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Culture and Religion: An

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The mediatisation of religion:

Theorising religion, media and social
change
Stig Hjarvard

The Department of Media, Cognition and Communication ,

University of Copenhagen , Njalsgade 80, DK-2300, Copenhagen S,
Denmark
Published online: 13 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Stig Hjarvard (2011) The mediatisation of religion: Theorising religion,
media and social change, Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12:02, 119-135, DOI:
10.1080/14755610.2011.579719
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Culture and Religion

Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2011, 119135

The mediatisation of religion: Theorising religion, media and

social change
Stig Hjarvard*

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The Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen,

Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
Drawing on recent advances in mediatisation theory, the article presents a
theoretical framework for understanding the increased interplay between
religion and media. The media have become an important, if not primary,
source of information about religious issues, and religious information and
experiences become moulded according to the demands of popular media
genres. As a cultural and social environment, the media have taken over
many of the cultural and social functions of the institutionalised religions and
provide spiritual guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages and a sense of
community and belonging. Furthermore, the article considers the relationship
between mediatisation and secularisation at three levels: society,
organisation and individual. At the level of society, mediatisation is an
integral part of secularisation. At the level of organisation and the individual,
mediatisation may both encourage secular practices and beliefs and invite
religious imaginations typically of a more subjectivised nature.
Keywords: media; mediatisation; Nordic countries; popular culture;
secularisation

Mediatisation has emerged as a new theoretical framework to revisit and reframe

old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture
and society. In particular, the theory of mediatisation has proved fruitful for the
analysis and discussion of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and
influence other fields or social institutions such as politics, family and religion. In
general, mediatisation denotes the social and cultural process through which a
field or institution to some extent becomes dependent on the logic of the media
(Asp 1986; Hjarvard 2008b). Many analyses have demonstrated, for example,
how the institution of politics in various ways has accommodated to the demands
of both news and entertainment media (Stromback 2008) at the same time as
political parties and individual politicians build up media expertise and make use
of various interactive media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook in order to
re-establish contact with their voters. In a similar vein, religion as a social and
cultural institution has in various ways become influenced by the media.
The Mohammed Cartoon Crisis was a spectacular example of how public

*Email: stig@hum.ku.dk
ISSN 1475-5610 print/ISSN 1475-5629 online
q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2011.579719
http://www.informaworld.com

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discussion about religion and religious conflicts became intertwined with various
media dynamics (Eide, Kunelius, and Phillips 2008; Hjarvard 2010), but more
importantly the mainstream, day-to-day religious beliefs and practices of both
individuals and religious communities have also become dependent on and
integrated with various media practices (Hoover 2006). Mediatisation is about
long-term social and cultural change and as such it may be considered on par with
other significant social and cultural transformative processes of high modernity,
including individualisation, urbanisation, globalisation and secularisation. It is
also highly interdependent with these processes; for instance the rise and spread of
communication media have in some ways been a prerequisite for the globalisation
of culture and commerce, but through the break up of national media systems
globalisation has also changed the way media are produced, distributed and used.
The aim of this article is twofold: first, it outlines the core elements of
mediatisation theory with specific reference to the mediatisation of religion. The
concept of banal religion is also introduced to highlight some important ways in
which media may rearticulate religious imaginations. Second, we will consider
the relationship between mediatisation and secularisation. Here, the basic
research question we will address is to what extent and in what ways processes of
mediatisation are implicated in the secularisation of culture and society? This is
of course a complex question to try to answer within the limits of a single
academic article, so we will immediately try and delimit the scope of our inquiry.
Media may have numerous and variable influences on religion depending on the
types of religious practices and beliefs in question and in the general social and
cultural context. For instance, mediatisation may imply something rather
different if we compare the use of media by Pentecostal movements in India
(Thomas 2009) with the use of media by protestant youth in northern Europe. For
our discussion, we will delimit ourselves to the role played by media in the
protestant, yet highly secularised societies of the Nordic countries. Furthermore,
we will primarily consider the role of the mainstream and weak religious beliefs
and practices and not strong religion (Kelley 1972). In the Nordic context, the
most widespread form of religion may be categorised as weak because it is
characterised by a lesser degree of commitment to religious organisations and a
higher degree of individualised belief. In the words of Grace Davie, mainstream
religion in the Nordic countries may both entail believing without belonging,
i.e. individualised faith outside the church, and belonging without believing, i.e.
membership of a church is a widespread custom but with little or no impact on
belief or behaviour (Davie 2007, see also Storm 2009). Strong religions of
Christian, Islamic and other origin do also exist in Nordic countries, and they
have come to play a rather significant role in the representation of religion in
the news media. The public image of Islamic fundamentalism is, not least,
influenced by the workings of the media. However, the role of media in relation to
strong religions may be somewhat different from the case of weak religions,
among other things because strong religions in some cases have become
politicised and, therefore, dominate the news medias political agenda in highly

