of the apocalypse, God has been replaced with what I call the “cowboy messiah,” an armed vigilante figure who judges his own enemies typically through the barrel of a gun. Instead of waiting for God to intervene, the cowboy messiah helps to bring about the violent transformation of the earth, or he responds to its inevitable destruction (through plague or resource depletion, for example) by “preparing” a future space in which he will live with his chosen few – his family and friends – reinforced by a violent perimeter. The gun becomes a mobile means of imagining a “wall” around one’s own exceptionalized perspectives, be they religious, racial, gendered, or otherwise close-minded. 

I argue in my upcoming book that the cowboy apocalypse is a product of the unique American racially-charged historical landscape, since America is a land formed upon the backs and with the blood of “others." The justification of genocide was accomplished in two not altogether compatible ways: either by defining the frontier as an empty vast wilderness intended for consumption by God’s newly-settled chosen ones, or by defining the frontier as a hostile landscape intended to be violently contained and purified by God’s chosen. In both cases, the brown-skinned peoples already occupying these lands were viewed as dispensable and - through mythic machinations - as violent interlopers themselves. Because settlers perceived themselves as acting with God’s favor, the “other” – the “bad guy” could be justifiably massacred. To put it simply, the American story of “cowboys versus Indians” has become the heart of the American story today, where other brown-skinned peoples (the ancestors of former slaves, the Mexican peoples along the Texan border, and most immigrants to America) have symbolically replaced the “Indians” as violent, barely human entities worthy of extermination by the “good guys.” These self-proclaimed “good guys” can be recognized by their weapons and their cowboy uniform. This is participatory culture with a punch. 

But with the challenges of a global economy and global threats, this localized American myth has taken on cosmic form today, such that the American articulation of the apocalyptic myth is inseparable from American frontier mythology. They’ve blended into one shared mythic, transmediated construct that tells of America’s beginnings and its imminent ending. We can see what I call the “cowboy messiah” enacting this myth over and over again in our media. For example, John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard(1988) takes on the stage name Roy Rogers and shouts “Yippee-ki-yay, mother fucker!” while shooting at the violent foreign enemy who has infiltrated his wife’s American business. We can see it too in Tremors, the cult-classic film (1990) in which a forward-thinking cowboy stockpiles military-grade weapons and thus helps to save a small remote community from aliens. We see it in Zombieland (2009), where the figure of Tallahassee wears the expected cowboy costume with hat, boots, and gun strapped to his leg. He’s in the “ass-kicking business” and takes out dozens of zombies in a vicious post-apocalyptic wasteland, in a single shoot-out, all while effortlessly cracking jokes.

This myth is - and really always has been - a kind of participatory culture for those who buy into it. With the growing awareness of the inevitability of a shared global destiny, this American story of violent frontier exceptionalism has melded with the Christian myth of apocalypticism, creating what I call the cowboy apocalypse: a participatory culture in which the role of God’s avenging agent is no longer supernatural but earthly, and embodied by the cowboy messiah himself. Where once America’s borders seemed porous and expanding, today they are fixed and in danger of shrinking. Whereas once the brown-skinned violent population seemed controllable and even easy to destroy, today the “other” is perceived as clamoring at the border – much like many of the portraits of zombies in shows like The Walking Dead– where they push against “American” land and identity, demanding visibility. This is a highly racialized, uniquely American, violent apocalyptic mythology, masked behind myths of zombie identity at times, and diluted in the form of alien representation in others. But it is easily recognizable once you look for it. 

The implications of the myth of the cowboy apocalypse are chilling: In traditional apocalypticism, those who see themselves as persecuted, the “righteous few” await God’s intervention, huddled beneath a heavenly altar or standing on a hill awaiting Jesus’s return. They themselvesdon’t enact the violence of judgment. Instead, a messiah figure intervenes and in some texts (like the Jewish text 4 Ezra) this figure comes with a mouth of flaming fire or (like the Christian text Revelation) with a mouth exuding a supernatural sword. Speech is violent in these texts. In traditional apocalyptic texts, an otherworldly messiah figure fights forhumanity so they don’t have to. Supernatural armies may be involved, but humans are on the sidelines simply hoping for the best, sometimes praying or singing but not riding into battle or blasting flames from their mouths. 

This all changes in the blend of frontier mythology and traditional apocalypticism that is today’s cowboy apocalypse. The “good guy with a gun” is himselfa self proclaimed messiah figure. Tired of waiting for God, today's cowboy messiah takes on the savior role himself in a highly gendered form: the gun becomes his apocalyptic weapon of choice, the “mouth” of flaming fire through which he speaks. The gun becomes the means of enacting “righteous” judgment on his enemies. In a later part of this conversation, I’ll introduce the concept of “excommunication,” borrowed from Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, and Alexander Galloway, which I use to argue that the gun itself can be viewed a mode of mediation – a way of speaking – in this new apocalyptic mode. It’s participatory culture and avowed fandom with deadly consequences. It’s ritual performance with violent purposes. I don’t see the transmediated apocalyptic myth - the cowboy apocalypse - as harmless fiction. It is the darkest response possible to the challenges of globalization, in that instead of imagining a future in which humans cooperate to find global solutions, some of us propose a mythic solution with material consequences: that is, for some of us it would be preferable to violently refresh the “frontier” by allowing the earth to be destroyed. Such violent destruction would enable the cowboy messiah to demonstrate his manly mettle and ensure the survival of his own, his family and friends. This mythic construction is American exceptionalism in its most virulent, extreme form. And it’s not just mythic. Our global problems are real, which means that the responses we might envision are also real – whether they be global cooperation to deal with real problems, or cowboy destruction marked by “good guys” enacting vigilante “justice” in a harsh, ruined landscape. 

Alice:

Hi Rachel!

Your research sounds fascinating - I’m going to tell you a little bit more about the part of my own work that I think intersects most logically with your own and then delve into a few things that your email sparked for me. 

So I said in my last email that my most recent research interest, and something that’s become quite consuming, is disinformation and media manipulation online. Some background: During the 2016-2017 academic year I was a fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute in New York City. In the months running up to the election, a small team was watching as people on the 4chan and 8chan /pol boards brainstormed ways to influence the election through memes, conspiracy theories, rumors, slogans, and—most significantly—by using social media to spread false stories into the mainstream media. When we went to different funders and tried to explain why we felt this was important to research, we found that there was simply too much background that people didn’t understand—what is 8chan? What’s the alt-right? Who’s Pepe? What’s the men’s rights movement? Who cares what’s trending on Twitter?  Once Trump won the election, and the “alt-right” was on everyone’s radar, I volunteered to write everything up, and it became this massive report called Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online.

The main thesis of the report is that the alt-right is a disorganized group of people with very different viewpoints, backgrounds, and histories who are willing to work together on ideologically similar issues. Groups ranging from overt white supremacists to men’s rights activists to trolls to anti-Muslim or anti-Immigrant activists to conspiracy theorists all believe that their values are under attack from liberals, who have won the culture war (and in most cases, are synonymous with Jews). By positioning themselves as edgy, anti-PC, and countercultural, regressive social movements are spreading hateful ideologies to young people by radicalizing, or “red-pilling,” social media communities. This is often couched as ironic or humorous, providing plausible deniability when people are confronted or asked to take responsibility for their rhetoric. The gateway ideology for this process is typically anti-feminism, which is very popular among young men and often opens the door to racist and anti-Semitic belief systems. 

