Jesus in Disneyland E-Book

David Lyon

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 394

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this lively and accessible study, David Lyon explores the relationship between religion and postmodernity, through the central metaphor of 'Jesus in Disneyland.'

Leseprobe

Jesus in Disneyland

Religion in Postmodern Times

David Lyon

Polity Press

Copyright © David Lyon 2000

The right of David Lyon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2004, 2005, 2008

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lyon, David, 1948–

Jesus in Disneyland : religion in postmodern times / David Lyon.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7456-1488-5 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-1489-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN978-0-7456-6937-3 (eBook)

1. Postmodernism—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Religion—History—20th century.

I. Title.

BR115.P74 L96 2000

2000—dc21

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1   Meeting Jesus in Disneyland

Disney’s social impact

Modern and postmodern

Religion and social change

Authority and identity, space and time

Religion in or of theme parks?

2   Faith’s Fate

Mistaking secularization

An ambiguous legacy

Dismantling secularization

Revival, re-enchantment, restructuring

3   Postmodern Premonitions

Postmodern reconnaissance

Split canopy to floating signs

Beyond church and state

The net and the self

Postmodern pilgrims

Situating the postmodern

4   Signs of the Times

Media power

Religious communication

Trials of televangelism

Going to cyberchurch

5   Shopping for a Self

Postmodern consumption

Religious consumers

Constructing identities

6   A Global Spirit

Sacred landscapes

Glocalized blessings at Toronto

Flowing together

Global fundamentalisms

Places and spaces

7   Telescoped Time

Compressing time

Timeless time

The end of history

Memory and hope

8   Faith’s Future

Recollecting

Rethinking

Reshaping

Jesus and Disneyland

Notes

Bibliography

Subject Index

Name Index

Acknowledgements

I wish to offer sincere thanks to a number of institutions and people who have helped this project come to fruition. Making books is never a solitary pastime, even though actually writing them is. I am very dependent on a far-flung as well as a local community of friends and colleagues who patiently give their time and their insights in ways that I could never hope to reciprocate.

This book grew out of ideas first explored in meetings about religion and the postmodern in the early 1990s. One was in the Unicorn Guest House in Glastonbury, UK, where the New Age was the theme, and another was in the British Sociological Association Study Group on the Sociology of Religion, meeting at Bristol. Kind invitations to deliver lectures, first the Birks Lectures at McGill University in 1994, and then the Murrin Lectures at the University of British Columbia in 1995, plus an all-too-brief stint as professeur invité at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1996 and a conference in Sydney, Australia, in 1997, gave me opportunities to try to pull the materials together in a coherent form. In addition, involvement with the Research Unit on Religion and Society at Queen’s University, and with my long-suffering co-director, Marguerite Van Die, stimulated work on this title, as did critical responses to Post-modernity, to which I see this present book as in some ways complementary, and teaching sessions at summer school at Regent College in Vancouver in 1996 and 1998.

I acknowledge several intellectual debts, particularly to Nancy Ammerman, Zygmunt Bauman, James Beckford, Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, David Martin, the late George Rawlyk, and Robert Wuthnow. Many people have read chapters, sections, or the whole book, and I am profoundly grateful to all. They include Phil Apol, Gary Bouma, John Bowen, Alan Bryman, Tony Capon, Les Casson, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Mark Hutchinson, Margaret Poloma, Greg Smith, and especially Grace Davie, David Ley, Philip Sampson, and Bill Van Groningen. Zoë Ezinga and Jenn Poudrier helped me prepare the bibliography, abi lyon prepared the index. Some students in my sociology of religion class at Queen’s also gave me very insightful and honest feedback. Gill Motley, Lynn Dunlop and Pam Thomas at Polity have been consistently helpful and patient with me. Thank you. I take responsibility, of course, for what use I have made of this kind help.

Sue, Tim, abi, Mynh, and Josh – who first brought to my attention the Jesus in Disneyland event – also contributed more than they know by way of encouragement, support, and love.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

David LyonKingston, Ontario

Preface

This book is about the changing fortunes of religion in postmodern times. That first sentence may already have you worried or irritated. The “changing fortunes” sounds like a secular sociological account, unpalatable to those with sincere religious commitments. “Religion” smacks of conventional, organized religiosity, inappropriate to today’s world of spiritualities and seekers. And as for “postmodern” – it is a passing philosophical fad, so why waste time trying to force false connections between it and serious stuff like religion?