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polarised ways. In contrast, weak religion may not be high on the news agenda,
but media may nevertheless play a significant role for the production, circulation
and usage of weak religious imagery and practices. The focus for our
subsequent theoretical discussion is how mediatisation of weak religion in the
Nordic countries may or may not contribute to the development of secular views
and practices.
Mediatisation: Key assumptions
Media theory has been dominated by two major paradigms. The first and oldest
paradigm, theories of media effects, has been concerned with the ways media
may induce change in attitudes and behaviour at both societal and individual
levels. Studies of the effect of political propaganda and research into the possible
consequences of exposure to violence on television screens are examples of this
research paradigm. The second paradigm has focused on how individuals and
social groups make use of media for various purposes. The so-called uses-andgratification approach (Rosengren, Wenner, and Palmgreen 1985) represents one
strand of research within this paradigm and it has been studying how specific
forms of media usage may be motivated by different types of social and
psychological gratifications (e.g. diversion, social contact and prestige) that
people may obtain through their media usage. More recent research within this
paradigm has considered how usage of specific media and interpretation of
various kinds of media texts play an important role for audiences construction of
cultural identity and sense of public connection (Couldry, Livingstone, and
Markham 2007). Although the first paradigm primarily considers what the media
do to people, the second paradigm is mainly concerned with what people do with
the media. The first paradigm has historically been trying to document powerful
media effects, and the second paradigm has generally bestowed the audience with
considerable power to pursue its own needs and construct its own cultural
identity.
Both of these paradigms have their merits and may provide useful insights.
However, mediatisation theory occupies a third position and is sceptical of these
paradigms, because both of them conceptualise media as something that is
separate from culture and society. The effect paradigm suggests that media are an
independent factor that may bring about change in either society or an individual
actor. The second paradigm often involves a voluntaristic view of culture and
society in which social actors are free to use or not to use media for their own
purpose. In contrast, mediatisation theory stresses the interaction and transaction
between actors and structures: mediatization goes beyond a simple causal logic
dividing the world into dependent and independent variables. Thus, mediatization as a concept both transcends and includes media effects (Schulz 2004, 90).
According to mediatisation theory, media are not outside society, but part of its
very social fabric. Media have become integrated into the workings of almost all
types of social institutions at the same time as they have become responsible for

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the general societys public as well as private communication. It is precisely

through this social integration that media may exert their influence and be
implicated in the transformation of social institutions, including religion.
Schulz (2004) suggests that mediatisation brings about four types of changes:
(1) media extend human communication and interaction beyond immediate time
and space, (2) they substitute existing forms of face-to-face communication and
interaction, (3) media and existing forms of communication and interaction
amalgamate with one another and (4) social actors and institutions may
accommodate to the logic of the media. In the case of religion, the television
broadcast of a religious service extends the reach of the sermon to a mass
audience. The audiences reception of popular media fiction with quasi-religious
content may provide a substitute for the reading of the bible, and when a minister
in her sermon makes use of stories from the news media as a contemporary point
of comparison, the news discourse amalgamate with a religious discourse.
Finally, religious institutions are encouraged to accommodate to the demands of
the news media (e.g. news criteria, presentation formats and so on) in order to be
able to project their voice into the medias public sphere.
Mediatisation is characterised by a two-sided development. First, the media
have developed into a more autonomous, independent institution in society.
Previously, media were often in the service of another social institution. In the first
part of the twentieth century, the political press served in many countries as a
mouthpiece for particular political interests, parties and movements. Gradually
during the twentieth century, the press gained more independence vis-a`-vis
political parties and became news media governed by professional journalism.
Similarly, other media such as books, journals and magazines were to a greater
extent than now in the service of cultural, religious or scientific institutions, but
today are primarily businesses governed by professional media considerations
such as generic conventions, technological affordances and market demands.
From a sociological perspective, institutional independence or autonomy is always
relative, so the independence of the media institution from political institutions is
to some extent achieved through an increased dependence on the commercial
market. However, for the media, the relative independence acquired vis-a`-vis other
social institutions and increased dependency on the commercial market is not
necessarily a zero-sum-game. Because media institutions control a crucial and
common resource, public communication in society as a whole, it has acquired a
unique position in which all other institutions in society are at least somewhat
dependent on the media, while the media are primarily dependent on the market.
Second, at the same time as the media have emerged as an independent
institution in society, the media have become integrated into the workings of other
social institutions. Mass media, interactive media and combinations hereof have
become commonplace, natural components of everyday life such as education,
politics, family life and religion. Office work has been revolutionised by computers
and Internet and the private household has become a media-saturated environment.
Through this integration of media into other institutions, the media have partly been

