Page - 11 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

“You Need a Big God” | 11www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 7–20 processes are integrated into religious traditions and world views. Research in the third category asks how popular culture can become “religion”, for exam- ple by making transcendental experiences possible or by expressing spiritual feelings. The fourth category has a dialogical basis and explores, for example, how religious groups and popular musicians debate current issues, work to- gether or fight each other or how religion and popular music can be in dia- logue on the level of media. These four categories are helpful for systematising the main lines of the history of research. Even if they do not capture the complexity of empirical in- terrelations of religion and popular culture, they are useful guidelines for the classification of research perspectives. The contributions to this issue touch on all four of these perspectives, although not always to the same extent. In her contribution, Angela Sue Sawyer brings a song by Tracy Chapman and a biblical passage into an ecofeminist dialogue. Reinhard Kopanski explores two revealing case studies of how popular music is used to express Christian worldviews. And Lavinia Pflugfelder elaborates bricolages of religious motifs in heavy metal video clips. The editor’s approach considers religion as a complex communication sys- tem that interacts on diverse levels with other systems (e. g. economy, poli- tics) of a specific culture and provides a universal orientation.8 As a product of a specific culture, religious symbols or narratives cannot be fully understood without involving the contexts in which they are produced, distributed and perceived.9 In addition to written or spoken language, gesture and images, music is another means used by religion to transmit a specific world view with its norms and values. And vice versa, these means use religious motives, symbols and narratives, with agents, religion and the respective means of communication therefore refreshing a cultural imaginary10 by constantly set- ting and resetting meaning. 8 “Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long- lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz 2004, 4). See also Stolz 2001, 33. 9 The concept of the “circuit of culture” is a fruitful starting point for analysing cultural products and artefacts. This cultural studies approach suggests we analyse a product within a complex circuit of production, distribution, perception and individual interpretation to be able to understand its meaning at a specific time within a specific group. See Du Gay et al. 1997. 10 See e. g. Pezzoli-Olgiati 2015.