Not so fast. What follows is a sociological account, but it is not unsympathetic to faith. Indeed, it suggests that faith has been underplayed and underestimated in sociology. “Religion,” admittedly, is a shorthand, just to give some sense of what the book is all about. I use the term mainly in the context of institutional religiosity, which is indeed in pretty poor shape in contexts most directly touched by the postmodern. But I argue that the religious realm, including faith and spirituality, is far from dormant, let alone dead. Religiosity does find different modes of expression, however, and this relates to context. In premodern times, religiosity was often expressed in very traditional ways, which were upset by the coming of modernity. However, modernity itself is currently in the throes of remarkable and profound changes, but, because it is not clear that we shall ever be able adequately to encapsulate those changes in one concept, the more tentative “post-modernity” is used to sum up a movement, a debate, a set of tendencies: much more, in other words, than a philosophical fad (though I do not deny that its faddish features also exist).

All books have biographical as well as bibliographical genealogies, and it may help some readers to understand the family tree of this one. Over a decade ago a book of mine appeared bearing the title The Steeple’s Shadow: On the Myths and Realities of Secularization.1 Its central metaphor – the steeple’s shadow – raised questions about the reach and scope of institutional religion. If once the steeple’s shadow stretched over much social life in medieval and early modern Europe, what has happened in the modern era? A strong version of the secularization thesis suggests that, not only has the shadow contracted significantly, but, with that diminution of churchly influence, societies are simply less religious than they once were. There is something to this, of course. If one assumes that religion must take institutional forms, and that those institutions will exert social, political, cultural, economic impacts, then contracting institutions – seen in declining pew-populations and diminishing financial bases – will spell shrinking social shadows.

But there are other ways of considering the question. The idea of secularization, if taken to refer beyond institutional religiosity to the attenuation of all forms of faith, spirituality, and belief, is plainly mistaken. Even if one holds to the institutional definition, it is clear that on a global scale the fortunes of Christianity, not to mention other faiths such as Islam, are far from feeble. Much secularization theory is rooted in a more general theory about the modern world, that the latter has become progressively less hospitable, at least to certain kinds of religiosity. But this may be modified, in multiple ways. For a start, modernity is in part the product of religious activity and belief, so setting the one over against the other in a simplistic fashion is very misleading. For another thing, religious phenomena are never static; a constant process of renewal, relocation, restructuring, and resurgence appears to occur. Huge variations exist today between patterns of practice in Europe, North America, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim, and it becomes increasingly hard to see how one theory can fit all cases. At any rate, in The Steeple’s Shadow I showed how secularization theory was being questioned, and argued that alternatives to its most misleading variants were becoming available. Among other things, I argued that the chief cause of secularization – modernity – was itself in question.

In the mid-1990s I involved myself more directly in the debate over modernity, publishing a small book that introduced and analyzed the concept of postmodernity.2 In particular, I stressed that postmodernity refers to changing social conditions and not only to the well-known playfulness, parody, and pastiche of postmodernism. The changing social conditions have to do especially with the expansion of new communication and information technologies (CITs), along with the spread of consumerism, in the later part of the twentieth century. These two together have grown so fast and so far that they have altered the contours of what was conventionally thought of as modernity. The latter condition has not somehow gone away or been superseded; rather it has been reshaped, and seen in quite new ways. The indicators are varied, and include global tourism and travel, as well as television and the Internet. These have to be seen in the context of the restructuring of corporations and of cities, the increasing obsolescence of the nation state, and the fragmentation of labor and of lifestyles, as the single-occupation career declines and as cultural identities and alignments proliferate.

Seen this way, some connections with postmodernism become more evident, particularly insofar as CITs and consumerism encourage a relativism of belief systems. For postmodernism, as understood in this book, concerns the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of life. TV helps to dissolve the boundaries between high and low culture, and to turn simulation into a major aspect of cultural production. Questions of ideology, belief, and culture are raised here, and, above all, ideas associated with classic modernity are challenged. Indeed, at one level, postmodernism is all about the demise of the grand narratives, the superstories of modern times, the decline of ideological commitment to big ideas like the nation state or progress. Within postmodernism, Reason loses its capital R, science softens its hard edges, and knowledge is seen – and felt – as (con)textual, local, and relative.

In Postmodernity, as in The Steeple’s Shadow, I accent the importance of the everyday, the mundane, the ordinary. Despite the popularity of some rationalistic accounts of religion, secularization cannot sensibly be viewed as the steadily rising superiority of science over traditional beliefs. This is one “metanarrative” that has fallen on hard times. Nor is the postmodern challenge to faith best understood cognitively. Postmodern relativism may eat corrosively into the belief-content of some theological formulae at an elite intellectual level – and this threat ought not to be underestimated – but the gauntlet is more deeply and definitively thrown down by the social currents of postmodernity. It is in the commodification of everyday life and the impact of mass consumer cultures, facilitated by the CITs, that the impacts on faith and practice are felt most deeply. That is, they are experienced here, even if they are not necessarily understood.

