Abstract
When a leading Swedish newspaper summarized the 2016 version of the annual film festival in Venice, religion was said to have made a grand comeback: ‘God, Jesus, and the whole damn trinity is right there’ (Dagens Nyheter, 2016). But that religion can be said to have made some kind of comeback in the public arena does not only refer to explicit allusions to organized religion, like when a motion picture depicts the life of a pope. In recent years, we have also seen the rise of dedicated academic journals, conferences and courses on the topic of popular culture and religion, acknowledging a trend of religion and spirituality in cultural forms, such as film, popular music and social media.
The origins of the special issue at hand reside in a conference entitled ‘Holy Crap! Intersections of the Popular and the Sacred in Youth Cultures’, organized in August 2014 by the Finnish Youth Research Society and Network in collaboration with the University of Helsinki, Åbo Akademi University, Music Archive JAPA 1 and UskoMus 2 Research Network. The aim of the conference was on the one hand to examine the understandings of popular and youth cultures in the context of (post)secularization, re-enchantment and the emergence of alternative spiritualities. On the other hand, by analyzing the associated cultural and social changes, the conference sought to generate and enhance interdisciplinary exchange of ideas among youth studies, cultural studies, religious studies and the broader field of humanities and social sciences.
The same applies by and large to this special issue of YOUNG, and in the individual articles these issues are tackled by focusing on such topics as the importance of fiction films as a source for moral and spiritual reflection (Axelson), young people’s conceptualizations of the sacred (Baring et al., Ranta et al.), the production and transmission of religion in toys (Undheim) and the participation of young people in religious social justice initiatives (Winter). The articles are useful not only in foregrounding the intersections at play but also in questioning the three core concepts to begin with. In other words, in this kind of intersectional analysis one needs to be mindful of the multidimensionality and flexibility of the popular, the sacred and the youth, and of the criteria involved in defining them for analytical purposes. (cf. Häger and Lövheim, 2007).
The Popular
In the twenty-first century, a significant body of research has emerged attempting to re-evaluate the significance of religions, or to ‘rescript the sacred’ (Santana and Erickson, 2008), through analyzing popular cultural phenomena. An important background factor here is the apparent change in the religious sphere whereby conventional institutional religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, have been challenged by various forms of alternative spiritualities, whether labelled New Religious Movements (NRMs), paganism or whatever. This change has been theorized, for instance, in terms of post-secularization and re-enchantment which both refer to the possibility to broaden the ethics and values of modernist secular states through world’s religions, traditional cultures and emergent spiritual movements (James, 2007; Partridge, 2004–05). According to some, the social and societal functions served by religions are increasingly being addressed by forms of popular culture (Till, 2010), while institutional religions and religious subcultures adopt popular cultural artefacts and modes of narration as means of reinforcing identity and communicating religious traditions across generations (Clark, 2007: 20).
As a designator of a cultural sphere, however, the popular is an exceptionally flexible and multidimensional epithet. This is evident also in the definitions offered in the studies on religion and popular culture, although quite often there is a tendency to oversimplify the issue by defining popular culture so broadly that the whole notion becomes redundant. An example of this is provided by the influential work of Gordon Lynch and his equation of popular culture with ‘the shared environment, practices, and resources of everyday life’ (2005: 15) or ‘everyday cultural resources and practices in late modern society’ (2007: 162). One can also encounter breakdowns of popular culture where emphasis is laid on commercial production, mass mediation, everyday practices, leisure, lifestyle, consumption, identification, social distinction, meanings and even the unconscious (see Clark, 2007: 8–9), without considering how, particularly in capitalist societies that are saturated by mass media, these aspects define virtually all forms of cultural activity. As a consequence, ‘[i]tems of popular culture […] can also include what we might call “high culture” things’ (Clark, 2007: 8) in a rather purpose-oriented way. One may ask, for instance, what goals does the inclusion of avant-garde jazz in the definition of popular music ultimately serve (see Partridge, 2014), as it is highly unlikely that avant-garde jazz musicians label their products thus?
Admittedly, the risks of all-encompassing and purpose-driven definitions of popular culture have been duly recognized within religious studies. Lynch (2007: 162) for one notes that the term ‘can have the implicit effect of reinforcing the ideologically-loaded binary of high/low culture’ and that ‘the barriers and unhelpful assumptions generated by [it] often out-weigh its value’. David Morgan (2007: 21) in turn stresses the importance of asking ‘[w]hat’s not popular’ and ‘if “popular culture” really means anything as critical nomenclature anymore’. While his emphasis on the ‘p-word’ implies a suggestion to consider the term’s substance more closely, he equates popular culture straightforwardly with ‘common forms of leisure, commerce, and entertainment’ and in fact suggests replacing it with the notion of common culture (Morgan, 2007: 21, 24), instead of offering a more elaborate definition or discussing the multidimensionality of the popular and its implications in detail.
