Saturday, July 15, 2017
The Protestant Media Complex
In Residual and Resurgent
Protestantism in the American Media (and Political) Imaginary, Stewart M.
Hoover examines the evolving moral culture in the US, and the Protestant vision
for America. In this essay, he discusses relations between religion and media, in
particular the recurring Protestant anxieties over the progress of modernity.
Domesticating the American private
sphere under a Protestant moral regime, he notes, relies on an imagined past. As Hoover
observes, that imagined past “provides a powerful symbolic framing of values
and ideals for received, commonsense, traditionalist readings of American
cultural history,” evident in the fact that 75% of Trump supporters saw the
1950s as the ideal decade, the one they wanted to bring back.
