Religions Reviewed

Primiano’s study examines the role of talk-television as a mass medium engaged in propagating religious ideas under the rubric of the “supernatural.” The material under his consideration includes instances of religion in popular culture, but also popular culture in “religion” (taking the allegedly factual representations of religious ideas, organizations, and professionals as a department of religion), dialogue between religion and popular culture. He did not take the popular culture as religion tack, which might have examined figures like Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey as occupying quasi-sacerdotal roles, in which they use the divine power of celebrity to provide their audiences with moral guidance, and cultivate a sense of mass community through the television medium.

More than the four approaches anatomized by Forbes, the perspectives enumerated by Jolyon Mitchell in “Questioning Media and Religion” are perhaps more useful in examining Primiano’s method in this case. He does not see the television medium as inimical to religious integrity (Mitchell’s first perspective), but he instead conforms roughly to Mitchell’s second perspective, identifying the mass communication of television (including the studio audience and viewer call-in mechanisms) as a vehicle for “religious folklore,” and thus a ‘opportunity’ for the deployment of religious ideas and practices.

Primiano is especially interested in the idea of ‘vernacular religion,’ a term roughly interchangeable with ‘popular religion,’ but one which—strangely—plays on the historical division between the learned Latinity of the Christian priesthood and the ‘common’ language of the general run of believers. He defines it as “religion as it is lived in everyday life,” and he writes of a “continuum of religious negotiation intrinsic to the reality of being a vernacularly religious person.” (pp. 47, 58) Although the term ‘vernacular’ has seen increasing and effective use among scholars of late medieval and early modern religion, I’m not sure what might characterize a “vernacularly religious person” in the 21^st century—or from what forms of non-vernacularity or vernacular secularism Primiano’s ‘vernacular religion’ could most clearly be distinguished.

In any case, it is clear that Primiano uses the notion of vernacularity to identify those forms of religious discourse that are most eligible for treatment as folklore. He identifies two genres of religious folklore that are frequently rehearsed in the talk-television medium: conversion narratives and supernatural memorates. The former is inarguably ‘religious’ (as long as it involves a conversion to a ‘religion’), but the latter basically consists of ghost stories—with the proviso that the ‘ghost’ of the story may equally consist of “vampires, werewolves, devils, aliens, and various mysterious killers,” (p. 49) as well as manifestations of more benevolent supernatural entities.

And while this sort of memorate concisely describes the matter at hand in the opening anecdote from the Oprah show, the case of Geraldo’s “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground” was clearly a more complex form of discourse, drawing on more than memorates or conversion narratives. What’s more, its subject matter was arguably non-supernatural. The muddling of distinctions between neo-African religious forms, genuine professed Satanists, and alleged criminal Satanic conspiracies, was facilitated by a particular form of discursive power deployed under the figure of ‘investigative journalism,’ in order to effectively re-synthesize the witch-cult paranoia of the 16^th and 17^th centuries in a form credible to modern American television audiences. (p. 53)

This instance illustrates the extent to which Primiano could have perhaps attended more fully to the ‘resources’ question highlighted in Mitchell’s third approach to mass media and religion. Geraldo’s “Devil Worship” program provided a launching pad for a micro-industry of psychologists, clergy, and other ‘experts’ and ‘consultants’ who propagated disinformation about Satanic conspiracies throughout the US. One cautionary example is the opportunistic slanders of Carl Raschke, a professor of religious studies at the University of Denver who wrote the execrable Painted Black (1990). From the content of his book, Raschke obviously knows too much to be taken in by his own line of scare-mongering. Similarly, while Geraldo may have been a dupe of his picked ‘experts,’ he and his producers were only too willing to engage these particular experts because of their sensationalist ‘entertainment value.’

Primiano does not entirely neglect ‘resources’ issues. He does discuss the time constraints on expression, (p. 48) the premium on polarizing guests, (pp. 55-6) and the motives of producers in choosing ‘supernatural’ topics. (p. 57) The interpretive form of the shows suggests a decentralization of ‘spiritual’ judgment, in which individual studio audience members (and by extension, television viewers) are encouraged to bring their own prejudices and preconceptions to bear on issues that may be startling or contentious.

The Donohue exorcism show was an intriguing anecdote, and seems like it could be the basis for a full-fledged study in its own right, concentrating on religion and popular culture in dialogue. How does a commercial, secular venue like the Donohue show end up collaborating with the Roman Catholic Church on such a media event? What advantages do each offer the other? Are there hazards for either?

The thesis of Suzanne Holland’s article on “Our Ladies of the Airwaves” might have been brought into the mix for Primiano as well. Holland discusses the performative, ritual dimension of the on-air confession to authority figures, and the folkloristic narrative forms highlighted by Primiano also have ritualistic dimensions. Whether volunteered by a host or elicited from a guest, the memorate or conversion narrative has a heightened ritual effect because of the studio audience reactions, as well as the discursive conventions of the shows.