Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times

"This book is about the changing fortunes of religion in postmodern times." With this beguilingly simple opening line, sociologist and religious scholar David Lyon (Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario) introduces us to his complex web of interrelated arguments about the social status and influence of religion at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The project has an obvious logic to it: If modernity was critical and dismissive of religion, what is to be its fate in the postmodern world?

Lyon's discussion is set within the context of previous work, whose conclusions are reiterated here. His The Steeple's Shadow: On the Myths and Realities of Secularization (1987) challenged the "secularization thesis" of classic sociological theory and argued that categories of the religious realm remained strongly influential in persons' lives, even as the historical institutions of Christianity were relegated to the margins of public life and discourse. In Postmodernity (1994; revised 1999), he analyzed the structure of postmodern society as characterized by certain elements of modernity become inflated, predominantly communications and information technologies (CITs), with the resultant hegemony of mass media, advertising, and an individualist, consumptive paradigm for more and more social processes.

Jesus in Disneyland applies the foregoing explicitly to the role and function of religion; the work takes its title from the intersection of two phenomena: a large Christian gathering (the Harvest Day Crusade, with an attendance of 10,000) held at Disneyland, despite the Disney corporation's policies that are at odds with the Christian values of many, and the way the Disney marketing and theme parks have become paradigmatic for the many characteristics of postmodern culture that at first glance appear to sit uneasily with traditional religious faith's emphasis on authority, community, and transcendent meaning. Disneyfication "sacrifices knowledge for staged spectacle" and converts history to nostalgia.

Disneyization has produced "theming" in a wide variety of settings and has seen shopping become integral to other kinds of entertainment and business activities. Consuming has thus been "dedifferentiated" from other activities to such an extent that it has become paradigmatic for all of them. The high-tech theme parks are also emblematic of the way that technology and media duplication have come to blur the line between reality and its symbolic representation in ways that radically alter perceptions of time and space.

Lyon argues that postmodern religious believers are adapting these characteristics for religious purposes and thereby changing the way that faith is practiced. In this respect, Christians are not facing anything new; they are continuing the age-old strategy of both resisting and adapting, of negotiating a line between subversion and capitulation, of being "in but not of" whatever culture they inhabit. The first three chapters are spent laying out the argument's framework; the next four are devoted to applying it to the cultural "fault lines," revealed in that analysis, in reconfigurations of cultural authority, the derivation of self-identity, and perceptions of space and time. Each chapter begins with a description of a religious phenomenon relevant to the way these themes are played out: Thus, the chapter on authority uses the controversy over the television series Nothing Sacred to introduce Lyon's discussion of the power of the media and the Internet and of their impact on the way discussions about religious issues are shaped and disseminated; a description of the Toronto Blessing is used as an example of "glocalization." Examples taken from evangelical and Christian movements predominate.

The greatest difficulty in the book is the way the interwoven strands of Lyon's argument tend to become somewhat "dedifferentiated" from each other; this is understandable when trying to lay out such an intricate network of interrelated theses, but a few landmarks and signposts from the author would have been helpful.

The final chapter, dealing with possibilities for the future of religious life, is the least satisfying; despite an analysis that tries to discern positive possibilities and not just dire negativities, the author's recommendations tend to involve retrievals that indicate more concern with mitigating the negatives than exploiting the positives. Notwithstanding any of the above, the book is engaging and well-written-that academic rarity, a "good read." It is not a book for beginners in either sociology or religious studies, as it presupposes familiarity with classical sociological theories and their secularist understandings of modernity, but one not need be a specialist to find the book readable and insightful. Eighteen pages of notes and ten pages of bibliography bear witness to solid research and a good resource for authors and material on related topics.