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appropriated to serve the needs of these institutions, but at the same time these
institutions have also been transformed in various ways. In the case of the family,
both mass media and social media have opened the household for continuous
contact with the external world, changed the familys authority structures,
transformed leisure activities and altered adult, youth and child identities
(Buckingham 2000; Meyrowitz 1986). Through this two-sided development, the
media are both out-there in society as an independent institution with a logic of its
own that other institutions must accommodate to, and in-here as a part of the
everyday experience of doing work, going to school and relaxing with the family.
This duality is also reflected in the medias simultaneous visible and invisible
character. They are both highly visible as an institution commanding authority and
attention, and invisible as part of the mundane flow of everyday life. As a
consequence of this dual development, social interaction within the respective
institutions, between institutions and in society at large takes place via the media.
By the term media logic, we do not imply a singular, uniform logic that
resides behind every kind of media activity. Media logic refers to the
institutional, aesthetic and technological modus operandi of the media, including
the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic resources and operate
with the help of formal and informal rules (Hjarvard 2008b; see also Lundby
2009). Media have a series of characteristics a set of affordances (Gibson
1979) that come to influence the ways that humans interact with and through
the media. Thus, media logic comprises the various operational modalities by
which the media enable, limit and structure human communication and action.
In the case of journalistic media, news criteria and journalistic ideals of
objectivity and the press as the fourth estate may constitute key elements of
media logic. In the case of film drama, genre conventions and the star system may
be other examples of the logic of the media. Media are not a unified phenomenon
and the actual analysis of mediatisation processes must, therefore, take the
specific features of the media in question into account. In spite of the differences,
a convergence between various media has taken place during the last decades.
Digital technology has created multimedia platforms that make individual media
less distinct, and the continued economic concentration of media industries has
also brought different media together under the same commercial and
professional objectives (Bagdikian 2004; Deuze 2007). A hundred years ago
the notion of the media did not spring to peoples mind when talking about the
press, the telegraph or the gramophone. In those days, they were considered as
distinct communication technologies serving different social and cultural needs
and purposes. Todays widespread references to the media bear witness to the
fact that the media have emerged as an independent institution in society with a
set of distinct modus operandi through which they control a collective resource.
As a final clarification of the mediatisation concept, we will briefly consider
its relation to the broader concept of mediation. Mediation refers to the act of
communication via a medium, the intervention of which can affect both the
message and the relationship between sender and receiver. For example, if a

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priest chooses to use a blog instead of a printed newsletter to communicate

