Religion and Spaces of Technology: Constructing and Contesting Nation, Transnation, and Place

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on one particular technological development that has come to influence religious practice in significant ways—religious broadcasting. Whereas computer-mediated communications now garner growing research attention, I have chosen to remember the influence of the older technology of broadcasting for its continued influence on myriad lives. In bringing this focus to bear on another major phenomenon, that of transnationalism, I have come to understand how religious broadcasting does not contribute in a straightforward, linear fashion to perpetuating transnational identities and communities, but is instead implicated in the assertion of the national in the face of transnational influences, while simultaneously enabling and challenging the transnational. I am aided in this understanding through an examination of religious broadcasting in multireligious, yet secular Singapore, and its impacts on a significant Muslim minority which is, nevertheless, recognised as deserving of special privileges.