Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation

Notes

353 Notes Introduction 1. I use the term “America” to refer to the United States of America, although I realize that many other residents of the “Americas” rightly call themselves Americans as well. 2. James W. Carey, Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 3. Ibid. 4. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); James W. Carey and John J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” in Communication As Culture, 113–41. 5. Carey and Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” 113–41. 6. Two books that supposedly revealed the truth about the entertainment industry in the United States were Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell, 1975); and Anger, Hollywood Babylon II (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984). 7. “Resistance Is Futile,” Business 2.0 (January 1999): 21. 8. Ray Kurzweil, “Pattern Recognition,” interview by Daniel P. Dern, Computerworld (18 January 1999): 71. 9. Carey, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution.” 10. Morris Janowitz, preface to Introduction to the Science of Sociology, by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), xii. 11. Gregor Goethals, TV Ritual: Worship at the Video Altar (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981). 12. Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). 13. Martin E. Marty, “Denominations near the Century’s End,” Stob Lectures of Calvin College and Seminary (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Calvin College and Seminary, 1991). Chapter 1 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 280. 2. Ibid., 275, 278. 3. Ibid, 355. 4. James Carey, “‘A Republic, If You Can Keep It’: Liberty and Public Life in the Age of Glasnost,” in James Carey: A Critical Reader, ed. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 216, 217. 5. The Chicago School saw communication as the glue of society, the means of transforming what Dewey called the “Great Community” into the “Great Society.” John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927); see also Jean B. Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970). As Park put it, communication is, “if not identical with, at least indispensable to, the cultural process.” Wrote Park, “Family group or labor organization , every form of society except the most transient has a life-history and a tradition. It is by communication that this tradition is transmitted . . . . Thus the function of communication seems to be to maintain the unity and integrity of the social group in its two dimensions— space and time.” “Communication As Culture,” in Robert E. Park: The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays, ed. Henry Elsner Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 101, 102. Throughout this chapter and the rest of the book I address the ways that Americans used the media to communicate in space and time their conversations about and for religion. 6. Martin J. Medhurst and Thomas W. Benson, Rhetorical Dimensions in Media: A Critical Casebook (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1984), ix–xxiii. 7. Tocqueville, Democracy, 177, 176, 172. 8. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 27. 9. As I suggest in Chapter 2, Christian broadcasters and “secular” broadcasters in America are two sides of the same rhetoric of technological hope, what Carey calls the “mythos of the electronic sublime.” See James W. Carey, Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). The term “consumption community” 354 Notes to Chapter One is from Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random house, 1973), 89–90. 10. For brief summaries of evangelical and mainline approaches to broadcasting, see Quentin J. Schultze, “Keeping the Faith: American Evangelicals and the Media,” in American Evangelicals and the Mass Media, ed. Quentin J. Schultze (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan/ Academie, 1990), 23–46; Dennis N. Voskuil, “Reaching Out: Mainline Protestantism and the Media,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72–92; and William F. Fore, “A Short History of Religious Broadcasting,” in Religious Television Programs, ed...