This is why I chose the metaphor of Jesus in Disneyland for this book, because it neatly links together social and cultural features of the postmodern, while at the same time retaining some thoroughly modern characteristics. The world of simulations, which disturb or destroy a (modern) sense of reality, is seen delightfully in Disneyland. Yet those simulations are highly dependent upon the highest of high technology. They are products of modernist rationality that are celebrated in their shrine at Disneyland, the EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) Center. Disneyland, Disney World, Disneyland Paris, Disneyland Tokyo, and so on are also global tourist magnets, but, once there, one can also indulge in virtual tourism in almost any country you care to name. Heritage becomes instant and the immediate purges the historical memory, even as it is simulated in film footage and hands-on interactive experiences. Farewell to Hugo’s hunchback; hello to safe suffering.

In this book, then, the themes examined in The Steeple’s Shadow and in Postmodernity are explored further. I draw on many kinds of evidence, and rely on many other writers and sources, in order to paint the picture that I present here. As far as history and sociology are concerned, it seems important to listen to two kinds of voices in particular – those that allow themselves to be expressed in major surveys and opinion polls, and those that speak in more intimate settings of the small-scale case study. I refer to several of the latter, and also to the results of some large-scale surveys, which offer some impressions of overall situations. In particular, I make occasional reference to a major survey carried out in 1996 entitled “God and Society in North America,” which garnered some data for a research project that I co-direct with Marguerite Van Die.3 Among other things, this showed very clearly how much religious activity – often relating to orthodox belief – goes on outside conventional settings of churches and, for that matter, mosques and synagogues. This is a tremendously important aspect of contemporary religiosity, central to religion in postmodern times.

The picture I paint is done with a broad brush. It is impressionistic, relying on image and intimation as much as on the kinds of evidence mentioned above. Despite the definitive sounding subtitle – religion in postmodern times – readers seeking a comprehensive or detailed account will have to look elsewhere. But for those curious about the hints, the reports, the rumours of religion in the emerging postmodern landscape, I hope that what is caught in my wide-angle ‘scope will help you see the world in a different way.

David Lyon

1

Meeting Jesus in Disneyland

It is Disneyland that is authentic here! The cinema and TV are America’s reality! The freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed, deserts – these are America, not the galleries, the churches, the culture.

Jean Baudrillard1

The scene is Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland. Not unusually, 10,000 people are streaming through the turnstiles. Only today they are heading for a Harvest Day Crusade. In place of the regular attractions and rides, Christian artists perform at several stages through the park, and an evangelist, Greg Laurie, preaches a gospel message. While some find the juxtaposition somewhat incongruous (has not the Disney Corporation expanded its family values to include gays and lesbians? is beer not sold here?) the organizers have no qualms about it: “We saw Disneyland as an opportunity to bring God’s kingdom to the Magic Kingdom. We felt that, as they opened the door to us to share Christ, we wouldn’t turn down the opportunity just because other things take place there. Jesus is the example for this.”2

Jesus in Disneyland. A bizarre sounding collaboration. Or is it? Just why does it appear so odd? At first blush, the objection could be that an ancient, premodern religion is found side-by-side, or, more accurately, interacting with, the epitome of postmodern culture – the artificial, simulated, virtual, fantasy world of Disney. It is not as if this religious group is merely using the park as a stadium for its event. To a considerable extent they adopt the styles, the fashions, even the attitudes of Disneyland. And they are not alone. Other groups – such as at the annual evangelical Spring Harvest weeks at Butlin’s Holiday Camps or at Christian events at Legoland in the UK, and at numerous Christian theme parks, such as Logosland in Ontario – use similar venues and methods.

It seems like an anachronism. Two vastly different historical eras are telescoped incongruously into one, within the gates of a theme park. Not only do the two seem historically out of place; culturally, too, they clash. The simply-dressed, sandal-clad, travelling rabbi who quietly admitted to close associates that he was God’s promised Messiah – Jesus – also has connections with the self-advertising, technologically complex, consumer culture of comfortable California? Anachronism or not, such things occur, especially in America.

But the problem is not just one of oddity. This collusion – or collision – of cultures also takes place in a context that was once supposed to have erased most traces of conventional religion from daily life. It is often said that when premodern religions met modernity, from the seventeenth century onwards, relations were less than cordial. The scientific-technological revolution, the burgeoning of industrial capitalism, and the rise of urbanism and democratic polities often had an abrasive and corrosive effect on organized religion. The mathematician LaPlace took the trouble to inform the French emperor that he “had no need of the hypothesis” of God.3 For many others, the process was implicit, whereby the “hypothesis” was for all practical purposes quietly dropped. Religious vestiges gradually succumbed to the evolutionary forces of modernity. Or so the story goes.

