Making the American Religious Fringe
Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993
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- USD 29.99
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- USD 29.99
Descripción editorial
In an examination of religion coverage in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Ebony, Christianity Today, National Review, and other news and special interest magazines, Sean McCloud combines religious history and social theory to analyze how and why mass-market magazines depicted religions as "mainstream" or "fringe" in the post-World War II United States. McCloud argues that in assuming an American mainstream that was white, middle class, and religiously liberal, journalists in the largest magazines, under the guise of objective reporting, offered a spiritual apologetics for the dominant social order.
McCloud analyzes articles on a wide range of religious movements from the 1950s through the early 1990s, including Pentecostalism, the Nation of Islam, California cults, the Jesus movement, South Asian gurus, and occult spirituality. He shows that, in portraying certain beliefs as "fringe," magazines evoked long-standing debates in American religious history about emotional versus rational religion, exotic versus familiar spirituality, and normal versus abnormal levels of piety. He also traces the shifting line between mainstream and fringe, showing how such boundary shifts coincided with larger changes in society, culture, and the magazine industry. McCloud's astute analysis helps us understand both broad conceptions of religion in the United States and the role of mass media in American society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For decades people of faith have expressed dismay at the print media's coverage of religion and religious issues. McCloud's thorough and scholarly analysis of stories in leading newspapers, newsmagazines and consumer magazines over four decades offers tangible evidence of the reasons for their complaints. Starting with the transition away from the 1950s coverage of annual denominational meetings, prompted in part by the emergence of "California cults," McCloud traces the media's nearly homogeneous approach to covering such groups as the Nation of Islam, Hare Krishna, the Jesus People, Satanists, Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and Jim Jones's Peoples Temple, culminating with the Branch Davidian tragedy in Waco in 1993. Some stories took on a life of their own, such as accounts of the widespread and unconfirmed existence of Satanic cults in mainstream society. Coverage spilled over from newsmagazines into local newspapers and consumer magazines like Vanity Fair and Ms., perpetuating rumors that grave-robbing Satanists were lying in wait to abduct children for their human sacrifice rituals. Throughout, McCloud depicts some journalists as "heresiologists" who, through the events they chose to cover, the attention they gave to those events, and the very words they used, became self-appointed arbiters in determining what was mainstream religion and what was not. McCloud also examines journalistic accounts of brainwashing by cults and the deprogramming of cult members. McCloud's outstanding work should leave little doubt about the manipulation of public opinion by the news media whether intentional or not and the subconscious biases reporters bring to their work.
