Posted: May 30th, 2015

The Use of Pop Culture by Religions (Popular Culture in Religion)

Lesson 4: The Use of Pop Culture by Religions (Popular Culture in Religion)

  Lesson Tasks

• 
Read assigned texts
• Read or listen to the lesson
• Watch Little Mosque on the Prairie (Season 4 Episode 16, “Keeping the Faith” and Season 4 Episode 17: “Farewell to Amaars”), available to stream here.  These episodes are 20 minutes long.
• Watch the first 10 minutes of Zarqa Nawaz’s 2005 documentary Me and the Mosque (available to stream or download here)
• Submit Popular Culture Analysis #1 by the last day of week 4. The exact due date and instructions for this assignment can be found under the “Content” and then “Assignment” tabs on MyLearningSpace.

  Reading

• Romanowski, William D. “Evangelicals and Popular Music: The Contemporary Christian Music Industry” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, p103-122.
• Zine, Jasmin; Taylor, Lisa K.; Davis, Hilary E. “An Interview with Zarqa Nawaz.” Intercultural Education; v18 n4 p379-382 Oct 2007. Find this article here.

  Lesson Objectives

At the end of this lesson you should:

• Identify the historical relationship between evangelical Christianity and popular music
• Recognize ways that religions and religious people utilize popular culture to promote social, political and religious agendas
• Name specific ways that evangelical Christianity was altered or influenced by its interaction with popular culture
• Explain how orientalism and Islamophobia have coloured the representation of Islam and Muslims in popular culture
• Recognize critical issues raised and debated in the work of Zarqa Nawaz

  Key terms for this lesson

Evangelical: Evangelical Christians understand the Bible as the authoritative word of God and stress the experience of conversion or being “born again.” The term typically refers to theologically conservative Protestants that practice “evangelizing” or sharing their faith.

Agency: the ability for a person (or “agent”) to freely act or perform an action. In this lesson we will see that whereas western society typically assumes that Muslim women have very little agency (meaning they are silenced, oppressed and hidden) Little Mosque on the Prairie presents a very different argument.

Hegemony: domination by consent. This means that the ruling classes convince the working classes that society’s established hierarchy is in their best interest.

 

Introduction

 

Last lesson we looked at the use of religion, either blatant or implicit, in popular culture. This corresponded to our typology under the Religion in Popular Culture category. We found that Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth is an archetypal story that not only was a foundational myth in ancient times but continues today in films such as Star Wars. The use of the Monomyth or “Hero’s Journey” in popular culture connects secular cultural forms to religion through the use of mythic narrative. We also considered how oriental monks are represented in the west and discussed this in light of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism.

We now turn to Forbes and Mahan’s second category, that of Popular Culture in Religion. Your two readings for this lesson will each offer examples of this category and pose questions for the implications of religion’s appropriation of popular culture. As your text says, the focus here is on how religions “utilize elements of popular culture, and on how such borrowings have affected the form and content of religion” (p.101). The first reading (Romanowski), focuses on how religion is altered by its interaction with popular culture. Your second reading (Zine, Taylor and Davis) provides a clear example of how religious activists utilize popular culture to promote their political, social and religious agendas.

 

Evangelical Christianity & Popular Music

 

The Forbes and Mahan reading this lesson is on a religious group that is particularly adept at their use of popular culture for the purposes of evangelizing or proclaiming their worldview to the greater public. William D. Romanowski writes about how evangelical Christianity has been affected or altered by its use of popular music forms and popular marketing methods. His dominant claim is that the Christian music industry adopted the values and rules of consumerism, which trumped those of the evangelical churches it purportedly represented.

Links to Contemporary Christian Musicians

Here are some YouTube links to contemporary Christian artists mentioned in the article that had cross-over success into the mainstream marketplace. Click on the links to get a sense of the kind of music this article discusses. These links illustrate the ideas found in the article and in this lesson and as such will make it easier for you to comprehend the material.

Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby”

Michael W. Smith’s “Place in this World”

BeBe and CeCe Winans’s “I.O.U Me”

dc Talk’s “Heavenbound”

What does Evangelical mean?

You may be asking yourself this question as you read Romanowski’s chapter, as the author is never clear about he means by evangelical Christians. The term is derived from a Greek word and literally means “good news.” It is generally applied to theologically conservative Protestants that practice evangelizing or proselytizing, which means trying to convert non-Christians by sharing the “good news” or the biblical truths as interpreted by a particular church. Evangelical Christians understand the Bible as the authoritative word of God and stress the experience of conversion or being “born again.”

