Media and the Sacralization of Leaders and Events: The Construction of a Religious Public Sphere

Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate that media can achieve a religious construction of an event or issue and set the public sphere in a religious frame through the sacralization of events and persons. This perspective can be supported empirically by the studies showing the way in which mass media framed different events in a religious imaginary and language and proposed this image as a frame for public sphere debates and theoretically by the concepts of media events, mediatization, ritualization, and sacralization, in order to reveal the processes through which the translation from a secular discourse to a religious discourse is produced. Under certain circumstances, mass media work as an “as if” (metaphoric) religion, and the events are presented through a religious frame – through themes and figures that come from the religious sacred narratives. Journalists accomplish this by setting events and leaders within the symbolic frame specific to religion: within this framework, those who report the facts are using narratives close to hagiographic stories, and by this, they are accomplishing the sacralization of these events. This enables journalists to exert a “ritual mastery” over presenting the events and imposing its significations.

Media, Religion, and the Public Sphere

“…Here are some significant examples (Coman 2023): the electoral campaign of the future President of Ukraine, Victor Iouchtchenko was described through numerous evangelical images: the visit to his mother's house leads to her description as the Good Mother who endures sufferings in an electoral campaign presented as a path of the Cross so that her son can accomplish his divine mission (Iouchtchenko was poisoned and close to death). Another visit, to the Hoverla mountain, is presented as a miracle of the transfiguration on Mount Tabor, in which Iouchtchenko abandons the profane colors (the ones of the Ukrainian flag) and chooses as a personal symbol the color of gold.…”