This panel includes several studies that examine the role of visual culture (film, television) in structuring social life, communal participation, and the strategies for affecting individual participation. In their own way, each presenter explores how these experiences can be shaped on the intersections and edges of our collective organization, such as racial exclusions, professional structures, national identity, or religious coercion. They offer answers to questions about the role of visual culture in religious indoctrination, and how images are used to promote public norms and religious consensus. Together, our presenters explore the relationships between visual culture and public persuasion, including film and television that take up religious nationalism, high control communities, and supremacist groups.
This paper analyzes the music videos of Pastor Hyung Jin (Sean) Moon, or King Bullethead, as theological carriers of contemporary religious Korean American conservatisms. The work contextualizes Pastor Moon’s Tennessee-based World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church, or the Rod of Iron Ministries, within the broader Unification Church movement. Utilizing both institutional material and external documents, this analysis articulates the theologies (and their new media manifestations) which Moon, and the Rod of Iron Ministries, inherited from the South Korean Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or the Unification Church. Additionally, this paper will explore the theology’s reformulations since Hyung Jin Moon’s 2013 schism. These fall into three primary doctrinal camps: the political/spiritual, holy family, and the divine right to rule. The gun-slinging rap videos of King Bullethead give material (digital) shape to Moon’s doctrinal conservatisms and missionizes the ultimate imperialist and dominionist agenda of the Rod of Iron Ministries.
This paper explores Christian eschatology as orienting American society towards the disappearance of black persons from public life. Probing the iconic white supremacist film, The Birth of A Nation (1915), we will uncover how a racialized version of Christian eschatology is facilitated through this film. This paper argues that the expression of this Christian eschatology in The Birth of A Nation informs the disappearance of black persons from American life in the 20th century as a mode by which constitutes the organization of the United States as a racial project. I call this process a “theo-politics of disappearance;” which describes the intersection of Christian eschatology and anti-blackness as facilitating the removal of black persons from American life. This paper explores black removal as most notably expressed in the mass incarceration of black persons in America’s jails and prisons in the latter half of the 20th century.
The God’s Not Dead film series is more than just faith-based entertainment—it is a battle cry. Over the past decade, the franchise has transformed from a simple tale of campus religious persecution into a full-fledged manifesto for Christian nationalism, urging believers to reclaim America through political action. This paper critically examines how the films construct a siege mentality, stoking fears of a secular takeover while positioning conservative Christians as the last defenders of the nation’s moral and spiritual fabric. Through historical analysis and discourse critique, I explore how God’s Not Dead strategically aligns its messaging with pivotal cultural flashpoints—Trumpism, education battles, and pandemic-era governance—to mobilize its audience. Ultimately, this paper argues that the franchise is not just reflecting Christian nationalist sentiment but actively shaping it, weaponizing nostalgia, faith, and fear to turn religious conviction into a political movement with tangible electoral consequences.
AppleTV’s Severance is on the surface a sci-fi flavoured workplace drama, but alongside this presentational veneer lies a more dynamic, multifaceted interrogation of what it means to believe in leaders (corporate, faith, and governmental alike), where the line is drawn between healthy faith and cult-like devotion, what freedom looks like and how (and when) it needs to be fought for, and how one defines identity (not least of all: their own). From these launch points, as illustrated by characters individually and collectively as well as through the overarching plot, Severance provides an exceptionally fruitful source material for examination, reflection and potential instruction across numerous critical and consequential contexts: our personal communities, the Academy as a whole, and the larger global sociopolital context of modern times.