Wilfrid Laurier University

RE 220

RE220OC: RELIGION & POPULAR CULTURE
Department of Religion & Culture
Instructor: Dr. Brent Hagerman, [email protected]
This is an online class where all course materials are accessed asynchronously via MyLS. There are
no scheduled synchronous Zoom meetings.
Course Description and Aims
The interaction of religion and popular culture is as old as these two categories themselves. But
while it is relatively easy to pinpoint blatant interactions—Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks”, CBC’s Little
Mosque on the Prairie, Deepa Mehta's Water, Bobble head figures of the Pope, Buddha and
Moses—others are more subtle. As the introduction to our main course text, Religion and Popular
Culture in America, points out, Christian sermons are shaped by the medium of television when
preaching workshops advise ministers to “accommodate the television-influenced attention span
of seven or eight minutes between commercials” (Forbes and Mahan 2017, 1). David Chidester
has problematized comfortable definitions of religion by suggesting that sports such as baseball,
consumer products like Coca-Cola and music genres including rock and roll can be viewed as
religion because they “do authentic religious work by negotiating what it means to be a human
person in relation to transcendence, the sacred, or ultimate human concerns” (Chidester 2005,
viii). Further, a close look at George Lucas’s magnum opus Star Wars (or Harry Potter, or Lord of
the Rings…) will illustrate how the story of the Skywalker family closely resembles what Joseph
Campbell has dubbed the “hero’s journey,” a common archetypal myth found in religious texts
and sacred stories around the world.
The relationships between religion and popular culture are numerous, diverse, sometimes
problematic and sometimes controversial. RE220 uses a range of disciplinary perspectives to
examine the ways religious themes, symbols, icons and language are used in expressions of
popular culture and also how religion itself is influenced by popular culture. Using the 4-part
typology found in Forbes and Mahan’s Religion and Popular Culture in America (2017), this course
will survey several kinds of interactions between religion and popular culture from diverse
cultural and religious examples and across many me