About the Project

Editor: Tanya Erzen
Instructional Design and Support: Tal Halpern, NYU Instructional Technology Services
Advisory Board: Barbara Abrash, Faye Ginsburg, Angela Zito, Diane Winston, Bambi Schiefflin
Design: Tal Halpern & Alison Cornyn and Britta Frahm, Picture Projects

A group of scholars at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University began this project as a way to think about how conservative Christian media resists easy distinctions between traditionally religious spaces and the public spaces of consumer and popular culture. Wal-mart stores feature the novels of the New York Times best-selling Left Behind series detailing the rise of the anti-Christ and the years of tribulation following the rapture. Newspapers carry stories of Christian missionaries entering Iraq as part of a missionary push focused on Muslims, while Christian colleges and missionary schools develop sophisticated films, courses, and materials for missionaries to Muslim countries. Every summer, thousands of Christian teenagers flock to Cornerstone, a Christian rock festival that features music, Christian films, and seminars on topics such as teen dating and sexuality. These seemingly disparate examples of mediated religion show how innovative conservative Christians have been in utilizing film, music, publishing, and web technology as cultural activism.

We felt that the a virtual case book (VCB) could critically address misunderstandings about conservative Christian media that tended to reduce it to propaganda, veiled political activism or overt attempts to evangelize. Instead, we were interested in understanding the complexity of Christian media including its production, audience reception, and wider economic, religious and cultural impact.

The VCB format allows us to present material that could be used in the academy, since Christian media is often invisible to secular and academic audiences and dismissed as irrelevant or even dangerous. This close engagement with the innovative technologies and strategies of conservative Christian media expands the comprehension of the wider field of media production and religious belief in contemporary American culture.

Proselytizing Media critically addresses how conservative Christian media practices are constructing a wider Christian encounter with the world. We use the term proselytizing beyond the evangelical sense of attempting to convert others or "spread the good news." Here,we include the ways that media practices function as a form of cultural activism, constituting Christian encounters with other religions, countries, transnational flows of media images, religious and political values and economic exchanges. Proselytizing Media examines the intersections between conservative Christian cultural activism and Christian evangelization through a series of tactical media practices that have spiritual, cultural and oftentimes political agendas, whether through film, video, web-based materials, music, CD-roms, or Christian publishing. We seek to explore the cultural, economic, and historical fields in which these media practices are embedded, analyzing conservative Christian media not simply as propaganda but as activism with overlapping political, cultural, social and religious aspects.

Conservative Christianity in America amounts to a vast, varied and interactive aggregation of different denominations and parachurch organizations. Although their historical trajectories are important, the distinctions between individual Christian denominations have eroded as more Christians move into non-denominational churches. The project focuses on Christians who may have different denominational backgrounds but adhere to series of theological tenets that broadly include: the necessity for personal salvation through becoming born-again or saved, faith in the inerrancy of the Bible, the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, with whom they can have a personal relationship. Another component to this theology is a biblically prophetic scheme, often-times called pre-millennial dispensationalism, in which the second coming of Christ will end history as we know it, but before that occurs, the world will undergo a series of crises known as the tribulations and the rise of an anti-Christ figure. Christian beliefs about how and when this will occur is highly disputed and varies considerably.

Many conservative Christians are united in the belief that the Bible is infallible, and that it is their mission as Christians to spread the good news of salvation. Although conservative Christians formed the core constituency of the new Christian Right from the 1950s onward by fusing public activism and Bible-believing Protestantism, not all conservative Christians are involved in the Christian Right or political issues. The mainstay of conservative Christianity is to evangelize, and this can take many forms. These include: a wide spectrum of conservative Christian political involvement around "moral" issues like abortion, homosexuality, home-schooling, overt attempts at proselytizing through missionary work, a vigorous Christian consumer marketplace for Christian books, music, films and other products, or a more subtle form of evangelization that consists of "planting a seed" in non-believers, hoping that they will eventually convert through a Christian rock song or popular novel.

Proselytizing Media is conceived as a series of public spaces to understand and analyze Christian religiosity on the web. At the forefront of this project are representational issues about how we might critically engage and represent Christian proselytizing media without becoming part of the project of Christian proselytizing. Instead, Proselytizing Media will be based around three case studies.The VCB enables readers to trace each case study historically, in popular media representations, through essays, a list of resources on Christian media, syllabi, timelines, and bibliographies.

The first case study, Prophecy and the End-Times, examines the history, economics and recent popularization of end-times theology or premillennial dispensationalism through the Left Behind series, Hal Lindsey's novels and comics, and Christian apocalyptic films. It explores the relationship of these ideas to Christian understandings of Israel and the Middle East. The second case study, Marketing the Spiritual, focuses on training materials like the Cross and the Crescent resource kit, teaching programs for missionaries, and films such as the Jesus Film and Come Disciple the Nations. It uses these different media materials to consider how Christian missionaries have targeted Muslims and Muslim countries for missionary work, and the way these media materials shape Christian ideas of Islam. The third case study, Popularizing Youth Culture, analyzes the proliferation of Christian media materials for youth including youth missionary websites and organizations such as Youth with a Mission and Missionary Kids, ex-gay youth-oriented CD-roms, Christian rock and the Cornerstone Christian music festival, and the young adult graphic novels of the Left Behind series for kids and teenagers. In each case, users can view the popularization of certain Christian ideas within a wider historical context.

From the revivals sparked by Charles Grandison Finney to the Old-Time Gospel Hour, Christians have historically been at the forefront of media technology and innovation. Conservative Christian media is not wedded to one form but is constantly evolving, from the pioneering use of radio in the 1920s to innovative and experimental CD-roms today. Far from standing outside the market, Christian media is rooted in consumer culture, and part of the evangelization and promotion of Christian media projects means the creation of new markets for Christian materials and ideas. Not only does the cultural activism of Christian media shape Christian perceptions of foreign policy, the Bible and moral issues, but it also fosters a sense of virtual and actual community, a public space for those who share moral, social and religious worldviews.