Marcus Moberg

First-, second-, and third-level discourse analytic approaches in the study of religion: moving from meta-theoretical reflection to implementation in practice

During the past decade, an increasing number of scholars have started to highlight the usefulness of discourse analytical approaches in the study of religion. This article argues that the work that has been produced on the topic of discourse and religion thus far can be situated at different points along a continuum and be conceptualized in terms of first-, second-, and third-level approaches. This article aims to highlight, in particular, how the concrete application and implementation of discourse analytic theory and method in the study of religion in actual practice is dependent on these three types of approaches becoming further developed in close and more direct relation to one another.

The Concept of Scene and its Applicability in Empirically Grounded Research on the Intersection of Religion/Spirituality and Popular Music

Research into contemporary intersections of religion/spirituality and popular music has much to contribute to the wider study of ongoing changes and transformations in the contemporary Western religious landscape. Together with new media and other popular cultural forms, popular music has come to play an ever more important role in how contemporary religion is practised, experienced, and lived. An increasing number of scholars have become interested in exploring the possible religious or spiritual significance that individuals may attach to their involvement in particular cultures of popular music. However, any such explorations need to be based on a solid understanding of the particular structural, musical, aesthetic, and discursive environment in which this may occur. This article argues that the concept of scene provides researchers interested in exploring contemporary intersections of popular music and religion with valuable tools for mapping and making sense of such environments.

The internet and the construction of a transnational Christian metal music scene

Christian metal music emerged in the late 1970s as a means of evangelism among secular metal music fans. In recent years it has grown significantly and developed into a transnational Christian music-based youth culture. In addition to the music, Christian metal has adopted the metal style, rhetoric and attitude. At the same time, Christian metal is as much about religion as it is about music or style. This paper examines some of the most important ways in which Christian metal artists and fans in a number of countries all over the world have come together with the formation of a largely Internet-based transnational Christian metal music scene. Particular focus is put on the ways in which this Internet-based transnational scene supports the spreading of central discourses about the function and meaning of Christian metal as an alternative form of religious expression and Christian identity.

Religion in Popular Music or Popular Music as Religion? A Critical Review of Scholarly Writing on the Place of Religion in Metal Music and Culture

The highly conspicuous interest in “dark” religious themes and ideas found throughout metal music and culture has received increased scholarly attention in recent years. This article offers a critical review and evaluation of scholarly writing on the place of religion in metal music and culture produced thus far. The article highlights how this scholarship has interpreted metal music and culture principally as either providing its followers with important resources for religious/spiritual inspiration or, in quite different terms, as constituting a religion in itself.

Religion and the Media: Continuity, Complexity, and Mediatization

This chapter begins with a presentation of the particular features of the Nordic media systems and their transformations since 1980. The following analyzes three forms of mediatized religion: journalism on religion (in major newspapers), religion in popular media (popular magazines and films), and religious media (religious programs in the public service broadcasting and the Internet presentations by the Nordic majority churches). The conclusions show no simple pattern of a decline or resurgence of the visibility of religion in the media. This chapter also asks what the media do to religion (mediatization theory), and concludes that the media genre has a profound impact on the representation of religion, which results in a complex pattern of increased diversity of topics and perspectives.

Mediatization and the technologization of discourse: Exploring official discourse on the Internet and information and communications technology within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland:

This article explores changing discursive practices on the implications of the continuous development of the Internet and information and communications technology (ICTs) within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. The article argues that the development of the Internet and new media technologies has been accompanied by the proliferation of a set of influential and widespread discursive formations on the character of institutional communication and practice in a digital era. These developments have motivated an increasing technologization of discourse within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland that has chiefly involved a conscious redesign of its discursive practices vis-à-vis the Internet and ICTs in accordance with new criteria of communication effectivity and a notable new emphasis on training in these new practices.

Pop cult: Religion and popular music

In Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music, British musicologist Rupert Till sets out to explore the presumed religious dimensions of various elements and types of Western popular music culture. Like some other scholars before him, Till endeavours to persuade the reader that popular music cultures not only have come to fill many of the social and cultural functions previously performed by traditional institutional religion, but that they effectively have come to constitute religions, or ‘new religious movements (NRMs)’ or ‘cults’, in themselves. As such, it is argued, popular music cultures both can and should be approached and studied using the concepts and terminology of religious studies. In the first chapter of the book, Till outlines his understanding of ‘NRMs’ or ‘cults’, which he openly acknowledges as being deliberately ‘provocative’ (p. 1). According to Till, the defining characteristics of a cult include the following: strong dedication to certain charismatic persons who are often believed to have a special ‘link’ to the divine or supernatural realm; a ‘very high level of commitment’ among members; common use of various ‘manipulative techniques’; and a ‘preoccupation with making money’ (p. 3). Drawing also on the concept of implicit religion, Till then sets out to explore whether these defining characteristics of ‘cults’ can be applied to popular music cultures. What follows can only be described as an extraordinary exercise in excessive, although imaginative, parallel-drawing and simplistic, ill-constructed circular argument. Having outlined and decided on the defining characteristics of ‘cults’ at the outset of the book, Till then simply proceeds to explore whether the various elements and types of popular music cultures he discusses fit these characteristics. He comes to the conclusion that they all indeed do. The problem is that they are all made to fit Till’s particular definition of ‘cults’ too easily and too uncritically. If it does not strike the reader already when reading the first chapter, after having read a few more, it becomes clear that Till’s definition of a ‘cult’ is allowed to totally predetermine how the supposed religious dimensions of the popular music cultures he investigates are approached, interpreted and understood. Although Till provides highly detailed accounts of the historical developments of various popular musical cultures, his exploration of their presumed religious dimensions resembles more a personal interpretation than an actual scholarly analysis. This is illustrated in Till’s interpretation of the religious or ‘sacred’ dimensions of what is termed ‘local