with his followers, the choice may well influence the form and content of his
communication, whereas the communicative relationship between the priest and
the followers will be altered due to the blogs interactive features. However, the
single instance of using one medium or another will not necessarily have any
notable effect on religion as a social institution. Mediation describes the concrete
act of communication by means of a medium in a specific social context. By
contrast, mediatisation refers to a more long-term process, whereby social and
cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a consequence of the
growth of the medias influence. Mediatisation theory involves an institutional
perspective that considers social and cultural change at the meso-level. It is not a
macro-theory of universal media developments that will produce a uniform
outcome across all social and cultural domains. Neither is it a micro-theory that
only looks at communicative mediations among individual actors in particular
situations. By insisting on the institutional and historical situatedness of social
interaction, mediatisation theory tries to steer free of both the media determinism
of certain macro-level theories like medium theory (McLuhan 1969) and the
inability of some micro-level analyses to produce any generalisations beyond the
immediate mediated encounters in particular situations.
The mediatisation of religion
The mediatisation of religion is not a universal phenomenon that characterises all
cultures and societies. It is primarily a development that has accelerated
particularly during the last decades of the twentieth century in modern, highly
industrialised and mainly Western societies. The nature of this development takes
many forms and has various consequences depending on the specific religion,
media and context in question, but, in general, mediatisation entails the
transformation of three aspects of religion (Hjarvard 2008a):
. The media become an important, if not primary source of information
about religious issues. Mass media are both producers and distributors of
religious experiences, and interactive media may provide a platform for the
expression and circulation of individual beliefs.
. Religious information and experiences become moulded according to the
demands of popular media genres. Existing religious symbols, practices
and beliefs become raw material for the medias own narration of stories
about both secular and sacred issues.
. As a cultural and social environment the media have taken over many of
the cultural and social functions of the institutionalised religions and
provide spiritual guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages and a sense of
community and belonging.
To illustrate the first point about the medias importance as a source of
information about religious issues, we will briefly consider some findings of a

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recent national survey in Denmark about the ways in which people engage with
spiritual issues (Table 1). The two most common ways of relating to spiritual
issues are discussions with family and close friends and watching television
programmes. The reading of non-fiction books and use of Internet websites and
discussion are also a frequent channel for such engagement, and only 6.7% report
that they have attended church ceremonies. The reading of novels, attending
public lectures, going to cinema and listening to radio are not high up on the list,
but these media are still more frequently mentioned than the reading of the bible
(or other holy scripture), when it comes to the average Danes engagement with
spiritual matters. The preferences for various media vary considerably according
to the religious faith of the Danes. People who have a more traditional belief in a
personal god are much more likely to go to church and read the bible, whereas
people who believe in a spiritual force or are in doubt are much more likely to use
the media to engage with these issues.
The medias importance as information source and discussion forum for issues
relating to religion broadly challenges the authority of religious institutions. The
places (churches, etc.), representatives (ministers, etc.) and texts (bible, etc.) of
institutionalised religions have not only in general been relegated to a marginal
position in society, but also, when it comes to issues concerning spiritual matters
and religious institutions, no longer take centre stage. When media become an
important source of information about religion and more generally the place to
visit in order to engage with spiritual matters, the media acquire some of
the churchs former power to define and frame religious issues. The ability to
define what counts as religion, and what parts of religion which are worth talking
about have to some extent been passed over from the church to the media.
Table 1.

Ways of engaging in spiritual issues in Denmark in 2009.

Ways of engaging in spiritual issues

Discuss with family and close friends
Watch television programmes
Read non-fiction books (e.g. philosophy and psychology)
Visit websites/Internet discussions
Attend church ceremonies
Read novels
Attend meetings/public lectures
Go to cinema
Listen to radio
Read the bible (or other holy scripture)
Other
Did not engage in such issues

%
24.3
22.6
10.5
8.9
6.7
5.8
5.2
4.3
4.2
3.9
3.0
50.4

Notes: Question: People may have an interest in spiritual issues, including faith, folk religion, ethics,
magical experiences, life and death, and so on. If you are interested in such issues, how did you engage
in them during the last couple of months? The respondents were asked to tick a maximum of three
possibilities, thus, the sum exceeds 100%. The question was part of the research institute Zaperas
regular Internet based survey in Denmark 1st quarter of 2009; N 1010.

