What is Religion? Can a television show be a religion?

 

Answer:

Religion is a cultural system of behaviors and practices, world views, sacred texts, holy places, ethics, and societal organization that relate humanity to what an anthropologist has called an order of existence. Different religions may or may not contain various elements, ranging from the divine, sacred things faith a supernatural being or supernatural beings.

Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration of God. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred scriptures, and symbols and holy places, that aim mostly to give a meaning to life. Religions may contain symbolic stories, which are sometimes said by followers to be true, that have the side purpose of explaining the origin of life, the Universe, and other things.

With the onset of the modernization of and the scientific revolution in the western world, some aspects of religion have cumulatively been criticized. Though the religiously unaffiliated, including atheism and agnosticism especially metaphysical and religious claims such as whether God, the divine or the supernatural exist are unknown and perhaps unknowable, have grown globally, many of the unaffiliated still have various religious beliefs.

In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religion was understood as an individual virtue of worship, never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. The modern concept of "religion" as an abstraction which entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines is a recent invention in the English language since such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and more prevalent colonization or globalization in the age of exploration which involved contact with numerous foreign and indigenous cultures with non-European languages

Modern television shows and Christianity don’t seem to mix. Today we’re treated to shows in Televisions show about a conman pretending to be a pastor, which only serves to trivialize Christianity.

Time and time again, television shows give Christianity a bad rap. We all know the archetype. The “television Christian” is almost always portrayed as intolerant and bigoted. They are uptight and prudish. Even when they aren’t outright villains, they are never painted as sympathetic characters.

The repetitive structures of reality television not only mimic religious rituals in form, but also in function: they mark sacred time and space. Reality shows have a specific location that is devoted to decision-making and only decision-making. The time devoted to results has a different mood, mode of interaction, lighting and personnel than the time devoted to competition and behind-the-scenes interaction. The show’s officiants are distinguished by function, and arranged hierarchically. They almost always include a host, typically a celebrity with an independent aura, who oversees all and serves as mediator between judges and contestants; the judges, experts in the relevant field, who never interact with the contests outside “elimination” rounds until the very end, when the finalists have obtained their own special status; and a confidant and advisor, who counsels the contestants and has no role in judging, usually contributing some form of humor or clowning–the trickster or jester, if you will.

Finally, and most importantly, this most heavily ritualized moment of the show marks contestants as included or excluded, favored or rejected. Space, time and people are sorted–narratively and formally–into sacred and profane