In the latter task, on the basis of conceptual history one may first of all distinguish between at least four senses of popular culture: ‘inferior kinds of work[,] work deliberately setting out to win favour[,] well-liked by many people [and] the culture actually made by people for themselves’ (Williams, 1983: 237). These form the basis for theorizations of popular culture’s aesthetic, sociological, quantitative and folk dimensions, respectively, and can be further juxtaposed to the political and postmodern dimensions that build on sub- and countercultural aspects and a conflation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of expression (Storey, 2009: 5–13). Interestingly enough, religious phenomena are not included in these theoretical musings, and thus one might ask what kind of ‘rescriptures’ they might yield in terms of conceptualizing the popular and possibly reconstituting it as critical nomenclature. For instance, in the field of music one could delve a little deeper into hymns and (re)consider them not only as participatory ‘popular’ forms but also as sources of recognizable ‘popular’ emotional tropes and deeply implicated in ‘the process of cultural imperialism, spreading Western musical forms East and South’ alongside capitalist music industry (Frith, 2001: 106–07). This line of thinking foregrounds the significance of institutional religions as financial and commercial entities, as well as the nature of religious movements as quantitatively popular by definition.
The Sacred
As implied by the ‘rescriptive’ attempts, the notion of the sacred is often considered as ‘the defining essential of religion’ (Pals, 2006: 13). In the ‘classics’ of the study of religions, the sacred is linked to such issues as encountering something exceptionally overwhelming and experiencing a presence of the other-worldly, ‘the numinous’ (Otto, 1990), as well as organizing communities by setting apart certain things that are deemed the antithesis of the ‘profane’ and worthy of special respect and protection through various prohibitive measures (Durkheim, 1995). Furthermore, in the separation of the sacred from the profane, ideas about the overpowering controlling force of the former have been put forth, thence treating religion as a conduit for promoting contact with it (Eliade, 1968).
While all these influential strands of study stem from an interest towards religion(s), it is evident already in them that the sacred should not be taken as a synonym for ‘religious’. The classics share an interest towards ‘archaic peoples’ in their quest to ascertain the ‘elementary forms’ of religious thinking and practices, and as the communities and societies in question were less stratified than modern ones, the sacred becomes intimately connected to that which by later criteria is axiomatically labelled as religious (Willander, 2013, 2014). In the context of Western secular societies, it may be yet argued that while the explicitly religious may have lost much of its significance as an organizing principle, ‘the intuition of the sacred remains a permanent feature of human thought and activity’ and ‘people display it in surprising, unconscious ways’ (Pals, 2006: 200).
Thus, it becomes important to recognize the broader implications of the notion of the sacred, especially in relation to identity construction. Instead of treating the sacred as an exclusive property of religions, there is a need to investigate the multiple forms of it and the ways in which they exert absolute, normative claims on social life (Lynch, 2012). Within this line of thinking, the sacred becomes part of a widely applicable cultural logic that is based on an idea of a boundary between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, and whose importance rests on its polysemy: It comes into being as a category in any value-laden situation to mark the inviolability of the boundaries of an entity in times of crises or in periods of transformations taking place in temporal or spatial categories of the society. The sacred forms a boundary that can either strengthen the inside against the dangers or impurities of the outside or it can just as well open up the inside in order to fuse into the outside. (Anttonen, 2000: 204)
The implications of such an inclusive conceptualization of the sacred become particularly pronounced in the context of multiculturalism and neoliberal capitalism. Thus, it may be argued that an entity’s boundaries may be challenged or violated by the presence of ‘the alien Other’ on the one hand, while on the other such violations pertain significantly to ‘economic activity and its rationality’ (Thompson, 1998: 101). Alongside the worship of Mammon, there are several different belief systems that may be approached in a similar vein, recognizing also that often religious maxims intertwine with political, nationalistic, legal, economic, educational and subcultural ones. As a consequence, it may be postulated that at the centre of any society there are ‘competing sacred visions’ and moral ambiguities that may lead to ‘collective identification with idealized symbolic forms that can legitimize destructive forms of thinking, feeling, and acting’ (Lynch, 2012: 40, 115).
