Problems of Using Religious Language in Contemporary Media

Abstract

In discussions about religious discourse in the media, the tension or discrepancy between the communicative secular and secularized language of contemporary media and the more hermetic and traditional language describing situations related to religious experience, i.e. the sacred is emphasized. This article is an attempt to answer the question of what the religious language of the media should be. The research problem is: is it to be adapted to the contemporary Polish language, taking into account the commonplace, or more archaic, theological, referring to biblical and cultural codes? When discussing the ways of transmitting religious content in the media, two elements should be taken into account: 1) religious language has always been and is the language of communication (proclamation), focused on lively contact with the recipient and caring for communication; to some extent always adapted to the recipient; contemporary media, which are rapidly developing themselves, speed up this adaptation process, but this process is part of the nature of the language; 2) the creators or the first teachers of great religions (excluding small esoteric religions) used spoken language, close to colloquial language, understandable, adapted to the audience (their teaching or revelation was written later); they, too, are a model of inculturation that religious language continues to undergo, without giving up their specificity and sacredness. It should be mentioned that the research questions posed in this article concern only the religious language of media messages, not the language of official religious communication. This article uses the research method based on a critical analysis of the scientific discourse on religious language in the media studies literature from 1998-2020, combined with the presentation of own proposals in this area.