Reception of Christian Television in Contemporary Iran: An Analysis of Audience Interactions and Negotiations

This research explores Iranian audiences of Farsi Christian satellite channels. It considers what the narratives and interviews of participants of this research reveal about the way audiences interact and negotiate with both religious broadcasts and their socio-political or religious contexts.

What are the motivating factors that led the audiences first to watch Christian channels and secondly, where relevant, to change or add to their religious belief system? For those whose faith was transformed, how did this process happen according to their self-declared stories? Expressions of belief are analysed in order to consider their different understandings of religion, faith and their own belief system.

The research also studies the triangular relationships between the audience, Farsi Christian media, and the audience’s culture(s). It is therefore a study of Farsi Christian channel audiences, their motivations in viewing the Christian message, their methods of interpretation and negotiations with different media texts, and their process of changing or altering their religion, using the concept of conversion as a tool of analysis.

More specifically, I investigate the motivations of those in the audience of the four Farsi Christian satellite channels who stated that they had become Christians through that medium. I examine factors that influenced both their interpretations of and negotiations with the religious media message, and their process of changing, adding to or modifying their belief system, including their understanding of religious conversion. My research investigates the interactions and negotiations between meaning making and mediation, and the process of faith transformation within Reception Theory against the background of the sociology of religion and culture in contemporary Iran.

This research contributes to three areas of study: media reception (largely religious television) and sociology of religion and culture, mostly from the point of view of self-identified conversion; Media, Religion and Culture, mainly using audiences’ interactions and negotiations methods with the channels, and the religion of Islam and Christianity in the Iranian political-cultural context. This involved analysing three hundred narratives drawn from audiences of four Farsi Christian satellite television channels, during the period between 2010 and 2015, as well as fifteen semi-structured interviews, two focus group discussions and a telephone survey.

Sarjaz, Afshari, and Masoumhe Sara. 2017. “Reception of Christian Television in Contemporary Iran: An Analysis of Audience Interactions and Negotiations,” November.