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.