In general, scholars of religion seem more willing now to view popular culture as analogous to religion in its ability to shape worldviews, values, and identity.10 Some resist making an identification between the two, perhaps because fans of popular culture do not always define their activities as religious or because this seems to stretch the word beyond its normal sense. It may be that scholars resist naming aspects of popular culture “religious” because they believe this will require us to confer equal legitimacy on them.11 In fact, there is no reason that would be required, as we have never granted all things that we call “religions” equal legitimacy, nor do we do so now. We continually make judgments on what we regard as valid belief systems or ways of living in the world, based on their ethical payoff, agreement with other societal values, or coherence with scientific or logical reasoning. We cannot pretend that we do not make normative judgments about aspects of religion and popular culture all the time, and so there is no reason to avoid the slippage between the two categories out of some supposed need to safeguard one or the other from scrutiny.
It is worth noting that scholars such as Russell McCutcheon and Timothy Fitzgerald hold that the way we have come to use the word religion is itself the product of the modern academic study of religion, which has used this concept to group together certain phenomena, perhaps with an agenda in mind. They find the term suspect due to its ideological heritage, and for this reason, they argue that it should be understood as a problematic and biased category.12 I do not believe that we need to actually abandon the word religion, however, as it has become a category that adherents themselves use to describe their activities, and it has a heuristic value in spite of its ideologically tainted history.13 And because it has some heuristic value in describing and analyzing certain cultural phenomena, it may also have applicability beyond the range of phenomena to which it is normally applied. The value, then, of viewing film “as” religion lies in discovering some of the ways we can come to better understand what films do to and for people, by comparing their form, content, and effects to the form, content, and effects of the things we call religions: this point will be dealt with in greater detail in the first chapter.
Changes in Part I from the First Edition
The first edition of this book argued that films are analogous to religions in providing stories (myths) that express a worldview, systems of moral values, and a ritual means of participating in them that connects the viewer to the models of and for reality expressed in them. To do so, I relied heavily on Clifford Geertz’s functional definition of religion, which I still find the most useful definition of religion both for understanding religions and for understanding how the audience reception of films can be akin to religions. That argument will be repeated in this edition with few changes, as I believe it remains valid and illuminative. As such, the reader will find that the chapters on the definition of religion, myth, ritual, and interreligious dialogue are all almost unchanged from the corresponding chapters in the first edition, as they seek to develop the analogy between religion and film viewing as a practice that resembles religion.
In the first chapter of the first edition of this book, I reviewed the current state of scholarship on religion and film in order to make the case for my own methodology as an alternative to what I called “theological” and “ideological” interpretations of film by scholars of religion. I found these to be the two major approaches extant for the study of religion and film, and I found limitations in both. But the study of religion and film has now evolved well beyond these two alternatives, so that particular argument does not need to be made anymore. Some scholars analyze the ways that films function religiously, as I do. Some study the representation of religions within films, informed by closer and more accurate understandings of different religious traditions than previous generations of Western scholars, as they are often from those traditions or have firsthand knowledge of them. Others offer nuanced analyses of the films based on a keener understanding of film technique than earlier scholars of religion and film. For all these reasons, there is a plenitude of excellent scholarship in the area of religion and film that was still under development when I wrote the first edition. I have no desire, therefore, to simplistically dismiss this diverse scholarship as either “theological” or “ideological” in its method. While many theologians continue to write about film, they do so now better informed by scholarship about film and therefore more willing to listen to the films themselves and the viewpoints they offer, rather than either dismissing them summarily or reducing them to ciphers of Christian values.14 And scholars who use the ideological analysis of films have also developed more nuanced and complex views, informed by a better understanding of cultural theory and cultural studies—myself included.
Melanie Wright, writing in 2007, noted that “cultural studies has transformed film studies in the past decade,” but these insights had not yet had much effect on religion and film scholarship.15 Her suggestion was that cultural studies offered “a means of avoiding the twin poles of auteurism and reader response” through attention to more than just the filmmaker’s intentions or the interpreter’s viewpoint. In particular, she pointed to the attention by cultural studies to processes such as “distribution, exhibition, and reception,”16 which comprise part of what is often called the circuit of culture. Gordon Lynch has also challenged theologians and scholars of religion to move beyond their tendency to focus on “texts” of popular culture and instead look to “the shared environment, practices, and resources of daily life” that embed the ways people appropriate popular culture and give meaning to it.17 He has also argued for a broader appreciation of the circuit of culture, a concept first developed by Richard Johnson at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1980s. In Johnson’s view, one can better understand cultural “texts” through studying the cultural systems in which they are embedded, including “the contexts, structures, and processes of cultural production, the texts and artifacts produced, the ways in which these texts and artifacts were read or used by people in real-life settings, and how these processes of cultural production and consumption related to wider social structures and relations.”18 Lynch makes use of a revised form of this, which includes “processes of production, issues of representation in relation to cultural objects and texts, the ways in which cultural products relate to the formation of social identities, the ways in which cultural texts and objects are used and consumed, and the structures which regulate how cultural products are produced, distributed, and used.”19 I have myself used a form of the circuit of culture to analyze films, focused on the stages of the process of creating and producing the film, the marketing and distribution of the film, the film itself, and its reception by audiences.20 While I will not be able to consider all these aspects in detail for the films I discuss in this book, I will attempt to remain aware of the fact that the meanings films have do not exist apart from their appropriation by viewers in a particular societal and historical context, and the circuit of culture is an important reminder of that.
Lynch notes that there has been some tension between those who have primarily utilized