According to the Ontario website www.religioustolerance.org, some common evangelical Christian denominations include: Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists, Independent Baptists, Black Protestants, African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion; Church of Christ, Churches of God in Christ, Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, National Baptist Church, National Progressive Baptist Church, Nondenominational, Pentecostal denominations, and the Presbyterian Church in America.

Romanowski’s use of the term evangelical in association with contemporary Christian pop music describes Christian musicians and music industry professionals that seek to either evangelize or promote Christian values through popular music.

 

The Devil’s Music Meets God’s Music: On “Sinful” Pop Music

 

Evangelicals (and, indeed, many Christians) traditionally were suspect of popular entertainment forms because they considered them “worldly” pleasures that could cause their members to stray from their religious values. Theatre, novels, dancing, films and pop music were all perceived as a threat to traditional beliefs and values and religious identity.

Think back to our first lesson regarding high and low culture. You will remember that popular culture has traditionally been considered low culture and, in the west anyway, has had a strained relationship with scholars and religious people. The dichotomy of popular and religious music here is similar to the high and low culture binary.

Later in the term we will look more in depth at how African American sacred and popular music styles became fused in R&B, soul, rock and even hip hop. This first happened in the mid twentieth century, a few decades before the era Romanowski describes, but the controversy over pairing the sacred and the secular is the same. Many church going fans of gospel singers such as Aretha Franklin considered it sinful for her to “cross-over” into popular music venues and styles. She sang gospel songs in secular venues and gradually her material took on secular themes. You can see Aretha Franklin singing the very secular “Natural Woman” below.

http://youtu.be/q9nSU2hAqK4

Likewise, when R&B pioneer Ray Charles sang “This Little Girl of Mine” based on the tune and lyric of the African American spiritual “This Little Light of Mine,” he stirred up controversy among Christians who felt that it was sacrilege to sing about sensual pleasures in a pop song based on a sacred hymn.

 

You may have heard various styles of popular music called the “devil’s music.” This term was first applied to the blues, then jazz, and more recently rock ‘n’ roll. Similar things have been said about rap and dancehall too. In fact, there was a recent musical based on the life of blues legend Bessie Smith called “The Devil’s Music: The Life and Times of Bessie Smith. You can hear Bessie Smith sing “Devil’s Gonna Get You” here.

 

Blues guitarist Robert Johnson is another American icon that drew on the stigma of popular music as the devil’s music in his own material. There is a legend surrounding Johnson, one that he proudly mythologizes in his songs (and perhaps started himself), that he sold his soul to the devil to learn to play guitar. Robert Johnson’s influence on popular music is vast and his songs like “Me and the Devil” and “Cross Road Blues” furthered the connection between popular music and the devil. There was even a movie loosely based the mythology surrounding Johnson called Crossroads. You can hear Johnson sing “Me and the Devil” here.

 

The term “devil’s music” speaks to the legacy of popular music being in an antagonistic relationship with the church. Church music, or religious music, was not to be confused with pop music. For the authors of ultra conservative website www.Jesus-is-savior.com, this antagonistic relationship is ongoing. They have devoted a very long web page to warning readers about what they describe as “Satan’s music” which, in most instances here, is rock and roll. Here’s one of their quotes:

There is no such thing as “Christian” rock music… When it is rock, it is not Christian.  There is only one “Christian rock” and “THAT ROCK WAS CHRIST” (1st Corinthians 10:4).

From: www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/devils_music.htm

Given this historical relationship between pop music and Christianity, the contemporary Christian music industry accomplished quite a feat by adopting pop music forms for church-related purposes. Even though evangelicals believed that popular entertainment went against their values, Romanowski shows that historically it was not unusual for them to adopt the formats and technologies of mass culture (like radio and television for instance) for the purposes of evangelizing.

The article helps us to see that the contemporary Christian music industry of the seventies and eighties was a subculture apart from the mainstream music industry. It allowed evangelicals to adopt popular culture forms but not popular culture content. Of course, one of the main points of the article is that the industry faced several challenges in keeping their traditional values intact.

  Reflection

After reading Romanowski’s chapter, you should be able to answer these questions:

• How did the popular music industry challenge traditional evangelical values?
• How and why was the evangelical message diluted in contemporary Christian music?

What was the reaction by evangelical critics to cross-over artists like Amy Grant?

