Foreword

Summary

For much of the 20th century journalists and programme makers in the mainstream media of advanced industrial societies showed relatively little interest in stories about religion. ‘The religion beat’ and the ‘god slot’ tended to be among the least prestigious areas of the media in which to work – with some honourable exceptions such as the New York Times and Le Monde. The place of religion in the graphic and performing arts was also a faint echo of the prominence that it had enjoyed in previous centuries. But this changed in the 1990s when the public profile of religion began to increase. Not only did the news value of religious groups go up, but public curiosity about aspects of religion also heightened. The reasons for – and the timing of – these changes make the chapters in this edited collection particularly opportune and helpful in explaining the balance between continuity and change in spirituality and religion. The point about continuity is important, for public interest and involvement in religion had never declined in some regions of the world, including significant sections of technologically sophisticated societies.

There is no point in looking for a single event or factor that kick-started the revival of public interest in religion towards the end of the 20th century. It was more a question of separate developments that have criss-crossed in some complicated ways. Let me take the example of the regimes in Central and Eastern Europe that underwent rapid – if uneven – transformation in the early 1990s in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse and the removal of the most repressive parts of the apparatus that had previously excluded religions from the public sphere. Various Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic church were among those that regained control over their own activities and resources. As a result, levels of participation in religious activities and rates of professed beliefs increased sharply, ensuring that religious voices were once again heard in public life. The public profile of religion increased dramatically in a few years.

What is even more interesting from my point of view, however, is that many Evangelical and Pentecostal churches also took advantage of the relatively free market for religions at that time and launched recruitment campaigns in all the formerly state socialist countries.