All this, and more, makes it hard to account for the Jesus in Disneyland event. Yet it occurred. And, apart from a few raised eyebrows, it was not treated by those involved as an anomaly or an isolated California quirk. Perhaps the difficulty is in the eye of the beholder? Those accustomed to the predominantly secular discourse of contemporary politics, mass media, or academe apparently have a harder time coping with Jesus in Disneyland than those who actually attended this event. This is not meant to imply that there is no anomaly, or that the view from below, which cheerfully harmonizes the surface contradictions, is in fact superior or correct. Nor do I mean to propose, however, that the secular discourse has it right either. Rather, I suggest that both perspectives should be problematized – held up for serious and careful examination – as a prelude to a better accounting for the event.

In what follows, I offer just such a problematizing account, as an introduction to the broad themes of this book. While the Jesus in Disneyland event is interesting in its own right, it also opens a fascinating window on contemporary religion and society. Conventional religion – in this case Christianity, but similar analysis can be made of other religions – is caught at a curious cultural juncture. Disneyland captures several crucial features of this, as the theme parks epitomize the tensions of modernity. Both modern and postmodern elements may be discerned at Disneyland, and today religious life is drawn by the pull of both gravitational fields.

Disneyland is a social and cultural symbol of our times. In particular, Disneyland is a trope for the democratization of culture, including religion.4 An event like the one noted here raises questions about the deregulation of religion. Disneyland also points up the ambiguities and ironies of modernity and postmodernity, as well as their sources, the proliferation of new communications media, and the growth of consumerism. Disneyland as a cultural symbol also hints strongly at questions of authority and identity, and of time and space, each of which is crucial for a contemporary understanding of religion, spirituality, and faith.

Disney’s social impact

There can be little doubt that Disney’s influence is universal. Wherever it is possible to see a television or a cinema screen, Disney characters will not be strangers. And in more and more world tourist destinations, a Disney theme park is within reach. Plans for the latest are currently under way in Hong Kong.5 Disney’s impact extends far beyond films or parks made by the Disney corporation. By the end of the twentieth century Disney had become a byword for commercial culture, a symbol for animated cartoon lives, a model for tourist activities, and a mode of imagination. But it was also a way of communicating, a herald of technological futures, an architectural inspiration, and a guide to city planning. In Melbourne, Australia, a recent festival celebrated a Disneyfied Winnie-the-Pooh as a “United Nations ambassador for international friendship!” Under these conditions, it would be surprising if Disney did not have a religious relevance.

There are two main concepts used in exploring Disney’s social influence, Disneyfication and Disneyization. Each has something significant to offer, but it is worth distinguishing between them. Disneyfication tends to be used critically. Spy magazine, for instance, defines Disneyfication as “the act of assuming, through the process of assimilation, the traits and characteristics more familiarly associated with a theme park … than with real life.”6 The same magazine reported a telephone interview with Walt Disney World, in which it asked about the possibility of laying on a “Fantasia wedding,” featuring a transparent box of mice, with pinned-on ear enlargements. The Disney receptionist balked at this, explaining that Mickey himself would attend. “Why simulate it with a real mouse when you can have the genuine article there?”, she asked. The author of this piece also observed that “Genuine Disneyfication must be tawdry, contrived, useless, and dripping with class panic.”

More sociologically Chris Rojek focuses on the moral and political culture represented by the Disney leisure industry, coming to the caustic conclusion that Disney parks “encourage the consumer to relate to America as a spectacle rather than as an object of citizenship.”7 Disneyfication makes social conflict temporary and abnormal, emphasizes individual rather than collective action, and generally acts as a mouthpiece for the American Way. The Disney world view fails to make sense of the present or to provide a plausible vision of the future, sacrificing “knowledge for staged spectacles organized around soundbites of history and culture.”8 Thus for Rojek Disneyfication subtly organizes our lives, even while letting us think that we are in a realm of release and escape.

Umberto Eco takes a similarly critical line, applying it to the ongoing uncertainty generated by Disney in order to perpetuate consumption. Deep questions of good and evil are rendered shallow through this process. The cynical shows through all too readily. Eco thinks of America as the prominent hyper-reality, whose ideology “wants to establish reassurance through imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the good but also by the shudder of the bad.” Thus there must be metaphysical evil, “both with the same level of credibility, both with the same level of fakery. Thus, on entering his cathedrals of iconic reassurance, the visitor will remain uncertain whether his final destination is heaven or hell, and so will consume new promises.”9

Such critical approaches to Disney have much to commend them. Disneyfication may be viewed as a process that diminishes human life through trivializing it, or making involvement within it appear less than fully serious. No wonder Neil Postman wrote of “amusing ourselves to death.”10 Yet the Disneyfication thesis also has limits. The negative approach is not necessarily helpful in all contexts. With no pretence at neutrality, the term Disneyization has been proposed as an analytical alternative. Alan Bryman proposes that it should be defined as “the process by which the principles of the Disney theme parks are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world.”11 He isolates four elements of Disneyization, which are outlined below. As I shall show, each principle also resonates in significant ways with some major themes of this book.