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Through the agenda-setting function of the media (McComb 2004), both fictional
and factual media influence the level and kind of information about religious
issues that circulate in society at any given time.
When media become producers and distributors of religious content, the
institutional, aesthetic and technological characteristics of the media influence
the framing of religion and the ways that audiences and users are supposed to
interact with religion. Media may not only provide information about religion
but also create narratives and virtual worlds that invite people to have
experiences of a religious-like character. Furthermore, social media may provide
a platform for discussions and community-building among people with similar
religious orientation.
Media in general, however, do not have any intention or obligation to
propagate any particular religious views. On the contrary, mainstream media
normally adhere to a secular worldview and are anxious not to give preferential
treatment to any specific religious movement or belief. Media are not in the
business to preach, but they may use existing religions for the medias own
purpose as a raw material in news reporting, television entertainment, film drama
or computer games. The majority of the medias representation of religion does
not originate from the institutionalised religion or have close resemblance with
religious texts. News media may of course quote religious spokespersons and a
film like Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ may occasionally build on
sacred texts or myths, but the overwhelming part of media stories involving some
kind of reference to religion is produced and edited by the media themselves in
accordance with the demands of popular media genres. Through these genres, the
media provide a constant fare of religious representations that blend elements of
institutionalised religions with other spiritual elements in new ways. Computer
games like World of Warcraft, novels and films like Stephenie Meyers Twilight
series, J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, Dan Browns Da Vinci Code and
Angels and Demons, television series like Heroes, LOST and X-Files, and their
accompanying websites produced by media industries and fans alike, blend
religious symbols and actions that invite religious interest and experiences. This
bricolage (Levi-Strauss 1966) of religious elements constitutes a particular kind
of religion, banal religion, that we will consider in more detail below.
The media perform many of the social functions that in the past were
conducted by religious institutions. The media not only transmit communication,
but also serve a cultural function by creating and sustaining communities
(Carey 1992). By opening the newspaper or watching the television newscast, the
reader and viewer not only acquire information, but also enter a common social
space, typically the national, regional, or local public and cultural sphere.
Through their continuous representation of this common space, the media also
demarcate who are inside and who are outside the community at the same time as
they create a sense of belonging (or the opposite) among their audiences. More
specifically, as the media have moved to the centre stage of society, they have
come to perform a series of collective rituals that define and express important

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values and passages for society as a whole (Couldry 2003; Rothenbuhler 1998).
This may be festive media events such as royal coronations or important national
and international sports championships (Dayan and Katz 1992). The media also
perform rituals in times of crises, for instance during catastrophes and war.
During various tragic incidents such as the earthquake in Haiti 2010, the terror
attack of 9/11 and the death of Princess Diana, the media were deeply involved in
raising money for relief, symbolising the terror and providing guidance through
societys collective stages of sorrow (Kitch 2003; Wilson, Richards, and
Woodhead 1999). Media may also provide smaller rituals that demarcate the
small transitions of everyday life. The continuous flow of the day, the week and
the time of the year once acquired its structure through the daily chiming of the
church bells, prayers at specific times and particular seasonal religious feasts.
Today, daily life has become structured, not least, through habits of media
consumption, television time schedules and serial formats. Media may also
provide a forum for worship of persons and artefacts. Fan cultures constitute an
alternative social and interpretative community in which the fans often acquire a
specific mode of reception of their sacred texts at the same time as they
distinguish themselves from the ordinary, non-fan, consumption of the media
products (Jenkins 2006). Fans do not necessarily believe that their media heroes
and idols possess divine powers, but they do often treat them as if they were
saints. Thus, the ritualised practices of fan communities may resemble religious
practices and evoke similar emotions, but may also entail different assumptions
and beliefs about the existence of a metaphysical realm. Like Hill (2002), we may
not necessarily equate these fan cultures with religious communities, but the
similarities bear witness to the fact that religious practices such as worship and
idolatry can be re-contextualised into more or less secular media-centred
activities.
Finally, it is important to distinguish between the mediatisation of religion as
a specific contemporary development of high modernity and the fact that
religion has been involved in and influenced by various media activities
throughout the centuries. As Eisenstein (1979) has demonstrated, Gutenbergs
printing press was of significant importance to the development of Protestantism
among other things because the proliferation of printed Christian texts made it
possible for the layperson to have a personal relationship with the Word of God.
Similarly, missionary work has almost always involved some kind of mediation
through books, magazines, television and so on. The difference between these
religious mediations and the contemporary process of mediatisation is both
qualitative and quantitative. First, mediatisation implies a qualitative different
relationship between religion and media, as media have become an independent
institution in society, whereas the media in earlier times were more of an
instrument of other institutions such as politics and religion. Second, the sheer
volume and intensity of media presence in all kinds of spheres in contemporary
society make the influence of media on social interaction including religion
more pronounced.

