The Bible Goes ‘Pop’: How Religion Is Deeply Mediatized Amongst Flemish Youngsters

While the Bible’s stories are some of the most enduring in human history, they find increasing difficulty staying relevant, especially to young people in a secular context. How do contemporary youngsters relate to Bible stories? We exposed N = 32 Flemish, college-aged media users, divided into four focus groups of 7–10 participants (each meeting twice for a total of eight focus group discussions), to the same Bible story in three different media forms: text, video, and videogame. In these discussions, participants related the story to their own lives in various ways (whether new or familiar to them), relating it to their contemporary cultural context in three different ways. Some ‘Relativized’ the story as similar to contemporary fictional media narratives. Others ‘Perennialized’ by assuming an underlying, universal story from which all these stories originate—whether Biblical or contemporary. Others ‘Hierarchized’ the Bible as originatory, or even as a repository of stories from which all Western stories take their meaning. Within its specific cultural context, our analysis of this sample contributes a situated, empirically grounded example to the literature of “deep mediatization,” suggesting that the deep mediatization of religion encourages a ‘content-ification’ of Biblical narratives, making them comparable to other media content, while also placing pressure on their particular religious, sacred and authoritative status.