Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion, and Celebrity Culture

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Media and popular culture make up one of the fastest-growing areas in the study of religion. An entire range of studies focuses on religion and how it is portrayed, and changed, by the media. These include work examining religion and film, religion and advertising, religion and TV, and religion and popular music.1 Individual TV shows, rock bands, and movies have been mined for their “theology,” and the lived experiences of fans have been explored to see how and to what extent they construct religious meaning from popular culture. What all of this work has in common is the sense that the boundaries between popular culture and religion are blurring. As we begin to see the extent to which popular culture operates in religious ways and carries religious meanings, there is a growing perception that previous distinctions between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, are collapsing into one another. The investigation of celebrity culture forms a part of this ongoing project on the changing nature of religion in popular culture. Celebrity is ubiquitous; it has come to dominate media discourses in every field of life, from sports and politics to the arts and the environment . Celebrity-focused gossip magazines and Web sites have mushroomed , serious newspapers now have celebrity columns, and soap opera plots are given front-page headlines in the tabloid press. Celebrity is not 2 Gods Behaving Badly simply an aspect of popular culture—celebrity is part of popular culture ’s DNA. Even if we have very little interest in celebrities, we seem to know about them. In fact, we don’t just know about celebrities—we may well have somehow formed opinions about them. A great deal of celebrity gossip will pass us by, but we might still have a view to share about Bono, Britney, Demi, Michael, or Brad. Celebrity culture tempts us off the sidelines. It actively invites us to form a view and make a judgment . Some might say that celebrity culture is a kind of virus infecting all cultural life. Yet irritation with the pointlessness of celebrities is in many ways a key element in celebrity culture. On Celebrity religiOn: A WOrd tO its Cultured despisers The chattering classes like to affect an indifference to celebrity. They do not watch reality TV, and they would never buy a gossip rag. Most are agreed that the whole celebrity thing is froth, ephemeral, the antithesis of all things of value. In the main, this approach to celebrity is a thinly veiled version of an elitist view of culture. The religious version of this merges taste with some kind of ecclesial preference. Here celebrity culture is seen as representing the spiritual collapse of contemporary society, proof that for the large part we are living in an empty and vacuous society. The renewed interest in religion and popular culture has gone a long way toward redressing some of these assumptions. Yet while academics in the field of religion and theology have started to work with some elements of popular culture, celebrity can still trigger some version of the elitist view of popular culture. As I have hinted, actually this is part of the game. Celebrity culture thrives on the fact that we take a view and we form a judgment. It wants us to take the moral high ground. From the National Enquirer and Heat magazine to the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers, the subplot of celebrity discourse is (im)morality. So it doesn’t really matter if the question posed is who looks the best on the catwalk, or if the celebrity model is overweight or underweight, or whether this star should be allowed to adopt a child from the developing world, or if our appreciation for a pop star’s music should be influenced by their conviction for a sex crime—at root we are being drawn into a conversation about what we do and do not value. Introduction 3 Celebrities are significant not because they have any inherent skills, talents, genius, or even achievements. Most celebrities seem not to have achieved very much, and they can often be rather talentless. Celebrities matter not because of who they are but because of what they represent. It is the meanings that become attached to celebrities as they appear in the media that form their currency in the circulation of popular culture. Celebrities, in other words...