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Banal religion
If the media have become an important producer and distributor of religious
imagery, we need to ask what kind of religion the media tend to communicate. In
order to answer this question, we will borrow a concept developed by Billig
(1995) in his study of nationalism. According to Billig, nationalism is not only
constructed and maintained through explicit nationalistic movements, strong
national symbols or elaborate national mythologies, but is also a mundane and
implicit phenomenon that is reproduced through the everyday experiences or
occurrences within the nation and the inherent taken-for-granted assumptions
about who belongs to the national community and who does not. Billig
distinguishes between waved and unwaved flags, i.e. between the explicit and
elaborate representations of the nation, and the implicit and unnoticeable
representations that constitute a backdrop for our spontaneous ideas of what the
nation and national belonging may involve. This second and less noticeable kind
of nationalism is what Billig labels banal nationalism.
Just as the study of nationalism needs to take the banal elements of national
culture into account, the study of religion must consider the fact that both
individual faith and collective religious imagination are created and maintained
by a series of experiences and representations in the media that may have little or
no relationship with institutionalised religions (see also Lynch 2007).
Accordingly, we may make a distinction between the explicit and elaborate
texts and practices of institutionalised religions such as Protestantism, Islam,
Buddhism and so on and the implicit and bricolage-like religious texts and
practices of the media. The institutionalised religions actively promote particular
religious worldviews through waved religious flags, whereas the media through
their unwaved flags of various religious elements construct a variegated
backdrop of religious representations and practices. We will label this second
kind of religion, banal religion. Banal religion may consist of elements taken
from institutionalised religion, such as crosses, prayers and cowls as well as
elements usually associated with folk religion, such as trolls, vampires and black
cats crossing the street. Furthermore, banal religion may incorporate
representations that have no necessary religious meanings such as upturned
faces, thunder and lightning, and highly emotional music. These may, however,
come to be associated with religious meanings through the medias
representational practices. Banal religion is banal in the sense that it is
unnoticeable and does not constitute a highly structured proposition about a
metaphysical order or the meaning of life, and it is religion in the sense that it
evokes cognitions, emotions or actions that imply the existence of a supernatural
agency. The iconography and liturgical practices of both institutionalised
religions and folk religions become stockpiles for the medias own production of
factual and fictional stories about the world. In this way, the media distribute
banal religious elements that may or may not be integrated into more coherent
narratives with more explicit religious meanings. Owing to their industrial nature,

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the media talk about the world through generic conventions and accordingly the
medias banal religious imaginations become moulded according to popular
genres such as melodrama, crime stories, news, fantasy, comedy and adventure.
A few examples may demonstrate the notion of banal religion. The Indiana
Jones adventure film series is saturated with all kinds of religious symbols and
practices taken not least from Christianity but also from Buddhism, Islam and
various forms of folk religions. Despite their pervasiveness and very explicit nature,
the religious representations do not constitute a coherent religious narrative, nor are
we, as the audience, to take them seriously as real religious symbols, practices or
meanings. The religious representations are there to serve the conventions of the
adventure genre and invest the story with mysticism, magic and excitement. Thus,
the generic conventions put the religious meanings in brackets whereby they
become unnoticeable as religious representations. Another example of banal
religion is Stephenie Meyers Twilight series about teenage romance that is centred
on encounters with supernatural phenomena such as vampires and werewolves and
invested with Christian Puritan beliefs. Again, the supernatural phenomena are not
so much an end in themselves but serve the generic demands of the love story. The
existence of a supernatural world invests the love relationship with a sense of
destiny and deeper meanings, and the dangers of vampires and werewolves serve to
spiritualise the love relationship and make carnal lust a dangerous feeling. The
Twilight series is a re-working of an old Victorian tale about love and desire, in
which the use of the supernatural iconography from popular fantasy and horror
genres refreshes the Victorian story so that it becomes suitable for a contemporary
teenage audience. Both in the case of the Indiana Jones and the Twilight series,
religious representations serve the particular media genre in question and the
religious meanings are not to be taken too literally. Nevertheless, as banal religious
representations, they come to provide a backdrop in modern society of the
continued presence and relevance of religious artefacts, meanings and sentiments.
Banal religion not only makes implicit references to religion, it also challenges the
authority of existing religious institutions by disembedding specific religious
meanings from their original context and rearticulating them in new ways.
The notion of banal religion does not imply that this kind of religion is inferior
or less important than for instance folk religion or institutionalised religions such as
Islam or Christianity. On the contrary, it may be considered as a kind of fundamental
or primary kind of religion that is certainly not restricted to the realm of the media,
but may occur in various social conditions due to basic characteristics of social
cognition and emotion (Grodal 2009). From the point of view of human history and
evolution, such banal religious representations may be considered as the first
inventory of religious imagination that rests on the human ability to ascribe
intentional agency to unexplainable occurrences (Barrett 2004), to make
anthropomorphic projections into a metaphysical world (Guthrie 1993) and to
blend ontologically distinct categories (Boyer 2001). In view of this, banal religious
elements are often about the supernatural and intentional force behind natural
phenomena such as the sudden strike of lightning or meteoric fallout (ascribing