We also found that far-right extremists were using social media to actively spread rumors and disinformation to counter the Clinton campaign. They would brainstorm the best way to appeal to different demographic groups, identify potentially effective arguments, create images and videos that supported their counter-narratives, and use social media to spread them throughout the hyper-partisan mediasphere and to credulous journalists. A story like Hillary Clinton’s poor health circulated for months on social media, with /pol/ creating these elaborate montages of Hillary looking ill, which they spread everywhere when she actually did catch pneumonia. Other stories, like the Seth Rich conspiracy theory (which holds that the Clintons had low-level democratic staffer Seth Rich murdered because he was threatening to leak emails to Wikileaks), were fully-formulated and pushed to the mainstream once Trump had a bad news week.

It was surprising how vulnerable the mainstream media was to these efforts. If a story made Twitter’s trending topics (often by using bots), it was almost certain that someone would cover it. The campaign coverage was so intense and so consuming that often journalists were asked to push out dozens of blog posts or content items a day with little or no fact-checking. The people spearheading these efforts, like Andrew Anglin (who founded The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist blog targeted to millennials) or Richard Spencer (famous for being punched on camera by an antifa protester) were very canny at branding and marketing. Spencer, for example, was TV-ready and full of sound bites, while Weev, a notorious hacker who worked for the Stormer,conducted a series of fairly low-effort but newsworthy pranks that were, of course, covered by TDS in detail. As Yochai Benkler and his colleagues have since written about, a network of hyper-partisan news sites like Breitbartand the Daily Callercame to prominence during the election and were happy to publish any two-bit conservative conspiracy theory as long as it reflected poorly on Clinton and well on Trump. And of course, “fake news” sites set up for financial gain published all kinds of attention-getting claptrap, most of it pro-Trump. As a result, even on mainstream social media sites like Reddit and Facebook, there was a ton of pro-Trump, anti-Hillary messaging, many of it originating from far-right extremist groups.

I’ve continued my research on these communities since the election, and we have a really fantastic group of people involved with the Media Manipulation Initiative at D&S. While the alt-right isn’t the trendy topic it was a year ago, the people involved are still very much active. My co-author Becca Lewis is about to release a major report on the conservative influencer networks on YouTube, which are much closer to white supremacy than they are traditional Republican ideology. I’ve since investigated why people share fake news and conspiracy theories on social media, and found that it’s mostly motivated by identity expression and desire to fit into partisan social groups—that’s a whole other topic. Our amazing postdoc Francesca Tripodi spent a year talking to mainstream conservatives about news, and she found that even traditional Republicans are very distrustful of mainstream news, and are much more likely to believe that sources like Fox and Breitbart are trustworthy, and that large, significant stories like the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia are made up of whole cloth.

This research topic is fractal. I break off a tiny part and it gets bigger and bigger. Right now, I’m very interested in the social identities of the participants and how they feel themselves to be victimized underdogs. As a feminist scholar, I’m always interested in why anti-feminism and misogyny provides such an accessible entry point, and I’m also very concerned by the rise of misogynist separatist movement like the incels and Men Going Their Own Way. Feminists become a scapegoat by which disenfranchised or economically unsuccessful men can blame their lack of social or sexual success on the rise of women. And finally, I’m fascinated by the participatory nature of this culture. 4chan and 8chan are excellent examples of participatory culture; they have a low barrier to entry, creative contributions are highly valued, and there is a lot of explicit pedagogical interactions between less experienced and more experienced participants. My current obsession is Qanon, the theory that the Mueller investigation is actually a smokescreen for the real investigation of Hillary and Obama by, who else, Donald Trump. The people involved with Qanon are mostly baby boomers, and they conduct “close readings” of Q’s posts on 8chan in the same way that comparative literature students deconstruct poems, or fans beta-read fan fiction. While most of the early studies of participatory culture came out of fandom and tended to see participation as something very positive, creative, and generative, I’m interested in looking at communities that engage in participatory culture to less productive ends, such as networked harassment, spreading hateful speech, or propagating disinformation.

So I’m coming at your introduction from two perspectives. The first is my academic self, interested in the apocalyptic nature of a lot of conspiracy theories around, for example, white genocide, the New World Order, Obama death camps, etc. which often fall into the tropes you’ve so nimbly expressed. I really love this trope of the apocalyptic cowboybecause it’s not just about popular culture; it’s now a staple of extremist movements. Gun ownership, for example, is inextricably linked to the idea of armed insurrection against a government who has forgotten the traditional values of White America and is, instead, embracing European socialism, Islam, Sharia Law, Jewish control—even satanic or demon control (pick your poison). Often this is articulated in sort of vague terms, but it underlies much of the conspiratorial thinking and far-right sentiments that are present even in fairly mainstream social media culture. Qanon, for example, is all about defending American values from Obama and Clinton, who represent brownness, feminism, immigrants, and general Otherness. And while I really appreciate your insight that the apocalyptic cowboy isn’t waiting for Jesus’ return, I wonder how this plays out in stuff like the Left Behind series, which seems to at least scratch the same itch, and (very arguably) kicked off the contemporary fascination with post-apocalyptic stories.

The second perspective is mine as a lay-person dystopic enthusiast. Like many sci-fi fans, I went through a pretty intense period of reading post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction (I got sick of weak YA Hunger Gamesimitations and switched to mostly reading High Fantasy, which I love- if you have any ten-volume series to recommend, hit me up!). My favorite series are always those grounded in feminism, from the sort of liberal feminism lite of the Hunger Gamesto work by Octavia Butler or Margaret Atwood. At its bleakest, as in The Handmaid’s Tale or Meg Elison’s Book of the Unnamed Midwife, this work examines what life would be like for women if they were stripped of a social safety net and at the mercy of patriarchal control. At its most compassionate, as in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, it envisions rebuilding a future along more egalitarian lines. So here’s a question for you. Why do you think dystopia/apocalypse appeals across the spectrum? There are apocalyptic novels for conservatives (I read one once where the entire crumbling of the present was blamed on Obamacare); for teenage girls—so many for teenage girls!; for teenage boys; for progressives; for action enthusiasts; for literary fiction readers afraid to read genre fiction. What it is it about these tropes that appeal so widely?

Alice E. Marwick (PhD, New York University) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Faculty Affiliate on the Media Manipulation Initiative at the Data & Society Research Institute. She studies the social and cultural implications of social media and is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013) and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (2017).

Rachel Wagner [https://faculty.ithaca.edu/rwagner/] is Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College. Rachel's single-author book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality is part of the Media, Religion, and Culture series (Routledge, 2012). Short pieces relating to this research project can be found in Religion Dispatches and in the Society of Biblical Literature Forum. 

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation: Henry Jenkins, Sarah McFarland Taylor, and Diane Winston (Part Two)

Sarah:

I am glad that Henry recounted in his remarks his early life experiences with Christian fundamentalism and explained the ways that the trauma he carries from his religious upbringing has made him more hesitant to deal in professional life with religion as a category of culture or to engage possible correspondences between dimensions of religion and fandoms. In trying to discuss places where religious studies meets media studies with media studies folks I frequently encounter a similar reaction―a deep reluctance even to approach the topic of religion. It might surprise media scholars to learn that many in the cultural study of religion have had similar experiences of trauma related to their religious upbringing and, in some cases, gravitate to the field of Religious Studies in part to work through their religious traumas from childhood. Deborah Whitehead, who will be participating in this blog later in the series, is presenting a paper at the upcoming 2018 AAR that deals in part with what is increasingly self-identified online as a community of those who suffer from "evangelical PTSD." Whitehead examines the outgrowth of recovery support via social media channels for those who carry scars from their previous religious involvements. One of the challenges in building bridges between religious studies and other fields is our field’s unfortunate name, which makes it sound like our scholarship is "religious."  Diane and I just returned from a conference on media, religion, and culture, and although some headway has been made in introducing media studies scholars to what religion scholars actually do, many media scholars fundamentally misunderstand what the field is about. They think religious studies scholars are theologians and/or that our job is to evangelize and promote religion as a “good” in the world, or to convert our audiences to “believe” and become more religious. It is no wonder that few media scholars want to deal with the subject of religion and many have developed an “allergy” to discussing it. This is why I most often refer to what I do as the "cultural study of religion" in an attempt to make clear that what we do is not a "Divinity School" kind of religious offshoot. We are historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, folklorists, philologists, cultural studies folks, and so forth, but our job is not to cheerlead religion but to explore, analyze, and critique its dynamics, its sphere and modes of influence, and its enmeshments with other aspects of culture.  

