Television and Religion: Challenges and Solutions

There have always been discussions about the challenging disputes between modern media- like television- and religion. After the Islamic Revolution of Iran, these disputes caused many concerns for researchers who work in this field. In the few past years, there has been a lot of attempts to solve these disputes, but fundamental differences of opinion remained, especially between researchers of religion and researchers of media and communications. Having defined religion and explained the features and functions of television, the present paper, using an analytical method, examines three famous theories about this question; namely, instrumentalism, essentialism, and interactionism, then discusses the basic challenges in this field and finally provides some solutions.