The first aspect is “theming,” which can of course be found in many contexts not directly touched by Disney. Thus cafés and bars may be themed, along with hotels and shopping malls. Well-known examples include the Hard Rock Café and the Subway outlets. Theming lends coherence to a site, giving it a story line. Theming creates connections and thereby gives a particular ambience to a complete environment. Today, that environment may be physical, at a permanent theme park site. But it may also be virtual. All computer users have become aware of particular kinds of “environments” that are themed in idiosyncratic ways, the “Mac” environment, or the “Netscape” one, and so on. Theming may be seen as postmodern surrogates for narratives (even “metanarratives”) which, however fragmentary or temporary, tell tales within which lives may be located.

Bryman’s second aspect is the “dedifferentiation of consumption.” This technical term refers to ways that “forms of consumption associated with different institutional spheres become interlocked with each other and increasingly difficult to distinguish.”12 It is a breaking down of conventional cultural differences between kinds of consumption and between consuming and other activities. In the World Showcase of the EPCOT Center, visitors to Disneyland think they are sampling cultures from around the world, whereas in reality they are entering a thinly disguised shopping area. Conversely, sites where one expects to shop seem to spawn attractions. You can find rides and leisure zones within shopping malls. Airports and train stations provide evidence of the same phenomenon. Authentic crafts and current CDs can be bought, haircuts and massages obtained, tickets bought and checked. Increasingly, then, in more and more daily life contexts, one may expect to consume across a broad range of items. Such dedifferentation accentuates the consumer culture, in which consumption becomes an order of life. The dedifferentiated environment privileges consumer outlooks and consumer skills.

Thirdly, Disneyization means merchandising. Images and logos are used to promote goods for sale, or are themselves for sale. The parks are both places where such merchandise is sold and the source of images and logos. Likewise the films are a source of images and logos that appear on merchandise, sometimes even before a film has been released. Many others, from sports teams to universities, have learned the Disneyesque techniques and advantages of merchandising. From our point of view, merchandising points up the power of an image, both in its own right and as something that can be bought. Merchandising also refers to itself and thus connects with a more general trend towards self-referentiality, which is a prime component of the post-modern. A recent example of this is the picture of the classic Coke bottle that appears on Coke cans, to reassure imbibers that it is the “real thing.”

Fourthly, Disneyization involves emotional labour. Rather as McDonald’s restaurants attempt to control the ways their employees view themselves and how they feel, so the Disney Corporation encourages scripted interactions using its staff. Theme park employees are well known for their smiling friendliness and helpfulness. Disney employees are supposed to give the impression that they are having fun too and not really working.13 This focus on the self, and how the self is expressed, is again a feature of the postmodern. As we shall see, the modes of self-expression in postmodern times relate to the religious realm in interesting ways.

Bryman explores the possibility that while McDonaldization exudes some very modern features associated with bureaucratic organization, Disneyization portends a shift into the postmodern. Disneyization spells consumerism and a concern with the sign value of goods, with style and identity projects. Disneyization breaks down differences, is depthless, and deals in cultivated nostalgia and in playfulness about reality. These are certainly themes that I think are deeply significant, both for the worlds of Disney and for the worlds of the postmodern. How far these features are affecting – and are affected by – contemporary religious spheres remains to be seen.

Modern and postmodern

The Jesus in Disneyland event may be used as an exemplar for understanding religion and society relationships at the turn of the twenty-first century. In several significant respects, religion is being both Disneyfied and Disneyized. This is what makes Disneyland such a good trope for contemporary culture, both modern and, increasingly, postmodern. Disneyland encapsulates in concentrated form some leading trends, especially the preoccupation with consuming – fashion, film, and music – and the experience of spectacles made possible by high technology. While Disney’s simulations by electronic media raise doubts about reality, and thus connect neatly with the postmodern, there are many other features of Disneyland that still seem thoroughly modern. High technology, to take the most obvious example, is also explicitly linked, through the high-tech EPCOT Center, with classic modern notions of progress and linear time.

How, after all, does one enter the Magic Kingdom? What sustains this world? Well, all major credit cards are accepted and these, along with the whole massive theme park system, are entirely dependent on the highest of high technology. Night and day, electric power flows into Disneyland to support the operation of machinery and its finely tuned computer-controlled system. Moreover, McDonaldization, which epitomizes principles of modernity such as bureaucratic organization and scientific management, is also present in the theme parks.14 Whatever else postmodern means, at Disneyland or elsewhere, it emphatically does not mean that consumer capitalism has collapsed or that modern technology has been jettisoned. Just the reverse. The modern and the postmodern are equally characteristic of Disneyland.