One of the textbooks that introduces the study of religion to students is called Critics Not Caretakers and explains to the uninitiated that the scholar of religion operates in a socio-political role as "a cultural critic rather than a caretaker of a religious tradition or a guru dispensing timeless wisdom." We engage in socio-political-cultural critique, much as any cultural studies scholar would, because we are indeed doing cultural studies of a particular aspect of culture called "religion," attending to its various cultural expressions and permutations.  If one thing that comes out of this blog series is more scholars in media studies gaining a better understanding of what we do and do not do, I consider that to be a big win.
 

Henry:

Sarah, one of my goals for this series is to complicate the ways my field thinks about religious studies. You will not be surprised that more than one of the cultural studies participants felt compelled to tell me that they did not see themselves as religious, were atheist or agnostic, etc. And I suspect more than one of us will end up writing about our complex histories with religion as part of how we situate ourselves in this conversation.  Cultural Studies draws heavily on forms of cultural experience and identity that touch us in very direct ways -- not just the “Aca-Fan” tradition that I helped to inspire but also going back to Raymond Williams’ drawing on his own rural and working class background to inspire his reformulation of how and why we study culture or work in feminist, critical race studies, queer studies, etc. So that may lead many of us to assume that religious studies work grows out of the beliefs and experiences of researchers. Of course it does, but not necessarily in ways that some outside that field might assume. Witness Diane’s narrative.

I am hoping we can spend some time in this theory thinking about the nature of epistemology and experience across these fields -- how do we know what we know? How do you write about religion without being necessarily religious? How might those tools give us greater insight and access to groups who may be fundamentally different from us in terms of their beliefs and practices, as you do in the really provocative things you say here about Donald Trump’s evangelical base. This is one of the things that contemporary cultural studies might learn from religious studies which is really urgent given the culture that surrounds us at the moment.

Speaking of your discussion of Trump, I was surprised to see the “Get a Life” sketch surface here. I wrote about that sketch extensively in Textual Poachers some twenty plus years ago and it remains a touch point of our field. I wrote from a fan’s perspective, writing a critique of the ways that it perpetuated long-standing stereotypes that have been harmful to fans and discussing the ways that it was unfunny to many Star Trek fans I know because William Shatner was pretending to joke about hurtful things that he has said in earnest in other contexts.

I love thinking about Shatner as standing in for Trump here.  Shatner felt so trapped by his fans, even as he also knew he was totally dependent on them for support at that stage of his career, and if anything, through the years, he has become more ambivalent and more desperate, begging publicly to be included in future ST projects. I personally struggled for years with whether it was Shatner or Kirk I disliked, only to discover it was a bit of both when Chris Pine played the role in the new film series. If we could only find a Chris to recast as Donald Trump for the rest of his term, our time on this Earth for the next few years would be much more bearable. All of this is to say that Shatner, in that sketch, reinforced the fictional fan’s “plausibility structures,” but at the same time, he further undercut them with most of the real world Trekkers with whom I spoke at the time. We are not believers, in other words, but we play them on television.  

Shatner in that moment is a bit desperate to reconnect with his fans, to build back up his authentic link with them, even as what rang true was that the guy really and truly hated being out there on the fan convention circuit. To me, this suggests some elasticity but also some fragility in the structures of belief and structures of feeling you are discussing here. Your analysis of Trump and the televangelists makes sense to me from the outside, but I wonder to what degree the expressions of support of performative, that the gap between reality and the belief structure is expanding over time, and that at a certain point those relationships will be impossible to maintain. Fans eventually distanced themselves from Shatner. Will MAGA supporters also eventually distance themselves from Trump and if so, do we have a clue what kinds of things would be impossible for them to absorb into their “plausibility structures”?

Diane, I have yet to see Juliet, Naked, but your account of it here suggests that I urgently need to do so. Whether I can catch it in time to incorporate my response here is another question, but I will try. So, for now, I will focus on the underlying questions you ask about fandom and religion. “Fictional storytelling can supply narratives that elicit loyalty, inspiration and empowerment—much the same as some sacred texts do….his fandom provided meaning, purpose and identity to an otherwise undistinguished life…. the strength, resilience and passionate embrace that cultural products can stir in (some/many) consumers.” Each of these phrases resonate with me: they certainly describe the relationship I have with fandom. And Yet…

Fandom serves many of (though not all of) the functions religion and faith-based organizations perform for their believers, but is it enough to reduce religion to its functions? Or do we need to ask, say, about the difference between expressions of social and cultural identity or shared meaning or ethical values on the one hand and spiritual beliefs on the other? We are certainly not turning to fandom here for an expression of what happens to us after we die or whether there may be divine forces influencing the events of our lives. I can think of some cases -- for example, the way “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” gets sung at some gay funerals-- where fan symbols get deployed to provide comfort at moments of trauma and loss.

But, ultimately, I turn to fandom to address different kinds of questions in my life than religion has helped me to address at other moments in my life. There is always an element of the ludic about fandom: it is, as Michael Saler suggests, about the “as if,” a self-acknowledged fantasy realm which also seems different from the way I have experienced religion.

And that’s why I would stop short of fully embracing your question, “In an era of religious indifference and disaffiliation might (some) cultural products evoke deeper devotion (from some fans) than traditional religions dqo from (some/many) followers?” or your statement, “Henry’s fans are, pound for pound, more fanatical about their favorite films, TV shows and books than many church-goers are about their denominations.”  You left in enough weasel words here that it is hard to argue with the “somes” and “many” but keep in mind that Star Wars fans are not blowing themselves up to wipe out those infidels who love Star Trek, there is no mass genocide committed in the name of Harry Potter fandom, and none of us really think you are damned to eternal torment if you enjoy reading 50 Shades of Grey. There is something so fundamental about religious identity -- at least for the most hardcore believers -- that fandom is never going to match, nor should it. At the end of the day, we play as fans while religion is for keeps. But asking and working through these questions help us to understand more fully the similarities and differences between the two.

Sarah:  

Like Diane, I in no way dismiss the power and persistence of the legions of devout and the more traditionally scripturally and institutionally identified religious.  After many years of arguing for the “secularization thesis,” even the social scientists have given up the ghost and admitted that religion is not going away anytime soon, the world is not becoming more secular, and indeed if we examine religious phenomena globally, we find just the opposite.  Sociologist Peter Berger’s The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics put the nail in the coffin of secularization theory. [See also Rodney Stark’s “Secularization, R.I.P”] Sociologists and political theorists of religion now struggle to keep up with tracking the rapid growth of “desecularization.”  Having said that, cultural often moves simultaneously in contrapuntal directions, as our Pew Research polls in this country keep telling us.

Pixar is right when they proclaim their motto: “Story is King!” And the stories morally engaging and moving those of younger generations are not the stories of entrenched religious tomes but the stories of mediated popular culture, as told through music, television, film, streamed audio/video, digital games, and social media.  Many of the transmediated epics Henry points to in his work are the defining mythological narratives of our time. People do not simply encounter those defining stories—they participate in them and “get inside” them, often building communities of story along the way. Diane’s work with television similarly demonstrates that stories of mediated popular culture are increasingly prime sources for meaning making, life perspective, moral insight, and shared empathy and joy in contemporary lives.

