Media, Culture, and the Religious Right - Review

edited by Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998 380 pp./$19.95 (sb)

"Timely" is an oft-abused shorthand in the language of mainstream book reviews: it tends to be either a way of praising the publishing industry for exploiting social currents or crises for immense profit or, in academic circles, to exclaim a notable coincidence between the beat of a scholarly study and the rhythms of the external world. Many popular and academic books, especially on media, do try to catch the edge of massive and surging events, monumental reorganizations of transnational culture, their concomitant shifting modalities of expression and feeling within the context of rapid mutations of technology; yet few strike me as urgent, pressing or needed. Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, however, delivers "timely" to its rightful, radical place: the book shows us something of what our time is, of how our time is mediated by and imbricated with institutions, structures and alternate cultures about which we (leftist intellectuals, artists and activists) are likely to know very little. As this collection of essays reminds us, we need to know a hell of a lot.

Indebted to Sara Diamond's 1995 study of the rise of the contemporary religious fight, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States, an analysis cited as authoritative and astute by many of the contributors to Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, the essays hone their focus to the religious right's radio, TV, film, print and video productions "in terms of its resources, its networks of individuals and organizations, its relation to the state, and its objectives and ideology." Although uneven at times in pitch and methodology, as a whole the volume should function as a guide, a handbook, a major resource (along with Afterimage's special issue on fundamentalist media [22, nos. 7/8], also seminal to the present volume) to begin to understand the issues.

First and foremost: if you dismissed the folks on the religious right as crazies, you should pay better attention. As the left dismisses misguided, mistaken, hyperbolic right-wing texts and rhetoric, the religious right is organizing. They are seizing control of mainstream and alternative media, and through them are building an ever-expanding constituency that is setting the agenda for the mechanisms that are undoing the infrastructures of our own workplaces and culture. The anthology's 14 essays do not function simply as a plea to know thine enemy. Instead, the book divides its concerns among four separate sections that together provide crucial context and history, individual case studies, rhetorical analyses and studies of specific popular and alternative media forms: "Overview of Contemporary Issues" (with sections on "Culture and the Religious Right" and "Christian Media," by Kintz and Lesage respectively), "Religious Culture in the United States," "Popular Conservative Media" and "Religious Right Advocacy Media." Topics range from analysis of Christian coalition leadership training videotapes and The 700 Club (the most prominent Christian television show), to figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Dobson, a religious psychologist, to cable and satellite broadcasting and the changing technologies of Christian media and case studies of anti-gay media and violence in Colorado and Oregon.

The editors are colleagues in the English Department of the University of Oregon; Kintz is the author of Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (1997) and Lesage is an academic writer, independent mediamaker and activist, as well as cofounder and editor (for the past 20 years) of the journal Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. In their introductory remarks and in their own essays within the volume (Kintz's "Clarity, Mothers, and the Mass-Mediated National Soul: A Defense of Ambiguity" and Lesage's "Christian Coalition Leadership Training"), the editors center their attention on the dynamic relationship between institutions and culture, between structures and attitude and "the desires and mindset of the people being addressed, be they conservative political activists, fundamentalists and evangelicals, or those disenchanted with social welfare legislation." The concept of belief, elaborated by Kintz through the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, is crucial to understanding how "belief, influenced by religion, holds that certain truths are immediate, natural and God-given, 'inalienable' in the sense that they cannot be articulated because they are so deeply felt as natural and primal." Unswerving and deeply-felt conviction is also tied to what makes fundamentalists fundamentalists: belief in the Bible's literal correctness, its "inerrancy." The fluidity of belief, as opposed to ideology or a concept of false consciousness, drives the volume's task of understanding how real and perceived needs are addressed by Christian media and how these media speak to real people in communities across the country.