Introduction

Lifestyle media, with its early origins in popular manuals of etiquette and household management, seeks to explore options and to offer advice in such areas of everyday life as personal relationships, finance, health, fashion and choices over career and real estate. There are a number of interesting ways in which contemporary lifestyle media intersect with religious tradition. Best-selling religious writers such as T.D. Jakes and Rick Warren have produced lifestyle literature from a particular Christian perspective (for example, Jakes, 2002; Warren, 2003), and lifestyle media often carries implicit or explicit reference to alternative spiritualities, ranging from explicit discussions of meditation, energy and spiritual well-being, to more implicit visual images conveying serenity in the context of calm, simple and natural surroundings. Traditional religious literature has even been refracted through the genre of lifestyle media, such as in the case of Revolve, a best-selling version of the New Testament presented in the format of a lifestyle magazine for teenage girls. Whilst the re-branding of religion and spirituality through various lifestyle media is an important area for study (Schofield Clark, 2007), my attention in this chapter will be focused on mainstream commercial lifestyle media in the UK that explores issues of lifestyle concern without any explicitly religious or spiritual frame of reference. A central concern in this chapter will be to examine how such ‘secular’ contemporary lifestyle media can be seen as an example of what Thomas Luckmann has referred to as the ‘invisible religion’ of late modern Western society, and to think about the implications of this for the study of religion and the sacred in contemporary culture.

The approach I will adopt here is to offer a theoretical reading of the content and significance of lifestyle media, with particular reference to lifestyle television shows in the UK. This initial theoretical discussion is, of course, meant to be a provocation for further research, and a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of lifestyle media would inevitably require a much more detailed analysis of the whole ‘circuit of culture’ in which this media functions, including empirical work with both producers and users of this media (see, for example, Jackson et al, 2001). Nevertheless, through this discussion I hope to be able to demonstrate how contemporary lifestyle media might be analysed in the light of wider debates about religion, media and contemporary culture.