When Henry resists comparisons between fandoms and religion because fandoms have been dismissed or denigrated as “false religions,” such a designation of “falseness” is not in keeping with the theorizing of religious studies or what religious studies scholars do. Theologians and clergy may dismiss and judge fandoms as “false religions,” but contemporary cultural theorists of religion take cognizance of the very real religious dimensions of these fandoms and do not judge them as “less than” or “second fiddle” to “real religions.” In fact, the very notion of “real” religion versus “fake” religion is highly contested.  Can one even make such a designation in the cultural study of religion? Designations of “real” and “fake” are the purview of theologians.

The very definition of “religion” in our field is a constantly moving target. What counts as “religion” is constituted by who does the defining, what power they have, what interests are at stake, and in what context, circumstances, and to what ends that definition is enacted. “Religion” is a modern constructed category and that construction is involved in an ongoing process of negotiation with power dynamics and vested interests. The work of Gary Laderman, who has written on music fandoms and the Grateful Dead, among other aspects of popular culture, David Chidester who has written on the religious dimensions of Tupperware, gang culture, and Coca-cola consumer culture, and Kathryn Lofton who has written about “Oprah religion,” all do not cast “fandoms” and fan devotions as “false religions.” Again, that’s not what we do. In my own work on religion and consumer culture, I compare the 2008 “Black Friday” stampede death of Long Island Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour, who was killed when shoppers broke down the store’s doors at five in the morning and trampled his body in order to make their way to discounted plasma television sets, to the religious stampede two months prior, when 224 pilgrims were trampled to death as 25,000 worshippers rushed the doors of the Chamunda Devi Temple in northern India during the 2008 Kumbh Mela festival. In my account of these two events, neither of these is “false” but each an authentic expression of a kind of extreme religious fervor.

Henry, you make the point that Harry Potter fans do not enact violence―strap explosives to themselves and blow themselves up―for what they believe.  In contrast, you observe that “religion is for keeps” and not playful the way fandom is. Yes, and no. To some, it is and to many others, it is definitely not. Is Unitarianism “for keeps” in the sense you mean?  A playful marketing meme for the Episcopal Church features the hip-looking biologist/oceanographer presiding Episcopal Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori standing next to ad copy that invites: “Don’t believe all that crap? Neither do we.”  Plenty of multireligious people find that one religion is not simply “for keeps” and so they identify with multiple practices, philosophies, narratives, traditions, and sacred symbol systems, often testing out and playing with a variety of customized combinations. Self-identified “Hinjews” or “Jewbus” are examples of this kind of exploration and experimentation.

The study of “lived religion” shows us that even when people remain self-identified with one religious identity, they still create and “mod” their religious worlds, adapting the tools and resources within them to meet new needs, “playing with religion” and trying out new possibilities. This is precisely one of the reasons Henry’s theorizing of “participatory culture” is so fascinating to the cultural study of religion because “prosuming” and remix is alive and well in religious contexts. Many religions in various forms are open to revisable data and creative interpretations, embracing the work of innovative figures. The impressive number of variations [feminist, gay, environmental, social justice, multi-faith, hip-hop, vegetarian, humanist, DYI, and even comic] of the Passover Haggadah are exemplary of this protean quality to religion and willingness to “play” with form and content. Check out also Denver-based House of All Sinners and Saints-founder Lutheran Pastor Nadia Boltz-Weber’s provocative online video shorts, in which she offers a unique spin to questions like “Why You Should Forgive Assholes”, as she also “updates” the Beatitudes to include things like, “Blessed are those without documentation,” “Blessed are the sex workers,” “Blessed are the closeted,” and “Blessed are the kind-hearted NFL players” [the ones taking a knee]. Rachel Wagner and other scholars of religion and digital gaming have studied the ways in which gamers “play with religion” in the course of digital gaming.  See, for instance, Heidi Campbell and Greg Grieve’s anthology, Playing with Religion in Digital Games; Craig Detweiler and Chris Hansen’s Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games With God; and Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs-Norris, eds., Toying With God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls. There is also a much broader literature on the study of “religion and play,” sacred clowns, holy fools, ritual play, comedy and playfulness, that deals with religion in its many and varied ludic dimensions. [See also Selva Raj and Corinne Dempsey’s anthology on religion and play in South Asian religions.]

On the other hand, what do we make of the violence of stalking fans who shoot celebrities, break into their homes, or attempt to do them other bodily harm? Fans for whom their fandom is not “ludic” but “is for keeps” in ways that are quite scary and destructive? What of Tori Amos’s famous autobiographical song, “Me and a Gun,” about a fan who gave her a lift home after a performance, only to trap her in his car and rape her at gunpoint? John Hinkley, Jr’s obsessive fixation with Jodie Foster that played out with him shooting then-President Ronald Reagan? These fans might be dismissed as “lone wolves,” who suffer from mental illness, but that courtesy is often not reciprocally extended to other violent “lone wolves” who suffer mental illness, who end up being portrayed as representative of entire ethnic and religious groups.  And one might argue that neo-Nazism, the KKK, and other white nationalist and militia groups are “fandoms” of a sort, involved in collective group violence and complete with their own sorts of “cosplay.” Sarah Banet-Weiser’s work points to online misogynist antifandoms that collectively visit violence upon women and terrorize them.

I would offer that, just as with “religion”―a spectrum of social activity that is contextually defined with particular social interests and investments at stake―both ludic and violent dimensions are present. I am appreciative that you bring up these points, though, because they echo many of the assumptions I hear made by media scholars when attempting to discuss religion in scholarly exchanges. Reciprocally, I likely made you and others cringe by bringing up the hackneyed SNL “Trekkies” sketch (Sorry!), even if I did substitute Trump for Shatner.  More reason, though, to have these conversations and to keep having them. Onward!

Diane:

Thank you Sarah! My fingers began itching when I read Henry’s distinction between religion and fandoms, but the argument I would have made was aptly presented in your last post. Since you elegantly covered the intellectual side of it, I would only add that, as Henry suggested initially, a lot of one’s notions about what religion is and is not stem from our personal stories. My personal experience of religion is “liberal” Judaism salted with forays into Unitarianism and Buddhism. On a gut level, I “know” religion as free, open, inclusive, non-dogmatic, political-progressive, playful, and similarly positive affirmations of human possibility. The supernatural? At 14 when I asked my rabbi about God, he said it was a force like magnetism. (I was too stunned to ask a follow-up question, and my subsequent trajectory can be construed as an attempt to decide whether or not I agree.)

As a journalist and as a scholar, I “know” intellectually that religions can incite believers to commit acts of atrocity--as well as to eschew cheeseburgers, shoes and, sadly, civility--but, that’s not my norm. Perhaps for Henry as well as other scholars who rush to say they are not “religious,” the opposite is true. Besides personal experiences, such as “evangelical PTSD,” the news media is largely responsible for this warped notion of religion. In the 1980s, when evangelicals, televangelists, and the Religious Right burst on the scene, legacy news organizations took note. The groups had taken credit for electing Ronald Reagan, they were new and different, and their leaders gave good sound bite. When they spoke to reporters, they claimed to represent “real” religion-- Bible-believing, God-fearing, clean-living Christianity uncorrupted by humanism, secularism, or an Ivy League education. (The problem actually goes back a lot further, see Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz’s wonderful book about the Prophet Matthias, https://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-Matthias-Salvation-19th-Century-America/dp/0199892490/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535392332&sr=1-1&keywords=matthias an early 19th century example of how the news media trivializes and sensationalizes religion. Or if you really want to dig down, many of the essays in my collection on American religion and the news media make similar points https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Religion-American-Handbooks-2012-09-06/dp/B01K0T3P5W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535392599&sr=1-1&keywords=OUP+American+news+media+and+religion. )

Repetition leads to normalization, and after a time many Americans likely did believe that true religion was conservative religion. The news media presented few alternatives, and when journalists did cover religious moderates it was usually to report that they were dying out or locked in internecine battles over gay ordination and same-sex marriage. Bottom line: For 30-plus years, we’ve lived in a media environment that portrays real, authentic religion as extremist, close-minded, and sometimes lethal. And, as I write this, I realize that many religion scholars, especially those seeking to engage broader publics, are in an uphill struggle to recover the word “religion.”