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anthropomorphic agency), or about humans that can turn into werewolves or

vampires (counterintuitive blend of categories such as human/animal and
living/dead/eternal life). The weakness of banal religion is the absence of coherent
and elaborate religious propositions, but its strength lies in the ability to create
representations that arrest attention, evoke emotions and support memory.
The media do not only spread elements of banal religion but may also
distribute texts, practices and iconography from the institutionalised religions,
e.g. television transmissions of sermons and regular newspaper columns by
priests. Thus, banal religion is not synonymous with religion in the media and we
may distinguish between mediatised forms of religion (religion that is highly
influenced by media logic) and religious media (media that serve religious
institutions). The former is highly influenced by banal religion, whereas the latter
is dominated by institutional forms of religion. It should be added that by
institutional religion, we imply the official religious texts and practices advanced
by the priesthood. This official version of a particular religion has seldom been
shared by the religious community in general who have often combined elements
of folk religion with the official religion. Towlers (1974) distinction between
official religion (the priesthoods religion) and common religion (the actual
beliefs and practices held by the ordinary people) points to this difference. In
view of the mediatisation of religion, the common religion has found a new and
prominent source: the banal religion of the media.
Secularisation
In the final part of this article, we will address the relationship between
mediatisation and secularisation with a particular focus on the Nordic countries
that are characterised by a weak religion. The concept of secularisation has been
widely discussed and questioned, but we may initially take Peter Bergers
definition as a point of departure, in which he describes it as the process by
which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of
religious institutions and symbols (Berger 1967, 107). Because religion has
been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of
legitimation of socially defined reality (Berger 1967, 32), secularisation implies
that the maintenance of a religiously defined world is eroding. In particular, the
pluralisation of life worlds in modern society has challenged the authority of
religion by making religion just one among many possible sources to define and
legitimate social reality. Peter Berger himself has later denounced the process of
secularisation and stated
that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false. The world today
[ . . . ], is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever.
This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely
labelled secularization theory is essentially mistaken. (Berger 1999, 2)

A thorough discussion of the secularisation thesis is outside the scope of this

article, but in relation to our argument the interrelationship between media and

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religion it is a mistake to denounce a general process of secularisation by

pointing to the continued or even growing visibility of religion in society. The
increased public presence of religion in many countries during the last decades
may not be an endogenous or spontaneous resurgence of religion, but a complex
reaction to and outcome of both an ongoing global modernisation process and a
process of mediatisation that makes religion visible, but very often through the
eyes of the media. Increased public visibility is not to be equated with a growing
support for, or involvement in, religion. In particular, when we look at the Nordic
countries, there is certainly very little evidence to support the idea of a religious
revival. Despite a remarkable growth in the presence of religion in the public
sphere (Rosenfeldt 2007), the typical indicators of religiosity (e.g. church
attendance, baptism, belief and so on) for the general Nordic population signify a
slow, but continued secularisation. As Norris and Inglehart (2004) and Inglehart
and Welzel (2005) have demonstrated through extensive cross-national empirical
analyses, secularisation is still an important component of the modernisation
process of contemporary societies in Western Europe, USA and elsewhere. In
other words, the idea that our contemporary world is as furiously religious as it
ever was (Berger 1999, 2) does not find support in these systematic and
international comparative analyses.
Although secularisation is still an integral part of modernisation, the demystification and disenchantment of the modern world neither was, nor is, an
unambiguous process. As Campbell (1987) has demonstrated, the rise of the
modern consumer was intertwined with the development of a romantic
sensibility, and Ritzer (1999) has pointed to the fact that processes of
disenchantment and re-enchantment seem to go hand in hand in modern
consumerism. Inglehart and Welzel (2005) stress that the spread of selfexpression values in late modern societies may create a sensitivity towards
diverse forms of subjectivised spirituality and non-material concerns. Similarly,
we will argue that although mediatisation processes may often challenge the
authority of institutional religion and de-sacralise social imaginations, this is
certainly not a linear process. Precisely because media have become producers
and distributors of religious symbols and practices, they may also serve to
re-enchant the modern world in various ways.
In order to consider the manifold influences of the mediatisation process in
the Nordic countries, Dobbelaeres (2002) distinction between three levels of
secularisation at the levels of society, organisation and the individual may
prove helpful. As regards secularisation at the level of society, both church and
faith have been reduced to a niche in society. Although religion in earlier times
played a central role for society as a whole, it has now been diminished to serve
certain ritual and spiritual functions at the margins of modern society. In contrast,
the media have moved to the centre stage of society. Earlier they were serving
other institutions of society (such as politics, science and religion), but now they
are increasingly governed by a logic of their own at the same time as they
articulate societys common experiences. In this sense, mediatisation is part of

