The Media Versus Religion- Continued
Just near the McGill University student ghetto in the mid-1960's, there was a Catholic Chrurch that I often walked by in the early morning. On Sunday mornings I sometimes peeked into it just to look at the crowd there. It was very crowded when I took a look into it in about 1965.
Yet about ten years later I walked past the church again, took another look in to the Sunday crowd and realized that the congregation had really shrunk in size.
"God is dead," some pundits said in the 1960's. Yet this was premature. Religion is still going strong in many places around the world. If someone had asked me why back in the 1960's why religious belief was getting weaker I probably would have replied, "Because of the rise of science." Now I see that that answer was wrong. To-day I would say, "Because of the media."
In the distant past if you wanted to hear music and you were just one of the ordinary people you went to a mosque or a church or a synagogue. Religious bodies ran schools. So if you wanted to learn to read or write you had to go to school staffed by mullahs, nuns, rabbis or priests.
Yet about 100 years ago, this started to change. The spread of gramophones, radios, dance halls, movies, mass magazines and spectator sports loosened the hold of religion on people's minds. So too did the spread of government-run schools. The media was undermining religious faith.
This is the theme of John Updike's four generational tale called "In The Beauty of the Lilies'. Updike was one of America's most talented novelists of the 20th centyry.
The novel opens in New Jersey in about 1910. Here, as movies are being filmed nearby, the reverend Clarence Wilmot loses his religious faith. The clergyman suffers anguish and loneliness from this loss. Still, he carries on. He has a son Teddy who finds contentment as a mailman. Teddy is obviously Updike's favourite person in thisnovel.
Teddy's daughter Esther becomes a famous Hollywood movie star and a contemporary of Clark Gable and other movie stars of the 1940's and 1950's. Yet her son Clark leads a troubled life and joins a a Christian cult. He dies near the novel's end in a Waco-style shootout.
When 1960's people claimed that God was dying they had it wrong. The well-known First Nations theologian Vine Deloria junior probably got it more correct when he said," God is Red." In fact religious belief is much stronger among people of colour . And also as Updike's novel makes clear the religions that survive and grow are ones that preach an orthodox and maybe a fanatical creed. But for the rest of us Saturday and Sunday mornings as well as Friday nights are just times to stay home, sleep in or watch television and surf the Internet.
"I don't go to church," one young man told me. "It's for old people." Then this young man pulled out an i-phone and began to scroll down its screen. So the media is still chipping away at religion and will continue to, especially in rich western countries.
Wednesday 25 February 2015
Thursday 5 February 2015
Mass Media Help Shrink Religions.
Mass Media Shrink Religions.
Right across the street from where I live, there's an old-fashioned movie theatre. I've gone there countless times and usually enjoy myself. The movies that flash across the theatre's screen have amused, frightened, disturbed and sometimes bored me. Movies have been part of my life for far longer than religion has.
I unplugged my t.v three or four years ago. My computer crashed over a decade ago and when I need a computer I go to the local libraries. Yet I still listen to one of my five radios at least once a day. Often in the late afternoon, I turn on a radio and listen to pop music, sometimes for hours.
Song after song float out of this tiny box, lifting my mind backwards or forward .
They enliven my life.
"Music is the greatest art of all," a friend of mine says. "It moves me in ways no other thing can." Granted my friend may have been talking about opera. I prefer listening to the rockers and singers of the 1960's and 1970's. I like the Byrds, Bob Dylan and the Beatles of course, Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, Emmy Lou Harris, and the California rockers of the 1970's like Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles and Jackson Brown.
Now religion has never moved me in the same way. I grew up in a Jewish family where my father ruled the roost. My dad believed everything in the Old Testament and knew a lot of it be heart. By the age of 18 I veered away from my father's religion. The whole thing bored me and turned me off. I found its rules ridiculous.
Then in my late 40's, doctors probed my body and found non-malignant tumours sprouting all over me. I told myself, "I need religion to face my health crisis." Yet I didn't turn to synagogues for religious nourishment. I ended up going to liberal churches, which I'd often admired from afar. Yet after about 23 years I got tired of churches too. And in the end if someone asked me for my verdict on religions I've known, I'd reply,"Boring."
Week after week the services seem to be saying the same old thing. I've heard some great sermons and great singing in the two or three churches I went to. Yet in the end I turned away from all services. I prefer going to films, listening to music and at one time watching t.v. The reason to me for my choice is simple; the mass media always churn out someting new.
Allied to the media are sports which became popular at about the same time as the media. Radio made hockey famous or who'd have ever heard of Foster Hewitt? In the U.S., t.v.. turned football, baseball and basketball into household entertainment. The mass media and sports run together.
Every year, a new movie star, t.v. program or super athlete emerges. No religion can ever match the media and its ability to create superstars of the t.v., the movie screen or the gridiron.
Most Canadians still admire the super rich. Yet millions of Canadians worship athletic stars, movie starlets, t.v. characters and rock or hip-hop artists. These people are the new gods and goddesses.