But religion is rarely if ever just about religion. It’s also about politics and culture. Sarah and Henry’s discussions of Trump bring this to mind: are his evangelical followers participants in a religion or fandom? Or has fandom elided into religiosity as writer Jeff Sharlet suggested in a 2016  New York Times Magazine piece https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/donald-trump-american-preacher.html. Pope Francis is the flip side of this dynamic; his religiosity seems to have slid into fandom. Unlike Trump, Francis does not engender deep, unquestioning loyalty and devotion. Maybe religion has become so politicized that its worldly stakes--Trump’s MAGA promises--are more inspiring than Francis’ concern with eternity.

Here’s the nub of Henry’s argument: Fandom serves many of (though not all of) the functions religion and faith-based organizations perform for their believers, but is it enough to reduce religion to its functions? Or do we need to ask, say, about the difference between expressions of social and cultural identity or shared meaning or ethical values on the one hand and spiritual beliefs on the other? We are certainly not turning to fandom here for an expression of what happens to us after we die or whether there may be divine forces influencing the events of our lives.

I don’t think I am reducing religion to its functions any more than I am doing that to fandom. Both work functionally and substantively, and the two are intertwined. Systems succeed at a functional level because they offer substance--motivating rationales, specifically meaning, purpose and identity. When systems don’t provide meaningful rationales, their functionality is useless. That’s why so many Americans are turned off by traditional religions, but seek out cultural products that speak to their ethical questions and spiritual concerns. Are the 70 percent of Americans who are not evangelicals worried about what happens when they die and whether divine forces are influencing their lives? Maybe. But I think many are more interested in how to live meaningfully here and now. That’s why mindfulness programs are popular, why some Beyonce’s fans are investigating Oshun, and why Westworld became a social media sensation.  

Why is it that I--and maybe Sarah--are willing to totally deconstruct the notion of religion, but Henry is insisting on some form of essentialism?

Henry: Short answer, Diane, is that we are pushing against some of my own articles of faith here. I am, for the moment, agnostic on the prospect of “totally deconstructing the notion of religion”; I am more open to this possibility than when we began but you have not yet won a convert. You guys have had more time to work through the conceptual shifts you are proposing than I have. It’s core to your field and has been historically peripheral to mine.  For me, the distinction between fandom and religion does necessary work. But I am learning so much by trying to work through these issues together, and it is a good preview of what I hope the series as a whole will accomplish. We have much to learn from each other around shared concepts, such as meaning, affiliation, affect, aspiration, participation, fellowship, etc., which do not necessarily require us to resolve the definition of religion and its relationship to fandom.

Your responses to my suggestion that religion is more apt to lead to violence than fandom seem fair enough. I would distinguish between individual pathologies of specific fan stalkers and whole religious cultures that have turned to violence in the name of their faith. But, you are right to note that fandom does have its zealots too. And if we are talking about playing for keeps, we need to keep in mind the phenomenon that I most often see described as “toxic fandom” -- that is, the gender and culture wars within fandom which in extreme cases are resulting in threats of rape and other forms of harassment. Here, we are looking at collective forms of zealotry within fandom, though we still have much work to do to sort out myths from realities where some of this online behavior is concerned.

I certainly did not mean to imply that I saw religion as an exclusively conservative force, though I agree that is a common stereotype. This is why I referenced my own experiences with progressive forms of the Southern Baptist tradition. My embrace of reader-response theory is probably a direct outgrowth of the concept of the “fellowship of the believer.” I could also have noted how important black ministers from the civil rights movement were in shaping my political commitments growing up in the segregated South. And I have a great respect for the role faith played in my family, which tended to embrace a New Testament theology based on loving embrace rather than an Old Testament one based in fire and brimstone. My mother often sang “Jesus Loves Me” from the church choir. We might challenge some of its formulations of race, but the core idea that “all the little children of the world”  are “precious in His sight” was deeply felt and potentially progressive in the segregated context we were living. There was no hate in her religion, though her Pastor high-jacked her funeral for a “moral majority” style message. My relations to all of this is conflicted: I value the role of faith in our culture, but perhaps, like an immigrant who remains loosely connected to a diaspora, there’s some lag time in my mental image of the mother country from which I sprang. Like other immigrants, there are reasons why I felt I had to leave, but also much love and respect for my cultural roots and some nostalgia for what it was like to grow up in such a community.

I am trying to ask questions that I think other media and cultural studies people might need answered as we prepare the ground for the larger conversation series. I get the value of religious studies having the broadest possible definition of religion to describe the contemporary search for spirituality. But you are still operating in the context of a field of religious studies, which means there still must be some definition (however expansive) of what counts as religion and what doesn’t. I am trying to better understand where you draw those lines. I am prepared to accept that there are blurry boundaries here (your Beyonce example illustrates this) but are you really arguing that all culture is religion and vice-versa?

Sarah: Here is the video that I show my “Theories of Religion” undergraduate class. It is really pretty good!  

Henry: Yes, that is helpful in understanding the range of meanings religion might have in your field, and clarifying why it is so hard to nail down this concept even for the purposes of discussion. I suspect we are not the only cluster of conversants who are going to stumble around this issue.

Diane: Sarah, that is a great video! Thanks. Henry, will be working on conversion scenarios.I am curious to see if other conversations repeat our concerns.

Sarah McFarland Taylor is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University. She is the award-winning author of Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology(Harvard, 2008) and currently a candidate for an advanced degree in Media History, Philosophy, and Criticism from the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement. Her latest book, Ecopiety: Media, Green Virtue, and the Storied Earth, is forthcoming from NYU Press in 2019. 

Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. A national authority on religion and the media, her expertise includes religion, politics and the news media as well as religion and the entertainment media. A journalist and a scholar, Winston’s current research interests are media coverage of Islam, religion and new media, and the place of religion in American identity. She is the author of Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army(Harvard, 1999), Faith in the Market: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture (Rutgers, 2003) and Small Screen, Picture: Lived Religion and Television (Baylor, 2009). 

Popular Religion and Participatory Culture Conversation Series: Henry Jenkins, Sarah McFarland Taylor and Diane Winston (Part One)

Henry Jenkins:

A few years back, my USC colleague Diane Winston invited me to participate in a panel at a religious studies conference which was intended to address links between my work on participatory culture and the study of popular religion. My first response was that I had not consciously made any contributions in this space. This is not quite true since I do specifically address the Christian discernment movement in Convergence Culture, but only for a few pages. But I discovered that there were many young scholars working in the study of popular religion who were drawing on conceptual models developed in cultural studies -- and in particular, in fandom studies and transmedia studies -- and expanding them in exciting new directions. Yet, this exchange is largely one-directional: many in fandom studies, say, are apt to find themselves in the same position I was, not realizing what we might learn by engaging more actively with this work. And that’s why I decided to work with Diane Winston and Sarah McFarland Taylor to bring together this extended conversation series for my blog.  

