How is religion portrayed on prime time entertainment television and what effect does this have on our society? This book brings together the opinions of all the important factions involved in this important public policy debate, including religious figures (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Freethinkers—liberal and conservative), academics, media critics and journalists, and representatives of the entertainment industry. The debate provides contrasting views on how much and what type of religion should be on entertainment television and what relationship this has with the health of our society. Many contributors also offer strategies for how to reform the present situation. This is an important work that delineates the debate for the layperson as well as researchers, scholars, and policymakers.
This book proves there is nothing new under the sun regarding many of our modern religious beliefs. This includes Christianity, and how many of its beliefs could be far older than what we have suspected. It gives a complete run-down of the stellar, lunar, and solar evolution of our religious systems and contains new, long-awaited, exhaustive research on the gods and our beliefs.
The relationship between Protestant fundamentalists and mass culture is often considered complex and ambiguous. Selling the Old-Time Religion examines this relationship and shows how the first generation of fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing, advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel. Selectively, and with more sophistication than has been accorded to them, fundamentalists adapted to the consumer society and popular culture with the accompanying values of materialism and immediate gratification, despite the seeming conflict between these values and certain tenets of their religious beliefs. Selling the Old-Time Religion is written by a fundamentalist who is based at the country's foremost fundamentalist institute of higher education. It is a candid and remarkable piece of scholarship that reveals from the inside the movement's first encounters with some of the media methods it now wields with well-documented virtuosity. Carl Abrams draws extensively on sermons, popular journals, and educational archives to reveal the attitudes and actions of the fundamental leadership and the laity. Abrams discusses how fundamentalists' outlook toward contemporary trends and events shifted from aloofness to engagement as they moved inward from the margins of American culture and began to weigh in on the day's issues--from jazz to "flappers"--in large numbers. Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 1930s "were willing to compromise certain traditions that defined the movement, such as premillennialism, holiness, and defense of the faith," Abrams concludes, "but their flexibility with forms of consumption and pleasure strengthened their evangelistic emphasis, perhaps the movement's core." Contrary to the myth of fundamentalism's demise after the Scopes Trial, the movement's uses of mass culture help explain their success in the decades following it. In the end fundamentalists imitated mass culture not to be like the world but to evangelize it.
In this cogent history, Hart unpacks evangelicalism's current reputation by tracing its development over the course of the 20th century. He shows how evangelicals entered the century as full partners in the Protestant denominations and agencies that molded American cultural and intellectual life.
William Lobdell's journey of faith—and doubt—may be the most compelling spiritual memoir of our time. Lobdell became a born-again Christian in his late 20s when personal problems—including a failed marriage—drove him to his knees in prayer. As a newly minted evangelical, Lobdell—a veteran journalist—noticed that religion wasn't covered well in the mainstream media, and he prayed for the Lord to put him on the religion beat at a major newspaper. In 1998, his prayers were answered when the Los Angeles Times asked him to write about faith. Yet what happened over the next eight years was a roller-coaster of inspiration, confusion, doubt, and soul-searching as his reporting and experiences slowly chipped away at his faith. While reporting on hundreds of stories, he witnessed a disturbing gap between the tenets of various religions and the behaviors of the faithful and their leaders. He investigated religious institutions that acted less ethically than corrupt Wall St. firms. He found few differences between the morals of Christians and atheists. As this evidence piled up, he started to fear that God didn't exist. He explored every doubt, every question—until, finally, his faith collapsed. After the paper agreed to reassign him, he wrote a personal essay in the summer of 2007 that became an international sensation for its honest exploration of doubt. Losing My Religion is a book about life's deepest questions that speaks to everyone: Lobdell understands the longings and satisfactions of the faithful, as well as the unrelenting power of doubt. How he faced that power, and wrestled with it, is must reading for people of faith and nonbelievers alike.
Through a nationwide survey, the authors of this study conclude that US Evangelicals may actually be preserving the racial chasm, not through active racism, but because their theology hinders their ability to recognise systematic injustice.
Traces the decline of Christianity in America since the 1950s, posing controversial arguments about the role of heresy in the nation's downfall while calling for a revival of traditional Christian practices.