It is crucial to dispose of the idea that modernity has somehow ground to a halt, to be replaced by postmodern conditions. Rather, the prefix “post” is attached to “modernity” in order to alert us to the fact that modernity itself is now in question. This does not mean that the sense of an ending – evinced in much postmodern literature – is insignificant, only that it can be over-extended. Sociologically speaking, although the rediscovery of deep cultural influences has helped to balance the analysis of social structure, the danger is to imagine that somehow social settings are irrelevant to the emergence of new cultural landscapes. Postmodernity is a kind of interim situation where some characteristics of modernity have been inflated to such an extent that modernity becomes scarcely recognizable as such, but exactly what the new situation is – or even whether any new situation can become “settled” – is unclear.

The inflated characteristics of modernity, which give rise to postmodern premonitions, relate above all to communication and information technologies (CITs) and to the tilt towards consumerism. Both are bound up with the restructuring of capitalism that has been under way since at least the last quarter of the twentieth century. Some such as Manuel Castells focus on the former, arguing that present trends are best summed up in the notion of an “information age.”15 Others such as Zygmunt Bauman center their analyses on the social consequences of the shift towards consumer capitalism.16 But as the social and cultural converge, not least under the influence of these trends, it makes more sociological sense to hold the two together.17 The growth of CITs and new media augments the power of the image, while encouraging such developments as positional pluralism. But the dynamic of the whole system may be traced increasingly to the demand that consumption levels be constantly raised.

So phrases like the end of modernity, though arresting, can be very misleading. When Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo used this phrase as a book title18 he was referring to the exhaustion of modern ideas, a modern ethos or a modern world-view. For him, modernity starts with Descartes, and is characterized above all by a belief in progress. But this is undercut, especially by Nietzsche, when progress is shown to have become just routine, severed from its old religious roots in Augustine. For Nietzsche, the realization that “God is dead” breaks the spell of “higher values” or purposes that drive history. Consequently, some form of nihilism is all that is left. Modernity’s dynamic lies dead.

Much postmodern writing, especially in literary contexts, picks up these philosophical threads and weaves them into a story of the cultural collapse of modernity. But a sociological understanding of modernity would be rather more ambivalent about its incipient demise. If, for example, one takes the pulse of transnational capitalism or of technological development – each encapsulated in the Disney empire – the patient would appear to be in thoroughly healthy shape. True, the once cherished hopes that modernity would reduce global disparities of wealth or diminish the likelihood of war are seldom mentioned today. Yet, to change the metaphor, much of modernity’s machinery hums on as efficiently as ever.

Religion and social change

The Jesus in Disneyland event demonstrates how religion may spill over its older (modern) institutional boundaries, taking new and changing shapes, with a corresponding diversity of meanings. But, as I shall argue later, some traditional religious resonance with Disneyland also exists – the strong sense of a story line (what Jean-François Lyotard called metanarratives19) and of hierarchical organization being perhaps the most palpable. Understanding this involves exploring the reality of religious phenomena, the characteristics of the social-cultural context in which they are located, and the relationships between the two. The background to this is the debate about religion and modernity, classically understood within overarching theories of secularization. Such theories were once the standard means of coming to grips with the fortunes of religion in modern conditions.

Secularization theories provided a handy catch-all concept within which all kinds of phenomena could be interpreted, from the emptying of church pews to the decreasing references to God in political speeches (except maybe in the USA or Islamic nations). Despite the arguably powerful contribution of religion to the rise of modernity, it was widely assumed that Max Weber was right to see Christianity thus acting as its own gravedigger.20 So an event like Jesus in Disneyland could be seen in the light of such secularization theory as an instance of the inner secularization of the churches (given that the USA still has high rates of church attendance), in which the church becomes less and less distinguishable from the rest of the world, and entertainment rather than obedience its real dynamic.21

Although the secularization thesis still calls for critical attention (the burden of the next chapter), it is slowly but surely being supplanted by less self-assured approaches. Jesus in Disneyland might equally be seen, for example, as evidence of the transformation or restructuring of religion, or at least of its deregulation.22 What if, given the tarnished status of several myths that make American life legitimate, the Crusade Christians at Disneyland were associating themselves with the somewhat more resilient myth of technology?23 This would bolster Christian credibility by showing that believers can embrace high technology, and simultaneously counter any residual notion that Christians are obliged to be ascetically cut off from the real world. This interpretation would be in a venerable and plausible tradition.

Once religious activity is free of the secularization straitjacket, however, we discover all sorts of other ways to consider it sociologically. British sociologist James Beckford, for instance, concludes that religion is best thought of as a cultural resource.24 In this way, religion can be seen to “convey symbols of newly-perceived social realities,” whether to do with ethnicity, ecology, or the emancipation of women, and to be combined in flexible and unpredictable ways with all kinds of ideas and values. Jesus in Disneyland represents one such curious combination. Without its crippling conceptual tether to local community or to social institution, religion may be re-thought in fresh ways. Without the academic presumption that religion’s social significance declines in the modern world, its actual social significance may be gauged appropriately.

