Religion and Media in America by Anthony Hatcher (review)
- Religion and Media in America by Anthony Hatcher
From the fight over the addition of God to the Pledge of Allegiance to religious satire on late night television, Anthony Hatcher argues in Religion and Media in America that American media, popular culture, and Christianity are inextricably linked by their history, development, and mutual impact on one another. While the book's title and introduction promise a history and examination of the deep ties between American media and religion, the book discusses a range of cultural artifacts and focuses solely on Christianity.
Hatcher reviews the relationship between Christianity and American culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in three sections: Civil Religion, Religion and Entertainment, and Sacred and Profane Entertainment. Each of the six chapters tackles a "media" artifact—a term Hatcher broadly applies to a range of objects, events, organizations, and ideologies—through a mix of case studies, ethnographic narratives, historical narratives, and textual analysis.
The introductory chapter serves as an annotated bibliography for existing literature on religious popular culture and provides definitions of key terms that Hatcher builds on in the rest of the book: religion, evangelists, spirituality, and popular culture. Hatcher's key intervention is the choice to define popular culture not as media, or cultural expressions, that are popular in the current moment, but as pieces of culture that represent the populace.
The first two chapters, under the section Civil Religion, cover two religious issues turned political debates: the Moral Monday protests during the summer of 2013 and the introduction of the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
The next section, Religion and Entertainment, explores the world of entertainment made by Christians, often evangelicals, for a wider, non-Christian audience with the hopes of conversion through cinema. The third chapter is an ethnographic study of the Actors, Models, and Talent for Christ (AMTC). After an in-depth plot summary and thematic analysis of the 2011 movie The Way, the fourth chapter offers some connections between the film's successful marketing as a "spiritual," rather than "religious," story and the larger efforts by Christian filmmakers to reach non-Christian viewers through thinly veiled moral lessons.
The final section, Sacred and Profane Media, includes two seemingly unrelated chapters. Chapter Five covers the continual repackaging, marketing, and commodification of the Bible as an avenue to discuss the copyright and business practices of the Christian publishing industry. The final chapter analyzes the comedic satire of Christianity by two print magazines, The Wittenburg Door and Ship of Fools, and two late-night comedy-news shows, The Colbert Report and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
All six chapters contain a commanding narrative supported by a clear understanding of the history, background, and impact of all the cultural artifacts discussed. The use of archival material, field notes, interviews, cinema analysis, existing literature, and use of non-traditional source material creates well researched chapters with surprising findings. However, the book does not deliver on its promise of analyzing (Christian) media in America until the [End Page 73] conclusion. Along with a summary of all the chapters, Hatcher links a specific medium to each chapter and provides a more traditional analysis of how the interplay of Christian and non-Christian media affected American history, and vise-versa. Unfortunately, Religion and Media in America is not greater than the sum of its chapters. Hatcher acknowledges in the conclusion that the chapters "may appear unrelated at first" but "all present narratives of religious and spiritual negotiations with culture" (221). While accurate, that description brushes aside the disconnect between the analysis promised in the book's title and introduction and the actual content.
The book remains useful for a range of scholars and research topics. The introduction is a strong historiography of the religious popular culture field and annotated bibliography of current research especially regarding digital religion. The introduction also synthesizes the definitions of key terms by prominent scholars, which is a useful reference guide. Hatcher's series of essays are worth reading as a reference source, the...