As I do so, I need to perhaps modify some of my past statements about the relationship between fandom and religion.  I can’t tell you how many times through the years reporters and students have asked me about whether fandom doesn’t just function as a religion for a more secular time. I have remained skeptical. For one thing, as I discussed in Textual Poachers, the root word for fan dates back to the ancient world -- “worshippers of the Fain” -- with fanatics understood as engaged in practices of false worship and more broadly, excessive zeal. Both of those associations carry dangers for thinking about fans because of the ways popular stereotypes see fans as “taking things too far” and being unable to separate fantasy from reality.

Yes, we can draw some comparisons to religion in terms of bringing relatively diverse groups of people together around shared ethical values, shared narratives, and shared practices (rituals?) but there are any number of other institutions in a well functioning society which serve these same functions (labor unions or political parties come to mind) without bringing with them associations with faith or worship.  Certainly we see churches embrace fandom as a means of outreach and fellowship, especially targeting younger congregants. And we can look at the success of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, which uses interpretive tools from theology to re-examine J.K. Rowling’s fantasy texts as illustrating points of contact between the two.

Some of my resistance has to do with my own experience of religion. I was raised a Southern Baptist, the son and grandson of Baptist deacons, and so my template for thinking about religion was shaped by Christian fundamentalism. In some ways, being a Baptist was an ideal entry point to thinking about fandom, since in theory, the “believer” has a direct relationship with God rather than communicating through a church hierarchy and the “believer” is free to interpret the Bible on their own terms based on that communication, much as fans assert their own rights to play around with popular texts in whatever way they feel inspired. As a youth growing up in Georgia, I was particularly inspired by Clarence Jordan, the white minister who formed a multiracial, progressive community, Koinonia Farms, in rural Georgia in the 1940s, wrote The Cottonpatch Gospels, and helped to establish Habitat for Humanity. As I matured, I found my religious home at Northside Baptist Church, which also counted Jimmy Carter -- then, a post-president -- as a member.

But, along the way, I lived through a purge of progressive Baptists in the 1970s and 1980s as the far right took over the denominational organizations and seminaries and pushed out those who did not follow the “moral majority” party line. In those years, I met plenty of “one true wayers” --  people for whom there was only one possible interpretation and that was the most literal-minded (and humor-less) one possible. People I cared about, people who represented the things I believed in, were denounced and driven from my parents’ church. In the end, I lost faith.

And I will admit that this trauma has colored how I have thought about the religion analogy for fandom: there are certainly “one true way” types in fandom but its norms encourage much more freedom and openness; fans’ relationship to texts are not grounded in faith -- at least not in the literal-minded ways that fundamentalist are; religions are exclusive (with some notable exceptions) but I have always stressed the “nomadic” or “promiscuous” nature of fans who maintain affinities with multiple texts at the same time and many fans are devotely religious and understand that faith as very different from what they feel towards their fan objects.

Yet, what I learned in my discussions with Taylor, Nelson and others, was that the study of popular religion has developed more nuanced tools for talking about issues of belief, affinity, affect, and loyalty as they relate to faith-based communities and their practices. They are less interested in seeing fandom as a religion than they are in seeing how religion might be understood in the contemporary era as more like fandom. This is especially true as it relates to a more secularized world where many create syncretic religions, mixing and matching practices from different spiritual traditions, redefining them as resources through which to make sense of their own spiritual needs and their own identities, where many practice religion without formal links to particular religious institutions, and where religion gets fused with other ways of expressing their identities and social affiliations. It may be that we need a similar set of conceptual models to think about popular religion and fandom/participatory culture at the current moment, even if older models of religion may distort our understanding of fandom. I still have much to learn from this research, but I have found my own thinking starting to evolve in response to my first encounters.

Beyond this, the study of popular religion has been willing to take seriously and to more intimately engage with conservative groups than the Cultural Studies tradition has been able or willing to do.  The complaint is often that we assume that audiences or subcultures are progressive and yet, clearly, many Americans and around the world are conservative in their core beliefs and values. Since the election, my research team has been conducting workshops in red states (such as Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky), trying to get a better sense of where America is at today. And as we do this work, I find myself wanting to know more about how religion in these contexts helps to shape the way people think about democratic participation and social change. Our research group has at the same time done work in Mosques with a case study of the political lives of American Muslims a central dimension of our collective book, By Any Media Necessary. Here, again, we need to develop a better understanding of the ways religion both constrains and enables youth to find their voice in the contemporary struggles against Islamophobia.  And beyond all of this, I have been intrigued by what scholars of popular religion have shown us about progressive religious groups, whether the sanctuary movement or the Christian conservation movement, or going back further, the role of the black church in civil rights struggles across the 20th century. For all of those reasons, and many more, those of us in cultural studies need to develop a deeper understanding of contemporary research on faith-based communities and their cultural practices.

In this series, we have tried to pair participants who are working on related topics, looking for common ground, as well as disciplinary differences, and we have created a structure which allows participants to not only showcase their work but also ask each other questions and hammer out differences. I can’t wait to see what emerges here.

Sarah McFarland Taylor:

First, I want to thank you for organizing this “matchmaking” project between Religious Studies and Media Studies and inviting me to participate. Just to provide a bit of background for what brings me to this discussion, I should mention that encountering Henry’s work on media and popular culture precipitated a major shift in me as a religion scholar. When I first read Henry’s book Convergence Culture, I was struck at how much productive correspondence there was between Henry’s discussion of world building, participatory culture, transmedia storytelling, affinity spaces for learning, spreadability, and the various ways we discuss similar dynamics in the cultural study of religion. For instance, we study the mechanisms of worldview formation, cosmologies and cosmogonies, the making, unmaking, and remaking of religious worlds, the telling of religious narratives across art, music, material culture, literature, bodies, costuming and dress, technology, the dynamics of “spreadability” in evangelizing those religious narratives within the “spiritual marketplace,” patterns of culture, and so forth. After reading Henry’s work, I began to think of religions as constituting in many ways “media franchises” that engage in the telling of religious narratives across multiple platforms, not simply repeating the narrative but extending it through the use of varied mediums, strategically adding dimensions to it to make it more “spreadable” and to engender “fan” following and participation in the story. I now assign Henry’s work in my graduate-level contemporary theories of religion seminar, along with the work of core sociologists, anthropologists, and other cultural theorists that are useful tools for us when examining phenomena associated with religion. It was also in reading Henry’s work that it “clicked” for me that if you are not studying media, you are not studying religion. The converse is not true, but religion is always historically entangled with media, co-constituted with media, expressed through media, in many cases drives the development of media innovation and technology, and religion is always a media system. We might also think of some religions as “media ecologies.” A great example of this is the LDS church, which is very much its own media ecology. It was this realization about the integral relationship between religion and media, induced by Henry’s work, that set me on a course to return to graduate school in mid-career for an additional advanced degree in media studies.  It also prompted me to invite Henry to a special session on his work at the American Academy of Religion in San Diego to discuss with a wider audience of religion scholars how his theories of media and participatory culture might inform our thinking about the cultural study of religion. This continues as an open question, so it is a great pleasure to continue the conversation in this setting and format.

