of death, loss, and suffering and provide encouraging messages of hope, loyalty, compassion, and faith. The merging of Disney with Pixar has created a standard brand for children’s fantasies, but there are other films as well that offer some of the clearest moral messages in popular films. These films have struggled with the representation of diversity as well as gender roles, but they are beginning to offer stories that are more empowering for women as well as people of various cultures.
Science fiction has become an extremely popular film genre that continues to evolve as it expresses our increased anxiety about technology and its dangers. Whether it is fears of environmental destruction or the dehumanized world of robots, these films offer cautionary tales that ask us to heed their warnings. Like prophesy in religions, they call us to make a future that is morally responsible lest we suffer the consequences, and they express our dual nature, which can create both utopias and dystopias.
Horror continues to be a popular genre as well, with a diverse set of fears envisioned. Viewers may go to these films for a variety of reasons, including catharsis, the mastery of fears, liminal identification with the monster, and the desire to defeat or at least survive evil. People are both drawn to and yet repelled by that which they see as monstrous, which could be their own desires or the desires of others that they seek to contain and control.
The genre of war movies has been added to this edition. The portrayal of war has varied greatly, alternately glorifying or vilifying it; films with a pacifist bent have depicted the futility of war, but war has also been idealized, whether as propaganda during a conflict or as rationale afterward. Since the United States has been involved in an apparently never-ending “War on Terror” since 2001, the normalization of this situation can be found in films that have increasingly dualistic narratives that justify American involvement, elide political critique, and glorify sacrifice as sacred and noble.
The new conclusion to the book will suggest some of the insights we can gain into popular culture from this form of analysis. Popular culture both reflects and shapes our worldviews and values in ways that are not always recognized so that a greater understanding of these processes can help us be more conscious of the ways in which they affect us. We do not need to passively imbibe messages without thought but can exercise critical reflection on the cultural products put before us if we develop the tools to do so. This book offers a method for examining and understanding popular films as akin to religions, and this can help us evaluate their power and the ways in which they influence us more clearly.
The Definition of Religion
The Limitations of Definitions of Religion
Religion is not an easy thing to define. It is hard to list the requisite characteristics of any cultural phenomenon, given the diversity of cultures and the inevitable variations in their expressions. Defining religion offers special challenges, however, in that it is an area of culture that involves basic beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality, our purpose in the world, and how we find meaning in it. Thus the scholar’s own subjective religious worldview affects the study of the subject matter from the outset, and the judgments imported into our analyses will unavoidably influence how we define religion.
Jonathan Z. Smith has famously stated, “There is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.”1 By this he means that the scholar chooses what to call religion and that it therefore “exists” only as the product of the scholar’s effort. Smith reminds us that the “map is not territory,” that our understanding of religion is not equivalent to the actual cultural phenomena described. “Religion” is a construct we have invented as a label for certain sorts of activities that we classify under this rubric. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as the subject matter we classify as religion or that we cannot say anything about those things we call religions. Even though religion is a word used to describe a social construction that is dependent on humans, that does not make it imaginary in the same way as unicorns. As Kevin Schilbrack points out, politics, sports, and economics are also socially constructed and dependent on human activity, but they relate to things that are nonetheless “real,” such as the results of elections, games, and contracts.2 Furthermore, religion is not only a word used by scholars; it is used by the adherents of the social activities that are called religions. It can be argued, of course, that terms have been imposed on people who did not develop the terminology themselves: Native Americans, Hinduism, and even Christianity are labels created by outsiders to describe those groups, and religion is arguably the same sort of term. And yet in spite of the ideologically tainted histories of such terms and the obvious problems with any sort of generalizations (in that they overlook the differences between the individual things classified under them), people still describe themselves by these terms. It seems absurd to suggest that we stop using such labels at this point, even if the categories are imperfect, as all categories are imperfect: even to point at my car and say “that is an automobile” is to make assumptions about the category and the vehicle so designated that obscure all the other things it is or the fact that it is not identical with all other automobiles.3
Of course, there are more arguments about the definition of religion than about the definition of automobile. That shows that we may be continually redefining the term based on reason and the acquisition of new evidence. We should keep in mind that this process is not innocent, as it may seek to control the things described.4 We must be on our guard for the ideology present in our intellectual judgments as we decide what merits inclusion or exclusion. Later, I briefly discuss some of the ideological judgments implicit in well-known definitions of religion.
Early attempts by Christian thinkers to define the essence of religion unwittingly imported Christian categories into the definition, often assuming that all religions focus on a transcendent being such as the Christian God. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) defined religion as “the feeling of absolute dependence” on that which the Christian calls God so that “to feel oneself absolutely dependent and to be conscious of being in relation with God are one and the same thing.”5 Although Schleiermacher’s definition was broader than those of most Western thinkers before him in that he did not equate religion with belief in God as such, the general feeling he postulates still has as its referent the Western or even the Christian concept of God. A century later, Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), on the basis of more study of world religions than Schleiermacher had undertaken, asserted that religion is the feeling that arises when we encounter the “holy” or “numinous,” that which transcends us so totally that it inspires a mixture of fascination and fear. It evokes an experience of being a creature “submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”6 Otto claimed to have found this experience of radical transcendence in all the world religions he encountered in his travels, but he seems to have neglected those aspects of religions that would not fit his view—for example, the radical this-worldliness of certain forms of Chinese religions or Buddhism.7 In spite of a genuine effort to understand other religions on their own terms, Otto still based his analysis on a concept of divine transcendence developed from a particular Western theological understanding of God. Otto influenced other thinkers in turn: Mircea Eliade defined religion by its relation to “the sacred” in distinction from “the profane,” and although he defined sacrality more broadly than Otto (as religions may have numerous sacred realities, not just one), he still understood religion as always entailing a relationship to a transcendent reality that is radically distinguished from empirical reality.8 Among philosophers of religion, John Hick has made the same claim that religion is defined by a relationship with a transcendent reality.9
The definition of religion offered by Paul Tillich in his later theology sought to overcome many of the shortcomings of previous theological
