29 - New Technologies

Summary

Religions exist through their mediation. Without symbols, signs, texts, practices, codes, and languages, religions could not be represented, shared, or understood. Certainly the means of their mediation vary widely across time and across cultures. It is significant of so-called primitive religions that they used rudimentary systems of communication, and of more modern religions that they use the modern media. This is of course to say that the mediation of religion is significant of its context in time or space, a point that seems banal, but at the same time is deeply significant. It means that the most basic terms of engagement with and by religion are terms that are generated outside the religion itself. To be known and expressed, religions may need to depend on logics that are cultural or social more than they are religious. Indeed, any religion – and any religious mediation – must be embedded in its cultural or social context almost by definition. The fact that these contexts are typified by particular methods and means of communication – and thus mediation – means that the practices and technologies of communication have always been essential to religion, and that changes in those technologies have at least the potential of bringing about changes in the nature of religion.

It has been commonplace in relation to Christianity to note the important effects that a shift in communication technology – the development of movable type printing – had on religion. While it is probably not correct to credit printing with encouraging the Reformation, it is clear that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation each carried the signature of printing as a technology and as a social force. The emergence of printing as a commercial enterprise meant that a new force of knowledge production arose alongside the church and the state, and that this force came to vie with those sectors for authority and legitimacy in Early Modern Europe.