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the very process of societal secularisation. Through social differentiation, the

media come to acquire both independence and some of the social functions that
the Protestant church used to serve in the past, and in this historical process, these
functions are transformed into predominantly secular practices.
With regard to secularisation at the level of organisation that is the
adaptation of the Protestant church to the secular norms of wider society the role
of media is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the church must, like many other
organisations, adjust to the demands of media in order to be able to communicate
with the external world. On the other hand, the church may also use new media
such as the Internet for its own purposes, allowing it to communicate with its
followers in new ways that may strengthen a sense of community. However, most
research report that the use of new media by church organisations does not bring
them in contact with many people outside the existing church members, and the
spread of new media may also invite followers to adapt a less collective
relationship towards the church (Hoover, Clark, and Rainie 2004; Lovheim 2008).
As Meyer and Moors (2006, 11) argue, media have both a destabilizing and an
enabling potential for religious establishments control of their communication,
and media may, therefore, resemble a Trojan horse that challenges the authority
of institutionalised religion.
Finally, as regards secularisation at the level of the individual, the media may
challenge the individuals normative orientation towards religion. In the era of late
modernity, a new kind of social character or habitus has developed that involves
the individuals constant monitoring of his or her surroundings including the
media for orientation and moral evaluation (Riesman 1950; Hjarvard 2009). As
media produce and circulate various banal religious representations, these become
the backdrop for the modern individuals knowledge about religious issues and
may, despite an overall tendency towards secularisation, encourage the
subjectivised spiritual imagination. Furthermore, the media may also connect
individuals to collective practices of worship and rituals and thereby provide the
individual with a sense of belonging. Because the media circulate globally and to
some extent are dominated by Anglo-American content and formats, the
individual living in Nordic countries may become more acquainted with
the religious representations of global and Anglo-American media than with the
religious content of the Protestant churches in the Nordic countries (Petersen
2010).
At the level of society, mediatisation is, therefore, an integral part of
secularisation. At the level of organisation and the individual, mediatisation may
encourage both secular practices and beliefs as well as more subjectivised
religious imaginations. In actual social practice these levels are of course not
completely separate but interact in various ways. For example, religious
organisations may take up discussions of contemporary media culture in order to
take advantage of individuals interest in various popular media narratives. This
has, for example, been the case with J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter stories that have

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received considerable attention and counter-publication by religious organisations (Sky 2006).

Media may to a limited extent perform a reproduction of religion in late
modern society, but this religious role is volatile and certainly not of the same
strength as the institutionalised religions. In that respect, the media pose the
same or an even stronger challenge for the reproduction and transmission of
religion than liberal religion poses. As Bruce (2001) had argued, liberal religion
may often end up as a weak religion because liberal religion is open to the
pluralisation of lifeworlds which destabilises religious authority. In the same way,
mediatised religion is not governed by an intention to preach a particular religious
gospel, but on the contrary sensitive to the various social, cognitive and emotional
preferences of media audiences and users. This is the strength of mediatised
religion compared with the institutionalised religions, but also its Achilles heel:
the media facilitate the very multiplication of lifeworlds that challenges religions
authority to define the social world, and because of this the media will be a very
unstable force to ensure the maintenance of coherent and stable religious worlds.
In this way, mediatisation of religion primarily tends to be intertwined with the
process of secularisation.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Prof. Knut Lundby, Oslo University, and the editors of this
special volume for their comments on the article.

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