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Chapter five brings morality, literate listening, and sonic reading together to explore the semiotics of the “Moroccan model of Islam,” a state-sponsored effort to shape religious discourse and practices via media in the wake of “extremism.” In May 2003, Morocco experienced a major religiously motivated attack, in which thirty-seven Moroccans were killed. Extremist Islam, learned through foreign media, was blamed. In particular, people claimed satellite television and small portable media (like audio cassette and VCR tapes, as well as VCD and DVD disks, and more recently internet videos) had corrupted and confused Moroccans about proper Islam. One of the Moroccan state responses was to re-cultivate what they called the Moroccan model or pattern of Islam نموذج المغربي‎, namūdhaj almaghribī, a historically “moderate” Islam, which they would spread via modern radio and television stations, training institutes, and global dissemination of training materials. The Moroccan pattern of Islam included a bundle of semiotic forms promoted as uniquely Moroccan: clothing, Qur’anic recitation styles, writing scripts, textual reasoning patterns, and television/radio communicative channels for connecting Moroccans to Islam. This chapter examines critical Fassi responses to the state media efforts at semiotically shaping Islam in Morocco and the social non-movements precipitated from those responses.

This chapter provides a background on the relationship of religious media and the landscape in the antebellum United States in order to rethink the meaning of space in American culture. It traverses a range of genres and media including sermons, landscape paintings, aesthetic treatises, abolitionist newspapers, slave narratives, novels, and grave markers. It also traces the birth of a distinctly modern form of sacred space at the nexus of mass print culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the religious images and narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. The chapter investigates the efforts of Protestant evangelical publishing societies to teach readers to use the landscape to understand their own spiritual lives and their role in sacred history. It talks about the “evangelical space” that ultimately spread beyond devotional culture to infuse popular literature, art, and politics.

Chapter 3 presents a theoretical argument that explains when and how religious parties and religious organizations coevolve and the consequences of their relationship for civil liberties in a country. First, the chapter argues that religious organizations undergo a significant increase in their socioeconomic institutionalization only when a country is experiencing an inflation crisis and there is a concentrated bloc of religious parties in the legislature. Next, it explains why religious parties are compelled to curb civil liberties when they are in government in the context of highly socioeconomically institutionalized religious organizations, and why the absence of institutionalized religious organizations allows religious parties to moderate their positions on civil liberties. Thus, the presence of religious parties leads to religiously derived declines in civil liberties only in the presence of highly institutionalized religious organizations. These arguments lead to two testable hypotheses that are subjected to empirical tests in the rest of the book.

This chapter talks about how moving pictures have become an evangelistic complement for many churches. For Protestant fundamentalists and conservatives, the films preach repentance and conversion. For the more liberal groups, films sought to promote social justice and to bring a global consciousness to American congregations. Christian involvement in the industry would culminate in creative artists, directors, and producers like Scott Derrickson, Tom Schatz, Ken Wales, and Ralph Winter contributing their talents directly to Hollywood. Religious leaders recognized the visceral impact of film and envisioned the medium as a means to develop character—if film could be used for ill, it could also promote religious devotion. Such a viewpoint reflects the changing attitudes toward moving pictures, with more denominations actively investigating how they might appropriate the media for religious purposes.

This chapter first narrates the history of some stylistic, topical, and industrial tendencies that have come to characterize contemporary manga and anime culture by juxtaposing several brief sketches of notable technological innovations in Japanese illustrated media. It argues that there are important similarities in the ways in which contemporary producers and premodern proselytizers and performers have used combinations of image, text, and script in didactic and recreational settings related to religion. The second half of the chapter examines some common compositional techniques to show some of the ways in which producers of manga and anime visualize religious ideas and ideals. Specifically, it shows how artists' and directors' decisions about how to manage the ratio between text and image, how to approximate real-time motion, where and how to provide or omit background (literal and figurative), and how to expediently convey and elicit emotion all contribute to the capacity of a given work to invite vicarious experience and to take on religious significance through the creation of religious frames of mind. Furthermore, it demonstrates how marketing serves as another layer of rendition, determining the target audience and thereby expanding or circumscribing a given product's reach.

This chapter presents statistical results from models testing support for Hypothesis 2 and its corollaries. The results show strong and robust support for the second part of the theoretical argument that the presence of religious parties in government leads to a decline in civil liberties only when religious organizations in that country are highly socioeconomically institutionalized. In the absence of highly institutionalized religious organizations, ceteris paribus, religious parties in government are able to moderate their positions on civil liberties with the result that civil liberties do not experience a significant decline in line with a religious agenda. The analysis accounts for various confounding factors, and the potential endogeneity of more moderate regime type to various factors.