What are the dominant theoretical approaches employed in the study of religion and new media? How do these theories influence methods employed or questions explored in research? The aim of this chapter is to provide students and scholars with an overview of key theoretical approaches to the study of religion and media. This, it is hoped, may work as a lens for interpretation, especially for studies of new media engagement and interaction by religious users and communities. Studies of religion and new media draw upon scholarly resources in religious

studies as well as in media studies. The former includes a range of approaches rooted in different disciplines from the social sciences (sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, psychology of religion), the humanities (history of religions), and theology. Media studies also has roots in various social science and humanities traditions. Sociology, political science, economics, history, language, literature, music, and aesthetics all inform media studies as a field of communication. When it comes to “new media” or “digital media,”media studies are also informed by computer science or informatics. These lists are not comprehensive and the naming of the different research traditions may vary from one country or academic context to another. There may also be other ways of organizing the various knowledge traditions in relation to studies of religion and newmedia. The above is meant only to demonstrate how interdisciplinary and complex the seemingly limited research area of religion and media actually is. In principle, religious studies should be able to analyze religious expressions

in various media using the interpretative (hermeneutic) and critical-historic approaches that dominate their written, text-oriented disciplines. Similarly, the social scientific traditions on religion may approach how people use media as a substitute or supplement in their religious practices. However, none of these aspects of religious studies can prosper without further insight into how media and communication processes work in contemporary society. Religious studies will benefit from an understanding of the production processes for media content, produced “texts” as also visual or multimodal documents and wider reception processes, as well as the role of such mediated communication in society. These approaches are part of media studies. Religious studies could learn from media studies in order to undertake proper research into religion

and media. Similarly, media studies could approach religion in the same way as any symbolic field in the media. However, deeper analyses require greater understanding of religious traditions and their symbolic universes. Religion is not just transmitted via particular media. The forms of mediation

should actually be regarded as an integral part of the definition of religion. Religions are to a large extent shaped by their dominant means of communication. Whether they are mainly oral, codified in writing, or further distributed in print has significance. Printing technology was an “agent of change” in the Protestant Reformation in Europe (Eisenstein 1979), and likewise digital technologies are probably crucial to transformations of contemporary religion. These are ongoing processes, open for further research. Throughout history, religious traditions have had to be translated (or “trans-

mediated”) for new generations in changing contexts of communication. The tradition, then, is put in a new form. New religions, for their part, relate to their contemporary context of mediated communication. Religion, the anthropologists Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors argue, “cannot be analyzed outside the forms and practices of mediation that define it” (2006: 7). It then becomes paramount to explore how the transition from one mode of mediated communication to another contributes to reconfiguring a particular religious practice. The focus should be on the cultural practices of mediation rather than on the media themselves, as already suggested by the communication scholar Jesús Martín-Barbero (1993), based on his Latin American experiences. However, the extent to which media technologies are driving forces in transformations of religions is a key issue that distinguishes the theoretical approaches to be discussed in this chapter. When such modern technological media as the telegraph and the printing

press became part of industrialization and colonization, they were conceived of as vehicles of transportation, which, James Carey (1989) explains, had religious roots, and the moral meaning of this transportation of messages and ideas “was the establishment and extension of God’s kingdom on earth” (p. 16). However, science and secularization removed the basis for such religious metaphors of communication and the media technologies themselves became the central concern, though Carey reminds us that the alternative model, a ritual view of communication, also has religious roots, being aimed at the representation and confirmation of shared beliefs (1989: 18-21). By “new media,” this book and this chapter points to the contemporary

digitization of communication. Small-scale digital media give a ritual view of communication new energy, as these tools are woven into daily social interaction within a variety of communities. They invite “user-generated content” as symbolic sharing, although the transmission view still applies when religious actors use these new media to reach out via new forms of mediation. Further, it is clear that the theoretical approaches to be discussed below may have deeper roots in “old” than in “new” media. My presentation of theoretical frameworks for approaching religion and

(new) media will be limited by my own academic horizons. As a media scholar

with a background in the sociology of religion, my work has emphasized Christian traditions in high modern Nordic societies. The context for the reflections in this chapter is, more generally, that of high or late modern media-saturated societies.