On the specific theme of “fandom” taken up by Henry’s current blog series, I want to begin with the figure of William Shatner as a way into talking about Trump fandom. In the Trump era, when pundits shake their heads daily and puzzle about Trump’s continued devoted evangelical Christian following in the wake of so many moral transgressions committed both during his campaign and his presidency, I often think of the classic “Trekkies” [S12, E8, 1986] sketch from Saturday Night Live. As readers may or may not recall, the sketch features the actor William Shatner, who plays the lead role of Captain Kirk in the science fiction television series, Star Trek. Shatner has been contracted to speak at a Star Trek fan convention, and when he is repeatedly barraged with highly specific questions from fans about obsessive trivia from series episodes, he finally loses it and shouts at them to “Get a Life!” Shatner is insulting and singles out one Trekkie, demanding to know if he has ever kissed a girl [he hasn’t]. Even though they have raised him up to the stature he now enjoys and have ensured his livelihood, he demeans and mocks everything the fans hold dear―all the things they have organized their lives around―in what appears to be an unforgivable offense. After a strict talking to from the conference manager about the terms of his contract and compensation, Shatner quickly backpedals and explains to the fans that actually he did not mean anything of what he just said―he was merely recreating the “evil Kirk” from “The Enemy Within” [Season 1, episode 5]. The fans nod enthusiastically as if they knew it all along and it all makes sense. In the study of religion, borrowing from sociologist Peter Berger, we would say that Shatner has effectively reinforced the believers’ “plausibility structures.”  That is, even when confronted with directly contrary data, they are able to maintain their worldview and still make it make sense. Here is one such area of porousness and family resemblances between fandoms and the followings of religious leaders. To be clear, SNL’s sketch is of course poking fun, and I want to take cognizance of Henry’s point that too often fans are portrayed as failing to discern reality from fiction. But the Shatner sketch does provide a useful image from which we might examine contemporary devotional behavior among publics toward idolized figures of political and religious authority no matter what “contrary data” might be presented.

This past year, I attended a fascinating conference on media, politics, and populism at Northwestern University, where I teach. A smart, insightful presentation was delivered on Donald Trump and his populist following, but nowhere was religion mentioned when discussing his seemingly “Teflon” appeal to his devoted base. This conspicuous absence of religion in the discussion of politics and media is not an unusual lacuna. Religion and media scholar Stewart Hoover, who co-founded the International Society for the Study of Media, Religion, and Culture, tells a great story about attending sessions on the extremist group ISIS at both the International Communication Association (ICA) and at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in the same year. When discussing ISIS, the ICA scholars never once mentioned religion. In turn, the AAR scholars discussed ISIS and never once mentioned media. Back at the Northwestern conference, as the only religion scholar in the room, I raised my hand during discussion and pointed out what a potent role Trump’s evangelical aesthetics, whether inadvertent or effected, play in cultivating and solidifying his devoted following. Some months after the Northwestern conference, I gave a presentation at ICA on the visual rhetoric of Trump’s hair and demonstrated, accompanied by numerous visual examples, how Trump’s hair “reads” within evangelical aesthetics as faith healer/mega-preacher/televangelist hair. His extemporaneous speaking style, his emotive gestures and performativity, his unbuttoned overplus of emotion, including anger, all evoke a tremendous familiarity and recognizability to conservative evangelicals. Even the sex scandals, the mistresses, the porn stars, the tax problems, the lawsuits, the fraud charges, the federal investigation of misconduct, are all reminiscent of countless high-profile mega-preacher televangelists who have gone to jail and yet still maintain a loyal following from the faithful. Convicted felon Rev. James “Jim” Bakker (formerly of the Jim and Tammy Bakker TV preaching duo), who is one of the preachers currently involved in promoting the online “POTUS Shield” digital prayer project [http://www.potusshield.org/] to protect Donald Trump against “spiritual warfare” is a prime example.  Bakker faced public scandal for having paid hush money to his secretary Jessica Hahn to keep her quiet about his allegedly raping her and was also convicted on federal fraud charges in relation to donation solicitation for his media ministry and in relation to investments in his “Heritage USA” evangelical theme park. Now out of jail, Bakker is back on television, and his devoted flock continue to adore him, seek out his religious authority, and send him more money. Where is the “plausibility structure” in this story that makes Bakker a hero even after his moral failings, conviction, and jail time? The prosecution of Bakker and his imprisonment merely testify to his followers of the efficacy of his preaching and ministry.  Like Trump, Bakker would not have “attracted” investigation or prosecution/persecution if he were not effective in riling “the Enemy” [Satan] and thus attracting “spiritual warfare” to himself by very virtue of his success in doing God’s work. The more Mueller investigates and tightens the noose around Trump’s neck, the more it provides testimony to the faithful of the President’s efficacy in carrying out God’s plan. Were the President not being used as an effective instrument of God, he would simply remain under the radar and not elicit Satan’s attacks.  Of course not all evangelicals subscribe to belief in spiritual warfare, but as I documented in my ICA presentation, it has become more mainstreamed among evangelicals than one might think. A bumper crop of self-help, prayer books, novels, online videos, radio and television preaching, and the inclusion of spiritual warfare in evangelical popular culture narratives has taken what was previously a fairly marginal belief and given it much more centrality and acceptance.

Here is where I also have a related theory about the nature and persistence of Trump’s fandom among his evangelical base that it would be useful to “bounce off” some media theorists. Since reading about “predictive saccades” in one of my graduate media seminars, I cannot shake the sense that the phenomenon of “saccades” might be playing an important part in how Trump’s religious fans view him. French author Anais Nin is often quoted as saying “We see things not as they are; we see them as we are,” but the actual mechanics of perception are considerably more complicated.  When our eyes look at something, we do so selectively, but also by filling in any gaps in visual input. As E.H. Gombrich explains in Art and Illusion, “Visual perception is not a passive recording of stimulus material but a concern of the mind . . . Perception involves problem solving” (1960:172). Rapid movements of our eyes between different points of fixation, which are called “saccades,” send a jumpy input of images to our brains, often interspersed by seconds of blur from movement or darkness caused by blinks. To correct for these disruptions, our brain synthesizes, fills in, and smooths these images at a rate of one twentieth of a second. This is the same rate we use for “vision persistence,” the process we use to fill in the gaps between the frames of a film so that we see a continuous story without interruption and without actually perceiving the frames. Social and cultural theorists may talk about reality as a “social construction” (P. Berger and Luckman 1966), but Arthur Asa Berger points out that in a very literal physiological sense, “we have to construct the world we see” (A. Berger 2015: 182-183).  

So, when devout conservative evangelicals hear about Trump’s affairs with porn stars and paying these women hush money, yes, this may well be read as simply evidence of “spiritual warfare” against a leader, triggered by his actually making “headway” doing God’s work. But what are his evangelicals fans also “filling in” in order to “solve the problem” that is Trump and make it no problem at all? It occurs to me that those schooled in literalistic readings of religious texts may also be concomitantly highly practiced in inserting what is needed to maintain continuous “vision persistence” when dealing with inconsistencies in text, much in the way gaps are “filled in” to account for the moral failings of charismatic religious leaders. In the SNL “Trekkies” sketch, the fans quickly fill in missing data that would make Shatner’s offensive rant make sense, and they are thus able to create a continuous narrative that satisfies a desire for cohesion. Are we seeing a similar process taking place with the President?

The function of “predictive saccades” in our visual perception actually helps us to anticipate the movements and variations of different objects so that our eyes move in a spatially predictive manner, depending on what we think or expect we’ll see.  Looking at the persistence and loyalty of Trump’s evangelical fanbase, makes me wonder if a similar kind of “predictive saccades” dynamic is at work in which it simply does not matter what Trump does or says.  He visually “reads” as tribal, as familiar, as “one of ours,” and as a salvific tool of God, to his fanbase, and then the gaps or missing frames are merely filled in. Media pundits may be perplexed at why Christians continue passionately to support such a seemingly un-Christian figure, but in fact, he fits quite neatly into the “predictive saccades” and mechanisms of his evangelical fandom’s “vision persistence”―like a lock and key mechanism.  It would be very interesting, though, to get a fandom studies perspective on this theory.