The self-assured secularization story has little space for spiritual and supra-rational quests, whether formally religious or not. They tend to be seen as socially insignificant. Although Max Weber foresaw what he expected would be attempts to escape from the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality into a world of gods and spirits,25 it was the iron cage itself that preoccupied sociologists for the longest time. So the later twentieth century’s sacralization of the Self – as a means of finding some continuity for multiple identities – comes as a surprise. This is seen above all in the multifarious New Age movements – and their commercial parasites – but also in the “self-absorbed solipsism”26 of the cybersurfer, creating a customized cosmos inside a virtual reality headset, or even, perhaps, constructing a personal website on the Internet. In this case, paradoxically, the cage offers the escape!

Of course, Disneyland is itself a classic mode of escape (and this is a common Disneyfication theme). There, one may find release from the humdrum world of everyday reality, as well as from the tensions and the conflicts, the violence and the degradation that characterize the real world. It is, on the one hand, a controlled release27 into a fantasy world of childhood, but on the other, a means of organizing its subjects, and of moral regulation. It offers an attractive alternative reality while simultaneously ignoring the outside world of discrimination, disease, and death, and persuading its customers that the world beyond the park gates is really gray, monotonous, or boring. But it also portrays as normal a world in which good and evil are seldom ambiguous, in which right triumphs, where patriarchy rules – think of the Lion King – and which encourages robot-like passivity as a response.28 As one critic said, sanitizing the stories renders them cute rather than acute, and with their cutting edge blunted they lose “the pulse of life under the skin of events.”29 This ordering of the world through media discourse is a theme that straddles the modern–postmodern debate.

To what extent is an event like Jesus in Disneyland a capitulation to consumerism, and to what extent does it represent a carefully controlled compromise with contemporary cultural realities? As we explore the worlds of the new media and of consumer identities in relation to expressions of faith and of religious commitment, we shall find, as in this event, that there are no simple answers. The demise of regulated, institutional religion seems to open space for all manner of alternatives, as varied as they are unpredictable. All we can comment on here is the contexts that increasingly constrain and enable those alternatives to appear. The taken-for-granted religious monopolies of yesterday have now lost much of their former power, and in Christian contexts this may as often be applauded as bemoaned, in the sense that religious commitment may now be unshackled from its less worthy cultural accoutrements. The question confronted by believers operating in those contexts now is, with which aspects of today’s culture can contracts be made, and which – infantilism? consumerism? fun? nostalgia? – must be eschewed?

These, then, are the kinds of phenomena and the kinds of questions that cry out for renewed attention as sociology emerges from its secular space-warp. Part of the reason that such issues are on the agenda again is that radical questions are raised about the future of modernity itself. If modernity challenges religion, then what happens when modernity itself is challenged? Although the debate about postmodernity often generates more heat than light, the very existence of the debate enables us to take a critical look at time-honoured assumptions about both modernity and religion. Jesus in Disneyland may make more sense within some alternative frames, fashioned from fresh resources. Perhaps Jesus in Disneyland signals the arrival of the postmodern Christian?

Authority and identity, space and time

The Jesus in Disneyland event certainly seems postmodern. The Magic Kingdom is all about fantasy, illusion, slippery surfaces, revised realities, multiple meanings. It is also centered on play and the pleasure principle. These fit popular perceptions of the postmodern. Little wonder that Disneyland finds frequent references in postmodern literature. In the pastiche style that unblushingly mixes disparate images and experiences, Disneyland epitomizes the postmodern. The simulated nations of the world – Canadian Mounties, British Beefeaters, Japanese samurai – meet in one place. Like zapping with the remote, to visit Disneyland is to walk through a TV set. Different epochs and cultures jostle together, mocking the old distinctions of time and space.30 In 1998 the classic bicycle race, the Tour de France, began a fresh leg at Main Street, Disneyland Paris, thus inserting the unreal further into the real. The relativity of reality is reinforced.

But the reality question has a number of facets. Let me comment on four themes that are present in Disneyland, prominent in debates about postmodernity, and which will structure the discussion that follows. They are authority, identity, time, and space. The postmodern places question marks over older, modern assumptions about authority, and it foregrounds questions of identity. It does so because at a profound social level, time and space, the very matrix of human social life, are undergoing radical restructuring. Each of them is at the same time central to the religious quest and central to religious ways of being. Conventionally, one might think of religious utterances and texts as authoritative, so that they help shape social realities; of identity as deriving from a sense of connection with the divine, and with fellow-believers; of space as a tension between the fixity of a monastery and the movement of a pilgrimage; and time as a means of holding in place a memory that unites believers within a common frame of commitment.31 These four themes are woven into the account that follows.

