Celebrity Worship as Parareligion

This chapter presents a study of celebrity worship in an attempt to clarify how popular culture can be like religion, although both remain categorically different. Most approaches to religion involve at least one of the following ideas: a belief in a supernatural power, the significance of religion to generate community life or some kind of church, or a divine power's influence on people's lives. Celebrity culture in almost all of these respects falls significantly short of what is required of a formal religion. Yet rather than dismissing celebrity worship as not religiously significant, it might be possible to cast new light on how, through the action of the media, and through the agency of audiences and fans, something like (and not like) religion is starting to emerge. The term for this is “parareligion.” Parareligion is based on the premise that celebrity worship is not a religion but has religious parallels. Parareligion suggests that religious elements are present but that they are presented ambiguously. These religious elements are often contradictory and open to a variety of different understandings.

People of the Picture Book

Since 2005, a philanthropic organization, PJ Books, has set out to influence American Jews by reaching them in one of their most tender, intimate family moments: parents reading to children. The program uses children's books to influence Jewish families' values and practices. This chapter argues that PJ Library demonstrates the burden that American Jewish institutions place on popular culture to shape their communities. Though staff members deny that PJ Library is engaged in religious activity, the organization does, in fact, use children's books as a tool to shape American Jewish religion. It uses children's books to introduce families to or reinforce their connection with sacred rituals and Jewish customs. More broadly, PJ Library seeks to persuade American Jewish families to make Judaism an important part of their lives and to connect them, one illustrated book at a time, to networks that will help them do so.

The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture

This chapter analyzes the history of representation that has contributed to the current image of the Dalai Lama. We “know” the Dalai Lama, not simply because of the fact that we may understand his views and admire his actions, but also because we are familiar with the particular role he plays in the popular consciousness of the United States—the type of icon he has become—the icon of the “Oriental Monk.” To get a sense of what makes the Dalai Lama so popular, we need to get a sense of the history of this icon and how it has been used to express and manage our sense of Asian religions. The chapter asks: How did the Dalai Lama come to represent all that he does for Americans? Indeed, what exactly does he represent? How have we come to “know” him? Is our ability to embrace someone and something (Tibetan Buddhism) once considered so foreign, anything other than a testimony to a newfound openness and progressive understanding?

Rap Music and Its Message

This chapter provides a methodology for exploring and understanding the connections between religion and popular culture, labeled as “nitty-gritty hermeneutics.” Nitty-gritty hermeneutics exhibits a sense of nonconformity. It ridicules interpretations and interpreters who seek to inhibit or restrict liberative movement and hard inquiries into the problems of life. The chapter then discusses nitty-gritty hermeneutics in the blues and rap music. In particular, it argues that rap music is an implicit critique of the black church, an accusation that the church has been consumed with a moralism that fails to take seriously the realities of African American suffering. Though rap has been criticized by some religious voices, it fills a spiritual void and engages in a needed dialogue about the situation of many black lives.

Shopping, Religion, and the Sacred “Buyosphere”

This chapter explores the way in which consumption itself has come to be seen as a center of meaning and value in the United States today, and looks at shopping malls as places that are potentially sacred centers for this activity. It suggests that to use the language of “religion” or the “sacred” to represent shopping and consumer culture is to assert a kind of “common sense” ideology about both the nature of religion and the nature of shopping. The fact that popular culture has become the primary site for “naturalizing” the conflation of religion, markets, and consumption, while also a key site for critiquing this convergence, speaks to the central role popular culture plays in the contested power and politics that both reinforce hegemony and call for social change.

It’s About Faith In Our Future

This chapter examines the fandom that has grown up around the Star Trek movies and television series, arguing that the entertainment industry also creates meanings that begin to function in religious ways for consumers of popular culture. Popular culture has become an independent producer of mythical narratives, a reflection of cultural themes and a producer of new ones. Though often using indirect religious themes and imagery (as in Star Wars or Harry Potter), the narratives and messages have been formally cut off from the religious traditions that have dominated Western culture over the centuries. In other words, parts of popular culture have taken their place alongside the mainstream religious traditions, ideologies, and narratives that have guided people's lives.

Megachurches, Celebrity Pastors, and the Evangelical Industrial Complex

This chapter argues that the accelerated ascendency of megachurch celebrity pastors is best examined and understood in terms of marketing strategy and commodification processes specific to a digital age in which social media and interactive technologies are impacting the identity formation of Christians and non-Christians alike. It demonstrates how relationships between celebrity pastors and their congregants are mediated by cultural and technological shifts as church branding has become integral to evangelical purpose. It compares two campaigns to market books by celebrity pastors—Mark Driscoll's Real Marriage (2012) and Judah Smith's Jesus Is (2013). It considers how pastors have managed to gain celebrity and inspire congregational growth in what is considered one of the least churched cities in the United States—Seattle.

Broadswords and Face Paint

This chapter examines the use that evangelical pastors and men's groups have made of the Mel Gibson film Braveheart (1995) in their dialogue about masculinity, the roles and assumed responsibilities of men. It looks at how the film provides language and images through which these men imagine and articulate what it means for them to be evangelical husbands and fathers. Implicit here is an argument that popular culture provides language and images that more adequately or honestly get at the struggles of particular communities. The chapter focuses on the way some white men who remain within the church find its language and images inadequate, and turn to a particular example of popular culture to explore their roles and responsibilities.

Can Watching a Movie Be a Spiritual Experience?

The moviegoing experience can transport viewers into another place or the presence of another—perhaps even an Other. In the process, they explore life's possibilities and contradictions, testing out solutions and even finding themselves surprised by joy or sorrow, by love and pain, by life itself. Given such experiences, it should not be surprising that commentators have since film's early days explored the spiritual dimensions of this experience. This chapter shows that evangelical responses to popular culture are hardly monolithic. It suggests that faith and culture are always in dialogue. It explores the way conversation with movies, even seemingly secular ones, can be a spiritual experience.

The “Godding Up” of American Sports

This chapter considers the religious impact of sports. It argues that sports go beyond mere game playing. Whether we participate or watch sports, they function as a center of unity and identity much in the way that religion does. Sports exercise a power for shaping and engaging the world for millions of devoted fans; they enable participants to explore levels of selfhood that otherwise remain inaccessible; they establish means for bonding in communal relations with other devotees; they model ways to deal with contingencies and fate while playing by the rules; and they provide the prospect for experiencing victory and thus sampling, at least in an anticipatory way, “abundant life.” In America, quite simply, sports constitute a form of popular religion.