 

Section Summary

 

What I want you to take away from reading Romanowski’s article and the above lesson:

• Popular music and religion did not always go hand in hand. The values of the popular music industry and evangelical Christians are very different. Contemporary Christian pop music is a recent creation and one that was developed amidst much controversy within the church communities themselves. Among some Christians (and other religions too) popular entertainment culture is still viewed with contempt.
• The use of popular music affected evangelical Christianity. Just as religion had influence over popular music, the reverse is also true. For example, congregations debated whether or not they should include pop music into their services to make them more appealing to youth. How else was evangelical Christianity influenced by popular music?
• Consumer culture and mass culture tend to homogenize subcultures. Religious communities are subcultures of mainstream society with their own unique identities, value systems and worldviews. Romanowski argues that evangelicals were “converted” or “co-opted” by American consumer culture, thereby erasing some of the uniqueness of their subculture. Previous to the contemporary Christian popular music movement evangelicals were leery of consumer culture. Contemporary Christian music adopted consumer culture’s ethos and thrust evangelical youth into a new consumer-oriented youth culture.

Popular culture is an important evangelization tool. Despite their detractors, and Romanowski’s suggestion that their message became “watered down,” evangelical Christians successfully used popular music and the pop music industry to popularize their beliefs, share their values, attract “seekers,” convert non-believers and evangelize to a secular audience. They were able to construct an alternative music subculture that was defined by religious faith, not the secular mantra of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

 

Religious Activism in Popular Culture

 

The second reading I have asked you to look at for this lesson is taken from a collection of three interviews with female Muslim artist/activists. These interviews provide examples of artists working in popular mediums that use popular culture to forward a political, social and religious agenda. Each artist, (visual artist Jamelie Hassan; Little Mosque on the Prairie creatorZarqa Nawaz; author and poet Mohja Kahf), foreground their faith in their work. I only require that you read the short interview with Zarqa Nawaz for this lesson.

In light of Lesson 3’s section on Orientalism, the Nawaz interview highlights the importance of self-representation of the “other.” In this case “other” refers to female/Muslim/of non-western descent. While these identity indicators may not be “other” to you, the reader, they have historically been constructed that way in western society, a society where “mainstream” more often than not has meant white/male/North American of European descent.

Nawaz’s television show, Little Mosque on the Prairie, problematizes and contests notions of faith, gender and agency. Muslim women speaking for themselves, producing cultural artefacts that are counter-hegemonic, and contesting patriarchy goes against the image that we in the west have been taught to associate with Muslims and Muslim women. Muslim women are more often constructed as submissive, silenced, oppressed, covered, hidden and passive.

Whereas the Romanowski reading saw popular culture used by religious community (several Christian denominations that fall under the category evangelical) to promote a religious worldview, here we see the integration of popular culture and religion as a form of activism, largely on behalf of one religious individual.

 

Little Mosque on the Prairie

 

Little Mosque on the Prairie is a Canadian television show on CBC that first aired in January 2007. The show was created by Zarqa Nawaz and has been internationally syndicated in Western Europe, African and the Middle East.

Zarqa Nawaz created Little Mosque on the Prairie partly as a way to publicize some of the leading issues affecting Canadian Muslims, and to voice her opinions on sexism and misogyny within the community. Her take on Islam may be irreverent for some hard liners, but it is a representation of Islam that is true to her own experience as a Canadian born in Toronto and raised in Regina. She got the idea for the show after interviewing Muslim women around North America about issues facing them for a documentary called Me & the Mosque. I have assigned the first 10 minutes of this documentary for this lesson.

Little Mosque on the Prairie Plot

The show centres around a Muslim community in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. The plot often deals with the relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims (the latter often portrayed by radio host Fred Tupper or Anglican minister Reverend Thorne) or internal debates between conservative and liberal factions within the mosque. The mosque’s Imam, Amaar Rashid, is a Toronto-born liberal with modern ideas. He finds a like-minded confident in Rayyan Hamoudi, an outspoken doctor and devout Muslim who wears a hijab but, in the episode assigned for this lesson, refuses to be told she cannot wear pants in the mosque. Much of the hijinks and humour comes at the expense of either conservative mosque member Baber Siddiqui or town Islamophobe Fred Tupper.

You can learn more about the characters of the show here if you wish.

Representing Islam

With Little Mosque we are presented with an example of a religious individual (Nawaz) utilizing popular culture (a television sitcom) to portray a specific worldview (liberal Canadian Islam) and work through issues that affect her community (Islamophobia, Orientalism, religious accommodation, sexism, segregation, misogyny to name a few). The show’s liberal interpretation of Islam (which is by no means out of the ordinary) can be seen as part of Nawaz’s agenda to combat stereotypical representations of Muslims in the media.

  Reflection

Take a moment and think about other stereotypes of Muslims and Islam. Now think about the various ways Little Mosque combats these stereotypes and offers a different “reading” of Islam than is available on, say, the nightly television news or in the newspaper. Use this exercise as the basis for your assignment this lesson as you think through the various ways Little Mosque addresses orientalism.

