Religion + Popular Culture
Studying popular culture can tell us a lot about religion, because religion (religious people and religious entities) employ popular culture to make their religious products relevant and compelling in the free market of religious ideas and practices. Just as religion is difficult to define because of how varied it is, popular culture can be just as contested. According to Marcel Danesi (2015), cultural products are "popular" precisely because they are
- mass produced
- widely available
- regularly consumed
In other words, lots of people like them!
Historically, however, both scholars and other conservative cultural mediators have made a distinction made between "high" and "low" culture -- an old distinction based on class, which assumes that only the refined and educated are drawn to and capable of understanding high cultural products like opera. High culture has been associated with taste in music, art, hobbies, and other cultural products (e.g. art museums as opposed to Nascar). In part, this has to do with the notion that something enjoyed by fewer (read: elite) people is something to aspire to, while low culture is just that: low. Low class, low intellect, etc. And "popular" products are mass produced as opposed to original and therefore considered truly valuable.
We can relate the concept of "hi/low" to religion because most often there is the assumption that popular religion is somehow less "authentic" because it fits the “mass” definition described above. This is a biased assumption that “real” (read: authentic) religion is "Institutional Religion," complete with conservative ideals, lots of rules, and authorized clergy who have to go to school to learn theological methods. On the other hand, critics see "popular" religion as less authentic or even fake, because it often ignores or builds something new on top of institutional imperatives, is often found entirely outside (and unmediated by) religious institutions (like New Age and Contemporary Paganisms, for instance), and also often involves events and activities that appear circus-like. David Chiddester's wonderful book Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (2005) looks at this phenomenon (amongst others).
This is not a modern debate. In 18th and 19th century America there were major religious conflicts about evangelical revivals (wnat many historians have called the First and Second Great Awakenings), during which people left their churches and began meeting in open air revivals. "Old Light" preachers of the time criticized "New Light" advocates of the revivals because they were so individualistic (in a bad way, they thought), stirred up people's emotions (again, in a bad way), and eventually became mass produced.