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Introduction : the media and religious authority / Stewart M. Hoover -- Religious authority in the media age / Stewart M. Hoover -- The media and religious authority from ancient to modern / Peter Horsfield -- Media and (vicarious) religion : two levels of religious authority / Alf Linderman -- Religious authority and social media branding in a culture of religious celebrification / Pauline Hope Cheong -- Satellite publics : moral identity and new media in Moroccan Islam / Bahíyyah Maroon -- Examining all the realms of nature : evidence, insight, and the quest for knowledge in modern Thailand / Emily Zeamer -- Cyber memorial zones and shamanic inheritance in Korea / Joonseong Lee -- Baadaass mamas : race, sex, and afro-religiosity in Sankofa / Montré Aza Missouri -- Techno-vodou : transnational flows in the spiritual marketplace / Alexandra Boutros -- Evangelical media for youth and religious authority in Brazil / Karina Kosicki Bellotti -- The authority of the image : sex, religion, and the text/image conflict in Craig Thompson's Blankets / Christine Hoff Kraemer -- Afterword : the media and religious authority / Lynn Schofield Clark

Religion continues to evolve on both sides of the North Atlantic. In both contexts, traditional ways of understanding religion are confronted by new realities. The emerging and growing influence of modern media and media institutions are important causes of these changes. It is no longer possible to think of 'religion' and 'secular' as separate categories when 'secular' media increasingly define and deploy religious images, interests, and networks, displacing the influence of traditional authorities. The role of media in these trends is especially obvious in relation the emerging politics of populism, nationalism, and retrenchment. The media operate in a number of registers in these relations, including their textual, institutional, and practical dimensions.

This article explores the emergent politics of the 21st century through an analysis of the interactions of media and religion in these relations. It argues that to fully understand the dynamics underlying the new forms of populism emerging across the globe, it is necessary to account for them as movements of religious nationalism encompassing race, gender, and nostalgia, made possible by modern media imaginaries. The article argues that disciplined and substantive work on religion remains a lacuna within media and cultural studies, and that its explorations provide an example of how such work could address this critical gap. It concludes by suggesting a specific theoretical approach rooted in its consideration of relations of religion and media: that we think of media texts that circulate in these discourses of religious nationalism as "affective infrastructures" that do important work in making unstable and contradictory imaginaries possible and weaponizing them to political purpose.

Abstract
Recent struggles over the implications of migration have fueled transformational politics on both sides of the Atlantic. At the center of this are questions of identity, value, long-standing standards of human rights and even enlightenment categories of modernity. Both religion and media play central – even determinative – roles in these debates. This article will argue that scholarships focused on identity "imaginaries" are critical to understanding these discourses and this politics. This scholarship must inquire into both "sides" of migration, both the conceptual worlds of those who wish to move, and the conceptual worlds of those who receive (or attempt to not receive) them. This article will look at the latter through a deep historicist inquiry into the mediation of Protestantism as a central determinative force in the establishment of contemporary conditions of politics in relation to migration in the North Atlantic West. Protestantism's role in European modernity is well-known, as is its deep interconnection with evolving technologies and means of communication and practices of mediation. This article seeks to understand religion-inflected discourses of nationalism and identity as functions of Protestant social and media instrumentality.

The events in Lafayette Square in Washington on June 1, 2020, in which President Trump displayed a Bible in front of St. John's Church, constitutes a heuristic lens through which to explore the potential of serious scholarship on religion. Culturalist Media Studies, as a field, has traditionally ignored religion and it now does so at its peril, leaving it increasingly unable to account for the emergent political formations of the post-Brexit era. June 1 provided a rich tapestry of visual, iconic, symbolic, discursive, and agonistic formations through which to explore how religion, media, and culture are present in complex and layered ways and that careful scholarship can deepen knowledge and understanding about contemporary social and cultural life.

This essay seeks to introduce more substantive attention to religion into the field of media studies. It argues that religion persists in culture and politics, as demonstrated by political upheavals in the North Atlantic West, and that media scholarship lacks critical theoretical and conceptual resources to address that fact. The essay calls for careful historicism and, as a heuristic, interrogates American Protestantism as a cultural, political, and media project. It references emerging scholarships to suggest ways that Protestantism is expressed as a politics in relation to the public and domestic spheres.

This essay seeks to introduce more substantive attention to religion into the field of media studies. It argues that religion persists in culture and politics, as demonstrated by political upheavals in the North Atlantic West, and that media scholarship lacks critical theoretical and conceptual resources to address that fact. The essay calls for careful historicism and, as a heuristic, interrogates American Protestantism as a cultural, political, and media project. It references emerging scholarships to suggest ways that Protestantism is expressed as a politics in relation to the public and domestic spheres.