The multiple and competing forms of the sacred accrue further significance when examined against the processes of post-secularization and re-enchantment. Also here, questions of multiculturalism are relevant, as the common ‘narrower’ version of it condenses cultural diversity into immigration-based ‘ethno-religious mix’ (Modood, 2007: 2, 8). In more theoretical terms, at issue is how migrant transnational practices interrelate with religious transformations, especially with respect to the development of diasporas and their generational dynamics. Within postcolonial studies in turn, it has been pointed out that on the basis of Western secular rationalism there has been a tendency to dismiss non-European belief systems either by mystifying them as irrational forms of magic or romanticizing them in the name of postmodern relativism (Featherstone, 2005: 133–35; Vertovec, 2009: 128–40). Whatever the case, it is undeniable that in the contemporary world, virtually regardless of the location, there are myriad forms and ideas of the sacred that co-exist, and one of the key issues is whether or not this co-existence is accepted, tolerated and even supported.
The Youth
Whether at issue is the formation of new cultural practices or acceptance of religious multiplicity, young people hold a key position. And again, recognizing the importance of migration and transnationalism is paramount, as it has been noted that especially the progeny of immigrants are set apart from their parents by a variety of factors that relate to religion: education in Western schools and the inculcation of discursive practices belonging to secular and civil society; youth dissatisfaction with conservative community leaders and religious teachers who do not understand the position of post-migrant youth; growth of ‘vernacular’ religious traditions across Europe; compartmentalization of religion […]; and immersion in American/European popular youth culture. (Vertovec, 2009: 140)
More generally, it may be maintained that it is particularly young people’s ‘engagement with religion, religious ideas and institutions that tell us how resilient beliefs and practices are, and how religions might adapt, transform and innovate in relation to wider social and cultural trends’ (Collins-Mayo, 2010: 1).
By and large, the same could be said of youth’s importance for those aspects of cultural activity that are and become prefixed with the epithet ‘popular’. There is nevertheless an apparent risk to conceptualize youth culture as an equivalent of popular culture—as insinuated by the phrase ‘popular youth culture’ above. This would belittle not only the diversity of young people’s cultural practices but also the multigenerationality of popular culture (whichever way defined).
Indeed, there are pertinent reasons to question the unambiguity of ‘youth’ as well. Unlike the popular and the sacred, however, the category of youth is different with respect to the level of abstraction due to its inextricable connection to ageing and therefore to a fundamental property of organic existence. Conventionally, youth refers to a certain age cohort; EU Youth Report 2015, for instance, focuses on the ages 15–29 (European Commission, 2016). This notwithstanding, it is instructive to remember that a ‘young’ age is, effectively, a relative thing. Thus, clear-cut definitions of youth and youth culture on the basis of people’s age have in recent decades been augmented by expositions that foreground attitudes, values and ways of life, regardless of the physical age of the young in question. As a result, ‘the straightforward equation of youth cultures with the young has become more difficult to sustain’ and the groups ‘once unproblematically referred to as youth cultures are now increasingly multigenerational’ (Bennett and Hodkinson, 2013: 2).
The fact nonetheless remains that due to physiological reasons that pertain in no small degree to sexual maturity, the teenage years are considered in all societies as a crucial phase of transition towards adulthood and independence. This phase, in turn, is deeply interlinked with conceptualizations of the sacred, as it is virtually without an exception conditioned by various regulations and prohibitions that most often concern marriages and civil unions, purchasing alcohol, operating motor vehicles and sterilization without a medical reason. Equally importantly, the coming of age is greeted and associated with numerous rituals all over the world—the ‘coolest’ of which, according to one online source, are the Jewish bar- and bat-mitzvah, the (Amazonian) Sateré-Mawé bullet ant initiation, the North American ‘sweet sixteen’ party, the Amish rumspringa, the Apache sunrise ceremony and the Hispanic quinceañera (Picone, 2015). A counterpart for these respectable or otherwise acceptable rites of passage is of course constituted by the moral panics emanating from the adult establishment. A notorious example of this is the Parents [sic] Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the USA and its eventually successful campaign in 1985 to label ‘morally dubious’ recordings with a sticker reading ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Content’; its list of the most objectionable songs (aka the Filthy Fifteen) included mostly ones that were denounced on the grounds of sexual content, and also two because of ‘occult’.
Using their different cases, the articles in this special issue thus contribute to highlighting how these categories—the popular, the sacred and the youth—just evade being taken for granted, provoking us as researchers to reconsider concepts and methods. Thanks to interdisciplinary research, new insights can be won while at the same time also raise questions for further enquiry in a promising field.