Media & Celebrity Culture (Religion Group 2)

Our group podcast examined the role of religion in the lifestyles of celebs and how it is conveyed through the media. Popular culture often times sets the stage for how religion is viewed by individuals within our society. We mainly focused on how religious topics and issues are portrayed in celebrity lifestyles as well as examples of lived religion. Our case study mainly focused on and addressed the question, “How does the media present or communicate religious beliefs of celebrities?” We demonstrated this by looking at specific examples where the media has presented celebrity religion and how it is interpreted by the masses. Our group focused on how Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Madonna and other celebs framed the understanding of the respective religions in media situations. Scientology is also a key concept that we focused on for our case study. We found that lived and implicit religion was also conveyed throughout our case study it is lived religion because celebrities are using the media in an attempt to educate and convert people into their respective religions and it is also implicit religion because people have turned to celebrities as people they should follow and worship in place of religion.