By EUGENIO BUCCI*
When it speaks the language of radio, TV or the Internet, a mystical group converts itself to the cheap cosmogony of radio, television and the Internet.
By grace or interest, churches use the media to gain followers. We have known this for about a hundred years. It was in the United States, through radio waves, that the practice became a regular practice, still in the first half of the 1960th century. In the XNUMXs, televangelists, in the image and likeness of Billy Graham, grew and multiplied on a miraculous scale.
Christianity with Protestant roots and evangelical features took over an entire segment of TV networks, in a push that was replicated around the world. Then, the plaintive language, the scenography set in vast temples, the costumes in full formal wear and the expressionist choreography planted their pulpits in far-off lands – some truly remote, like Brazil.
Here, when prime time comes, preachers pray and give speeches on almost all open channels. All religions, or virtually all, require the services and assistance of media technologies in favor of faith. The divine is a ratings champion. The devil is too – it depends on the customer's point of view.
But we already know all of this, and it's not new. What we don't know and insist on not knowing is that, at the moment they invoked the gentle energies of entertainment to capture larger assemblies, the churches sealed a pact, if not with Satan himself, then with entities they didn't know about and that could devour them from within. So much so that they devoured them.
The result is there, before our incredulous eyes. It was not the television show that diligently met the demands of the multiple professions of faith – it was these that served, without realizing it, the designs of the show.
What has gained momentum over the decades is not charity, it is not love for one's neighbor, it is not pious recollection, it is not fraternity, it is not spiritual retreat, it is not the vow of poverty – it is, in fact, the trance of showbiz, it was the ecstasy of advertising revenues, it was the industry of the lucrative sacred, it was the market of prosperous and gallant pastoralism.
The theme of the program doesn’t matter; only the form of cathartic fun matters – religiosity is in the form, not the content. You may think that we are in the midst of a pluralistic polytheism of distinct faiths that coexist in an ecumenical environment. You may believe that the mega-events in the city prove what we have called diversity. You may even argue that the March for Jesus sends messages that are opposite to those of the Gay Pride Parade, and vice-versa.
However, behind the apparent “multiculturalism” there are hidden laws of the spectacle, which equalize, standardize and uniformize everything. Look and see for yourself. In their form, the Gay Pride Parade and the March for Jesus are more than equivalent, they are identical: both mirror each other like symmetrical Siamese twins. Both, assuming that they are taking advantage of the entertainment turbines, offer these turbines, in sacrifice, the precious fuel of fervent souls and fervent bodies.
Entertainment is the altar of altars: it is not a ready-made tool for delivering orders from sects – it is, rather, the social form of religion, of any religion possible in our time. Any kind of reconnection – whether as an identity bond or as a community bond – can only be achieved if it passes through the mediation of the communication network oriented towards the market and only the market. It is as a private company that a church is activated by the media.
Religions do not have the power to impose any liturgy on electronic screens – these are the ones that shape their vague liturgy on the ethereal being of religions. This means that, when it speaks the language of radio, TV or the Internet, a mystical group converts to the cheap cosmogony of radio, television and the Internet.
Fundamentalist, entertainment rules human beings with the force of a godless monotheism. Even when it does not deal with saints or orishas, even when it does not talk about Jesus or Jehovah, even when it only deals with banal merchandise, smiling actresses, shrill singers and soccer players, entertainment prevails with its draconian canons (submission to image, for example), its regular habits (the robes of the Supreme Court justices are worn as if they were Batman's cape), its rigid rites (cell phones with their lights on waving in the stadiums) and its apparently profane but dogmatic codes (swindlers making little hearts with both hands together).
The menu of feelings and the contours of affections have been consolidated by the entertainment industry. It has defined the meaning of love, justice, beauty, compassion and hate. The person who sees Donald Trump as a fearless hero projects onto him what he learned from Bruce Willis's films. That's all.
The religion of entertainment has turned the public into a fanatical audience, for whom democracy is just another attraction. There is no point in asking the audience to think about what they do. In the doctrine they have embraced with devotion, thinking is the greatest of mortal sins. Perhaps it is the only one.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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