ABSTRACT
The cultural approach to the study of media has challenged and gradually been assimilated into what has been a much more instrumentalist approach to media research in the United States. Applying a cultural perspective within the much more ‘religious’ popular culture of the United States has begun to open up new considerations of media and religion from a cultural perspective. A number of characteristics of the cultural perspective have thrown new light and created new collaborations in the study of media and religion. In a cultural perspective meaning is seen as a joint enterprise: a negotiated outcome that comes about through an interaction of the person generating the text, the text itself, the person engaging with the text, and the contextual circumstances in which these occur. Steve Bruce, for example, suggests: As he shows the religious cultures of different societies have developed in very different ways.
