Religion, Popular Culture, and the Nineties

This edited collection illuminates how religion shaped what it meant to live, believe, and belong at the turn of the millennium.
The nineteen-nineties occupy a paradoxical place in American cultural memory as both a space of nostalgia and profound socio-cultural transformation. In this edited collection, Ilaria W. Biano and her contributors consider a decade in which religion and spirituality were not confined to traditional institutions, but became deeply entangled with popular culture, shaping both public imagination and private practice. Both the Satanic Panic and the persistence of "culture wars" over school curricula, abortion, and civil rights pivotally informed the cultural production of that decade.
Across eighteen chapters, Biano and her contributors discuss how the nineteen-nineties amplified and diversified the entanglement of religion and popular culture, embedding spirituality into new genres, formats, and technologies. The essays herein span subjects including Five Percenter Rap, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Magic: The Gathering, revealing an arena where religion was performed, contested, and transformed. This collection, therefore, approaches the nineteen-nineties not as a backdrop for religion, but as a decade in which popular culture was one of the principal sites where religious meaning was renegotiated.