 

The Public or Secular Sphere

 

Given the historical relationship between religion and popular culture that we learned about above, we can see that the use of popular culture was not always an obvious or given option for religion. Religious musicians sometimes faced harsh criticisms and sanctions for performing “the devil’s music,” aka popular music.

The opposite is true too: popular culture has an uneasy relationship with religion. How many television shows or films have you watched that blatantly promote a religious worldview? Probably not that many because in our society there is a separation of the religious sphere from the public sphere. Because our society is governed by a secular government the discourse that occurs in the public arena (like the media) is largely secular.

The point of this is that North American popular culture and media has historically tended not to promote specific religious worldviews. Mass culture outlets like the television and film industry have stayed away from broadcasting confessional religious material because they believe that the majority of North Americans are secularized. These cultural industries survive on a capitalist business model (they are supported by selling advertising space) and since capitalism’s goal is to get the public to purchase goods and services, these industries do not want to offend secular society by broadcasting anything that could be construed as “religious.” Scholars continue to debate whether fewer people are religious these days (many churches report dwindling numbers, for instance, but worldwide Christianity and Islam are growing), but whether they are or not, blatant religion is often absent from popular culture. It is ok to satirize religion, as The Simpsons often do (you can see an example of this below), but very few television shows or films actively promote a specific religious worldview.

 

Reflection 

Think back to the Romanowski reading—in order for contemporary Christian musicians to cross over into mainstream markets, they had to water down the theology in their songs. Songs about salvation through Christ do not sell well to the majority of North Americans, but songs about universal love do.

 

Putting the Secular and Religious Spheres Together (in Canada)

 

What I have tried to communicate throughout this lesson is that

• many religious communities historically were uncomfortable with popular culture and
• popular and mass culture industries have historically been uncomfortable with religion.

This is what makes a show like Little Mosque so unique. The sitcom is not only successful in Canada but has become a hit around the world. Little Mosque is not only an example of Popular Culture in Religion, it is also a specifically Canadian example of this. Not only does it take place in Canada and its shows include many Canadian idioms, it also airs on Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, who has a mandate to represent the diversity of Canada. Given this, do you think Little Mosque could have been created in any other country? Without knowing the specifics of secular broadcasting practices in other countries, this is a hard question to answer. However, evidence suggests that this could not have occurred south of the border.

In 2007 Zarqa Nawaz told an audience at the American Academy of Religion conference in San Diego that American networks initially refused to pick up Little Mosque for syndication because it openly addressed religion. In 2008, however, after seeing the show’s worldwide success, Fox inked a deal with the show’s producers to create an American version. (Even capitalism likes religion when it’s profitable!)

Even so, when Nawaz went to Hollywood to pitch the pilot for a new show focused on an American Muslim family to American networks, she was told that American television wasn’t interested in religion. She revamped the pilot to focus on ethnicity instead of religion, and the show was optioned by an American network.

The inclusion of religion in western popular culture is particularly radical in the case of Little Mosque. Even though mass culture typically stays away from religious themes, television has proven to be a valuable tool for Nawaz in her attempt to widen the discursive scope of women’s rights in Islam. In fact, as your reading suggests, previous attempts by Nawaz to raise some of the same issues (the unequal treatment of women in mosques, for instance) in a non-popular format—that of the documentary—were met with very little attention.

Take a moment and watch the first 10 minutes of Nawaz’s 2005 documentary Me and the Mosque. You can stream it on the National Film Board’s website for free here or download it for a small fee (around $5 depending on your region). You are not required to watch the entire film for this course, but you will be responsible for the ideas laid out in the first 10 minutes.

  Reflection 

After watching the beginning of this film, consider these questions:

• What was Zarqa Nawaz able to accomplish with a television sitcom that she wasn’t able to with a documentary?

How does Little Mosque approach the issues of patriarchy, sexism and segregation differently from Me and the Mosque?

 

Lesson Summary

 

In this lesson we addressed instances of Popular Culture in Religion and looked at two very different examples. The first, the evangelical music industry, focused on the effects of popular culture on religion whereas the second, Little Mosque on the Prairie, drew attention to the benefits of adopting popular culture to promote a religiously influenced agenda. In both instances, religious worldviews were broadcast into the public sphere. One of the benefits of mass popular culture is that it reaches the mass population. Zarqa Nawaz’s documentary on sexism and segregation in mosques, like most documentaries, had a limited audience. Her CBC sitcom has become a global hit. Nawaz’s ability to address critical issues facing her community in a light-hearted manner has endeared Little Mosque to fans around the world, allowing Muslims communities to open up dialogue on these issues and showing non-Muslims a very different face of Islam than they normally see in the media.