Diane Winston:

After seeing Juliet, Naked, an adaptation of Nick Hornsby’s 2009 novel, I wanted to talk about it with Henry Jenkins, my colleague at USC. Duncan, one of the film’s main characters, is a media studies professor at a small English university. Duncan enjoys lecturing on The Wire and other contemporary films and television series, but his true passion is Tucker Crowe, an American alt-rocker, who mysteriously disappeared after walking out in the middle of a gig 25 years earlier.

Duncan is the quintessential, obsessive fan. On the Tucker Crowe website he created, he live streams the latest “news” of Tucker’s whereabouts, updates on new caches of old material, and speculation about his idol’s love life. Duncan visits the site from his man-cave, a basement shrine bursting with Tucker Crowe posters and memorabilia. In touch with a small community of like-minded fans, Duncan trades daily emails on the missing singer-songwriter, reverentially re-visiting a musical catalogue that hasn’t changed in more than two decades.

A post-modern academic, Duncan would never, ever call himself a religious man. But his fandom—centered on a god-like figure who is everpresent in his absence—has many earmarks of a religion: rituals, reverence, community and authority figures (Duncan himself). The group even believes in a Second Coming, which seems imminent when Duncan receives a bootleg recording of acoustic demos for Juliet, Crowe’s seminal album.

Duncan is more Gen X than millennial, but the shift from mainstream religious affiliation to spiritual seeking in cultural streams has affected more than just today’s much-hyped, coming of age generation. Traditional religions no longer work for many worldwide and while I am not writing off billions of believers, I do wonder how those who left churches, temples, synagogues and mosques find the wonder, hope and joy to get out of bed every morning. (I am not suggesting that traditional religions are the only site of meaning, purpose and identity, but that has been their stock in trade for millennia.) In my own work on television and religion/spiritualty/ethics https://www.amazon.com/Small-Screen-Big-Picture-Television/dp/1602581851/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535056030&sr=1-1&keywords=diane+winston, I have come to appreciate how fictional storytelling can supply narratives that elicit loyalty, inspiration and empowerment—much the same as some sacred texts do. And watching Duncan, I was struck by how his fandom provided meaning, purpose and identity to an otherwise undistinguished life.

This raises a key question: In an era of religious indifference and disaffiliation might (some) cultural products evoke deeper devotion (from some fans) than traditional religions do from (some/many) followers? I haven't met many church-goers who build shrines in their homes, much less visit them daily to commune with their “god” and fellow believers. Yes, Duncan is a fictional character, but in an era of cosplay, comi-cons, podcasts and fan-fiction, would he be considered  an atypical fan? Haven't Trekkies (Star Trek), Dumbledore’s Army (Harry Potter) and Anonymous (inspired by V for Vendetta) demonstrated the strength, resilience and passionate embrace that cultural products can stir in (some/many) consumers?

That passionate embrace ignites my curiosity. What induces people to orient their lives around a set of beliefs? When I wrote about the Salvation Army https://www.amazon.com/Red-Hot-Righteous-Religion-Salvation-2000-10-02/dp/B01K2QFHZO/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535056267&sr=1-10, I wondered at the young women who gave up family, security and respectability to become soldiers for God.  Even if this made sense for some, given women’s limited options and opportunities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, why would a woman today want to wear an Army uniform, live in Army housing and subscribe to the all-encompassing Army rules and regulations? Orthodoxy, that is, a strict adherence to creeds, boggles and, yes, intrigues this mostly secular mind of mine.

Unlike Henry, I have no personal experience of deep religious commitment. Secular Jews, my parents enjoyed a Christmas tree until I asked them to please stop. I went to Brandeis, not much of a stretch after growing up on Manhattan’s West Side, and fell in with zealous Catholics. Their faith fascinated me as did the avid Zionism of classmates who moved to Israel and the “crazy wisdom” of those who dropped out to follow Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. My personal engagement with religion is nine-tenths intellectual curiosity and 10 percent Shabbat dinners, High Holiday services and bouts of meditation. The deep commitments of the Catholics, Jews and Buddhists I knew in college is nothing like the idiosyncratic attachment that holds me (and many others) to nominal attachments with our birth faiths. To my mostly-secular eyes, those deep commitments seem akin to fanaticism, and I would argue that, etymologically-speaking,  true believers are the real fans.

I’ve come full circle here so will put in a bid for what interests me most in the conversation that Henry, Sarah and I have proposed. Scholars of religion are ever more conflicted about exactly what it is we study. Some of us are interested in traditional religions; others curious about new religious movements, and still others wondering about the religiosity of cultural products. “How do you define religion for your students?” I asked a colleague who is a philosopher of religion. Her answer, “Personal conviction.” If you can accept that, then the line between our disciplines grows ever more blurred and thinking together about shared terms and overlapping ideas is useful. I would argue that Henry’s fans are, pound for pound, more fanatical about their favorite films, TV shows and books than many church-goers are about their denominations.

Toward the end of Juliet, Naked, Duncan has dinner with Tucker Crowe. Crowe has emerged from his self- imposed isolation and become friends with Annie, Duncan’s ex-girlfriend, who had disliked Crowe’s music almost as much as she resented Duncan’s obsession with the faded rock star. During the meal, Crowe and Duncan argue about the meaning of Crowe’s music. Crowe says that since he wrote the songs, he is the authority on them, but Duncan says once the songs are public, their interpretation belongs to the fans. The music has a life of its own, which exceeds the creator’s grasp. It’s not unlike an updated version of the argument at the heart of “The Grand Inquisitor,” Dostoevsky’s tale of the Church that no longer recognizes the teachings of the real Jesus.

While the credits roll at the movie’s end, Duncan once again is live streaming on the Crowe website. Tucker Crowe has just released a new album, updating the canon after all this time. But Duncan is having none of it. Instead of Crowe’s familiar laments about heartbreak and betrayal, the new songs are happy paeans to childhood, animals and grown-up relationships—including his with Annie. Duncan rails about the new material, but his faith is unshaken. His Tucker Crowe lives. Fandom, like so many other religions, has a life of its own.

Sarah McFarland Taylor is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University. She is the award-winning author of Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology(Harvard, 2008) and currently a candidate for an advanced degree in Media History, Philosophy, and Criticism from the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement. Her latest book, Ecopiety: Media, Green Virtue, and the Storied Earth, is forthcoming from NYU Press in 2019. 

Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. A national authority on religion and the media, her expertise includes religion, politics and the news media as well as religion and the entertainment media. A journalist and a scholar, Winston’s current research interests are media coverage of Islam, religion and new media, and the place of religion in American identity. She is the author of Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army(Harvard, 1999), Faith in the Market: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture (Rutgers, 2003) and Small Screen, Picture: Lived Religion and Television (Baylor, 2009). 

Coming Soon: Diane Winston will be our guest on this week's episode of How Do You Like It So Far? discussing her recent book on religion and reality television.

How Do You Like It So Far? (Season Two): Science Fiction as a Mode of Thought

Our podcast returns after its summer hiatus with an episode focused on science fiction as a way of understanding and reimagining the world. We reassembled a panel of science fiction scholars fresh from the World Science Fiction Convention (in San Jose) and eager to dig deeper into the history of the genre, its social and political impact, and in particular, the forms of thought which were enabled and sustained by the emergence of speculative fiction. Our guests are: Michael Saler, author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality; Sherryl Vint, author of Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed; and Minsoo Kang, author of Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. 

Cheryl mentions the film General Motors produced for the 1939 World's Fair.

Our podcast returns after its summer hiatus with an episode focused on science fiction as a way of understanding and reimagining the world. We reassembled a panel of science fiction scholars fresh from the World Science Fiction Convention (in San Jose) and eager to dig deeper into the history of the genre, its social and political impact, and in particular, the forms of thought which were enabled and sustained by the emergence of speculative fiction.