Ask the expert: How art and culture influence religious understanding

A growing number of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center, but those broader shifts don’t necessarily mean Americans’ religious lives are disappearing. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, scholars like Michigan State University Associate Professor Laura Yares are asking different questions.

Yares co-authored the recent book “Judaism Mediated: Learning About Jewishness Through the Cultural Arts” with Sharon Avni of Borough of Manhattan Community College – CUNY to help answer some of those new questions. The authors spent over five years documenting ways that Jews and non-Jews learn about Judaism and Jewishness through art and cultural engagement in their leisure time.

Here, Yares provides insight about representations of Judaism in media, art, and culture and what audiences learn from those representations.

What did you discover about how people are using their leisure time to learn about religion and spirituality?

As scholars of Judaism and education, Sharon Avni and I have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.

Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.

This broader phenomenon of informal learning extends far beyond a single religious tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world. Looking at what people do in their leisure time was really a way of honoring the kinds of informal ways that people are learning for themselves and recognizing that religious institutions aren’t accessible to everybody.

In what ways are cultural experiences expanding people’s understanding of Judaism?

Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world and not only a theological tradition, so learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.

Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism through activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey. These activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community.

These activities included things like visiting museums, watching web broadcasts, attending the theatre and streaming television shows. We also explored social media communities that offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, including a fan site for audiences to discuss what they learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show ‘Shtisel.’

I wasn’t expecting to do all of this online media exploration. Not only was that necessary because much of this research was conducted during the COVID pandemic, but also because people are living their social lives in digitally mediated spaces in contemporary times.

Why is it important to better understand how people learn about religion and spirituality in the 21st century?

People are not joining religious institutions at the same rate that they used to, so one big question for scholars of contemporary religion to ask is does that mean that religious identifications are declining or that they’re shifting somewhere else?

Like all aspects of social life, our religious lives are moving increasingly online. If we want to stay on top of what American religion looks like in the contemporary era, we have to take online domains seriously, and that means developing some rigorous methodologies for actually researching it.

The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply determining whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.

Excerpts are from an article originally published in The Conversation.