George Clooney may not match the current pope in being popular. Yet it's a close call. "The new pope has become a super star," one journalist after another proclaimed about Pope John Paul the Second. And in fact, to raise the profile of the Catholic Church, John Paul used the t.v. and other media to lure people back to the Catholic Church. Even so, hundreds of millions of people adore Jennifer Anniston and screen stars like her, far more than they did the pope or Mother Teresa. Canadians still debate the merits of hockey players Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe. I've yet to meet a churchgoer who talks about religion with the fervour hockey fans show when talking about their favourite player.
"God is dead," some theologians proclaimed in the 1960's. God isn't dead yet nor is religion dying out. Jihadis and evangelical Christians are showing us in different ways that religions still have power. Yet no religion can compete with the mass media. Media have emptied church pews, synagogue benches and even wiped clean the floors of mosques. The media is the new religion and it's no wonder why.
Right across the street from where I live, there's an old-fashioned movie theatre. I've gone there countless times and usually enjoy myself. The movies that flash across the theatre's screen have amused, frightened, disturbed and sometimes bored me. Movies have been part of my life for far longer than religion has.
I unplugged my t.v three or four years ago. My computer crashed over a decade ago and when I need a computer I go to the local libraries. Yet I still listen to one of my five radios at least once a day. Often in the late afternoon, I turn on a radio and listen to pop music, sometimes for hours.
Song after song float out of this tiny box, lifting my mind backwards or forward .
They enliven my life.
"Music is the greatest art of all," a friend of mine says. "It moves me in ways no other thing can." Granted my friend may have been talking about opera. I prefer listening to the rockers and singers of the 1960's and 1970's. I like the Byrds, Bob Dylan and the Beatles of course, Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez, Emmy Lou Harris, and the California rockers of the 1970's like Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles and Jackson Brown.
Now religion has never moved me in the same way. I grew up in a Jewish family where my father ruled the roost. My dad believed everything in the Old Testament and knew a lot of it be heart. By the age of 18 I veered away from my father's religion. The whole thing bored me and turned me off. I found its rules ridiculous.
Then in my late 40's, doctors probed my body and found non-malignant tumours sprouting all over me. I told myself, "I need religion to face my health crisis." Yet I didn't turn to synagogues for religious nourishment. I ended up going to liberal churches, which I'd often admired from afar. Yet after about 23 years I got tired of churches too. And in the end if someone asked me for my verdict on religions I've known, I'd reply,"Boring."
Week after week the services seem to be saying the same old thing. I've heard some great sermons and great singing in the two or three churches I went to. Yet in the end I turned away from all services. I prefer going to films, listening to music and at one time watching t.v. The reason to me for my choice is simple; the mass media always churn out someting new.
Allied to the media are sports which became popular at about the same time as the media. Radio made hockey famous or who'd have ever heard of Foster Hewitt? In the U.S., t.v.. turned football, baseball and basketball into household entertainment. The mass media and sports run together.
Every year, a new movie star, t.v. program or super athlete emerges. No religion can ever match the media and its ability to create superstars of the t.v., the movie screen or the gridiron.
Most Canadians still admire the super rich. Yet millions of Canadians worship athletic stars, movie starlets, t.v. characters and rock or hip-hop artists. These people are the new gods and goddesses.
George Clooney may not match the current pope in being popular. Yet it's a close call. "The new pope has become a super star," one journalist after another proclaimed about Pope John Paul the Second. And in fact, to raise the profile of the Catholic Church, John Paul used the t.v. and other media to lure people back to the Catholic Church. Even so, hundreds of millions of people adore Jennifer Anniston and screen stars like her, far more than they did the pope or Mother Teresa. Canadians still debate the merits of hockey players Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe. I've yet to meet a churchgoer who talks about religion with the fervour hockey fans show when talking about their favourite player.
"God is dead," some theologians proclaimed in the 1960's. God isn't dead yet nor is religion dying out. Jihadis and evangelical Christians are showing us in different ways that religions still have power. Yet no religion can compete with the mass media. Media have emptied church pews, synagogue benches and even wiped clean the floors of mosques. The media is the new religion and it's no wonder why.
Sunday 1 February 2015
Corrections To The Latest Entry
Corrections to the entry, 'Men Kill, Women Do Sometimes'
In the blog before this one I mistakenly wrote about 'men doing things their mothers never did'. I should have written 'women do things their mothers never did.' Also there's a confused statement at the beginning and the end of this blog. In fact in the job world women became more like men and took up jobs their mothers and female ancestors never were allowed to. Women in the 1970's and after became lawyers, doctors, bus drivers, accountants, pilots, politicians, carpenters and so on.
As far as crime goes women did not commit crimes like men. In this way they differed from men. Yet in the job world they became more like men. in any case as women in some fields became more like men, Canada as a whole benefiitted.I
In the blog before this one I mistakenly wrote about 'men doing things their mothers never did'. I should have written 'women do things their mothers never did.' Also there's a confused statement at the beginning and the end of this blog. In fact in the job world women became more like men and took up jobs their mothers and female ancestors never were allowed to. Women in the 1970's and after became lawyers, doctors, bus drivers, accountants, pilots, politicians, carpenters and so on.
As far as crime goes women did not commit crimes like men. In this way they differed from men. Yet in the job world they became more like men. in any case as women in some fields became more like men, Canada as a whole benefiitted.I
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