ABSTRACT

Over the last ten to fifteen years the study of media and religion has changed profoundly. In the early 1990s researchers were still concerned with the ‘impact’ of the televangelists or other institutional religious media. Religious media of each denomination or national religious tradition – oral, print or electronic – with their powerful rhetoric were assumed to be the major instruments for impressing the group identity on the individual. Sociologists of religion in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that, in fact, most persons construct their own belief systems out of a repertoire of symbols offered by the context of religious affiliation but also by many other sources. The Media, Symbolism and the Life Course project defends its constructivist approach to media and religion in part because major social theorists such as Anthony Giddens affirm that the emphasis of late modern societies on the adaptation to nature have receded.