If classical sociological accounts tried to see the influences on religion of science and technology, urbanism and the state, and industrial capitalism, we should enquire what, in the emerging conditions of postmodernity, are the shaping factors at work today. After all, industrialism had once disturbed traditional patterns of largely agrarian and rural life, with its natural rhythms and its stronger ties to place, and these had profound religious effects. During the twentieth century, as I argued above, two interrelated trends became central to an increasingly globalized world: the rise of consumerism and the development of new technologies (CITs). Whereas the modern world tended by then to be held together by the routines and rules of the industrial work world and the bureaucracy of the nation state, a sense of disintegration has set in as both time and space are in flux. Slow, steady, sequential time is displaced by the instant and the simultaneous, and fixed space gives way to flows – of information, of capital, of power. These are the major factors behind postmodernity – which, of course, are epitomized in, and diffused by, the Disney Corporation – and they have more than a minor bearing on the modes and meanings of contemporary religious phenomena.

Disneyland may be viewed as a concentrated form of consumerism. All attractions are alluringly on display; an embarras de richesses. Personal enjoyment is paramount; family FUN is the goal. Indeed, shopping malls the world over – from the West Edmonton Mall in Canada to the Toison d’Or in France – take their cues from Disney. Entire landscapes of consumption characterize the Disneyized world.32 Consumer choice has, in turn, become the criterion for much more than shopping. Such skills are now required in education, health, and of course politics, where the slogan “free to choose” has achieved credal status. This is why choice has become such a potent political slogan; a market culture displaces citizenship with consumership.33

And on a personal level, identities are constructed through consuming. Forget the idea that who we are is given by God or achieved through hard work in a calling or a career; we shape our malleable image by what we buy – our clothing, our kitchens, and our cars tell the story of who we are (becoming). It is no accident that the world of fashion is seen as an “identity industry;” the idea is that self-esteem and our recognition by others may be purchased over the counter. The most anxious identity crises tend to occur in adolescence, but it is easy to see how this stage can be exploited by marketers. Artificially delaying the arrival of adulthood, and thus extending the period of identity exploration, is an obvious ploy, seen archetypically in Disneyland, but in many other contexts as well. “Playdium” in Mississauga, Ontario, for example, attracts more adults – often corporate groups – than children to its go-carts and video games.34 They seem to have a hard time following St Paul’s example of “putting away childish things”35 on entering adulthood.

Communication technologies are the other aspect of contemporary culture also epitomized in Disneyland. The entertainment media available for local consumption in Anaheim, Paris, Tokyo, or Orlando are also globally available by electronic means. After all, movies made Disney’s name in the first place. The growth of communication and information technologies (CITs) is one of the most striking and transformative changes of the twentieth century. They do not in themselves transform anything, but they contribute to the establishment of novel contexts of social interaction. They thus extend the process set in motion during earlier phases of modernity – especially through the telephone – of doing things at a distance.36 They help to alter the significance of face-to-face relationships while simultaneously bringing all of us into daily contact with cultures once remote or strange.

Disneyland is a global phenomenon. Not merely in the sense that Disney World, Disneyland Paris, and so on, have spread themselves into international contexts, but in the sense that Disney culture is known worldwide, and that its mode of imagination and its practices have seeped into numerous fields, from politics to architecture. At the same time, Disney respresents just one of many global flows of entertainment, information, and wealth that pulsate around the planet. Once associated mainly with nation states, modernity itself is now a global phenomenon. Of course, modernity was for centuries predicated on international trade, but today’s situation is different; hence the hints of a new postmodern order. The nation state is no longer the central cockpit of action; old systems of government are in confused disarray. Transnational corporations not only cross borders without passports; they dissolve the borders. And Disney is part of this dissolving process.

CITs, along with vastly increased travel, tourism, and job mobility, also help bring into question all traditional modes of authority. There are ways of doing things that are different from those passed down from the previous generation, audible voices other than those which once held a monopoly on identifying the good, the true, and the beautiful. The increased culture contact between diverse and once separated groups produces the pluralism of today’s world, which is either celebrated as part of a larger, global village – the portrayal offered by Disneyland’s World Showcase – or feared as the raw visibility of incommensurate and conflicting beliefs characterizing the “clash of civilizations.”37 Either way, authority cannot in any sense be taken for granted in the emerging globalized environment.

At the same time, the local world of compact discs, cable TV, and computers is very different from that of song-in-the-pub, neighbourly gossip, and the printed book. Again, this is not to say that new techniques create a new world, or that they eliminate the old. Rather, in certain social contexts new media enable fresh forms of communication