What We Talk About When We Talk About Religion and Media

The 2023 Conference on Media, Religion, and Culture highlighted the field’s diverse scope, with topics including social media, journalism, religious-themed entertainment, and media use in historical religious practices. This diversity is a strength but can lead to a lack of coherence, with discussions sometimes based on various understandings of “media” and “religion.” To address this, the paper proposes a typology categorizing research into two primary fields: studies on religion and mass media content, and studies on media use in religious practice. While remaining attuned to intermediate forms and ambiguous phenomena, these fields are further divided into subsections distinguishing between journalism, pr , and entertainment, religious and non-religious communicators, and analog and digital media. Importantly, the model also differentiates between media that evoke religious transcendence and media that facilitate religious practice. This framework aims to clarify shared interests and differences within the field, fostering more structured discussions and comparisons.