Hide That Religion I Do Not Wish to See

Hide That Religion I Do Not Wish to See

by Alain BOUCHARD

Professor at the Collège de Sainte-Foy and lecturer at Université Laval in Quebec City.

The media hold an important place in the daily life of our contemporaries. Watching television to inform oneself is now an activity shared by all social classes, and probably the only contact people have with events. That is why there is more and more talk, particularly since the Gulf War, of the dangers of manipulation by the media. More and more information circulates live thanks to the developments of technology, leaving less and less room for reflection and analysis. This tendency has modified the relationship people have with the news. One can speak today of a consumerist relationship that has taken hold with regard to information. The media treatment of the news has imprinted a form, thus attesting, as McLuhan said, that the medium is the message.

One day, while I was waiting for a researcher for a television interview, my eye was drawn to a laminated sheet bearing the logo of a large Quebec news network. On this sheet one could read the criteria sought for a good report on the news bulletin. The “standards” were presented in the following order:

1. Impact: significant and striking images.

2. Atmosphere: ambient sound to live the emotion.

3. Involvement: reporter in action in the field.

4. Story: the text sticks to the images.

5. Clarity: simple language, short sentences.

Form thus becomes more important than content. What is sought is the effect more than the facts. This more playful approach to the news, however, creates an effect of selection of information according to the needs of the medium. The same goes for the media coverage of the religious.

The religiously correct

In a world where the news becomes spectacle, room is left for emotion more than for analysis. When one seeks emotion, one targets the viewers’ sensitive chords. This play of supply and demand in matters of journalism has put in place a religious correctness on the screens and in the public space. The events of April 2002, concerning the wearing of the kirpan by a young Sikh of Montreal, constitute a good example of what is acceptable today, for public opinion, in matters of religion.

The principal argument used by the opponents of the wearing of this religious symbol is that, nowadays, religion must be practised in private and not in the public square. A veil at home, yes; but at school, no! Any explicit religious representation in the public space becomes ostentatious, it shocks, and people declare themselves outraged. The religious must therefore be discreet and measured to be accepted today. No exuberance, no emotionality when celebrating in matters of religion, there is an implicit norm in circulation of how to practise one’s religion.

If emotion must be excluded, the irrational is too. A religion must be rational and logical to be acceptable, it is forbidden to speak of miracles or of phenomena that defy the laws of nature. A correct religion cannot claim social relevance. It is unthinkable to want to base an argument or a choice on religious foundations. Stephen Carter gave this situation a name: The Culture of Disbelief. In addition, a religion must prove that it does not manipulate and that it leaves all its members totally free, outside the Church is salvation. In sum, the model religion for today is a personal religious practice, leaving room for the individual’s free choice. This practice must take place at home and serve only the person’s flourishing. Religious institutions fit poorly into this portrait, and it is within this relationship to religion that the distinction between the church and the cult is inscribed.

The church

When it is a matter of saving a heritage church, the media mobilise to publicise the situation and defend the interests of Catholicism. But when the bishops take a position on a current issue, the tone changes. Some speak of a chill with the Church resulting in a poor and unjust treatment of that institution. Quebec Catholicism is thus judged by the yardstick of religious correctness. The Church becomes an acceptable institution when its private character is valorised. In the reports devoted to the religious phenomenon over the Easter weekend of 2002, a presentation of the life of the monks of a monastery made the front page of a Quebec City newspaper. It was clear that these religious threatened no one’s religious correctness from the depths of their abbey, but if one of them had decided to organise a public rally to deliver the same message, the media coverage would not have been the same. That is what happened in 1988.

On Sunday 13 March 1988, 25,000 people travelled to see and hear the preacher Pierre Lacroix at the Montreal Forum. At the end of the gathering, a hundred or so miracles took place, to the delight of the crowd and the stupefaction of the media. For The Gazette, this rally was a banal event and the journalist devoted only a few lines to it. The Journal de Québec headlined, on the front page: “Miracle!”, Le Soleil of Quebec City, in its first section, proclaimed: “Miraculous healings at the marathon of love”, La Presse of Montreal trumpeted: “Miracles by the dozen at the Forum!”, while Le Devoir of Montreal spoke on its front page of bewitchment and sorcery to describe the event. By putting the accent on the few spectacular manifestations, not necessarily representative of the evening as a whole, the media created a less than credible image of this gathering.

The mediatised Church is thus a place of service for the consumer of the religiously correct. Its heritage character makes it acceptable. The cult is the reverse. In the media hubbub that followed the Forum event, the question was raised whether the preacher did not embody a form of cult. It is not surprising that a few years later, in the framework of the television series Miséricorde, old clichés about religious life were dredged up, going so far as to compare it to brainwashing, as in a cult.

The cult

The cult, then, is the embodiment of the inverted image of the religiously correct. The cult refuses the private and wants to invade the public. There is talk of the proliferation of the cults, of the invasion and the cultic menace. The cults embody the irrational in our society, which is why it is fashionable in the media to ridicule their beliefs. The loser in this vision of the world is always the follower. He is presented to us as a weak being without resources, as a sick person or as a chronic dependent whom the manipulative cults exploit. The cult is the inversion of autonomy and free choice.

Here is an example that constitutes a good synthesis of the characteristic elements of a cult according to several media: “[L]ike viruses that use the organism itself to reproduce, the gurus are found in the school itself. They infest the centres of power, governments, State corporations, schools, churches, trade unions, media. […] [I]f [you] want[ed] to screw people over and get rich quickly […] You have only to say that the end of the world is approaching, and your followers blow their own brains out while you count your cash. Above all, do not go believing that my sulphurous remarks are aimed at the Church of Scientology, the Raëlians, the Krishnas or the Doughnut-Hole Liberation Front. First, because they really are the friends of God, and because they really did eat Italian poutine with Buddha in the back seat of a UFO.”

This media treatment reveals to us a society afraid of emotional overflows, even minimal ones. In wanting to control the cults, is one not seeking a form of social Ritalin for a problem which is perhaps only a media distortion of a phenomenon that is, all in all, quite banal? But above all, these stories reveal to us the ambiguous relationship Quebec maintains, through the pens of its journalists, with Catholicism. Behind the religiously correct, a whole discourse on Quebec identity is speaking itself, and the fact that it emerges around a Sikh religious symbol is symptomatic. The media thus become a mirror before which the Quebec citizen wants to see only what he wants, and as in the fairy tale, the mirror tells him what he wants to hear.

Alain BOUCHARD is Professor at the Collège de Sainte-Foy and lecturer at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Sciences of Université Laval in Quebec City. President of the Council of the Société Québécoise pour l’étude des religions (SQER)