This article presents an empirical study on the institutional audiovisual mediatization of social sustainability made by the eighteen religious denominations officially recognized in Romania during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic onset. Research is undertaken based on the mediatization theories. Specifically, it highlights and discusses the conditions for producing the meaning of social sustainability as a result of religious mediatization during the months of March, April and May 2020, a period with strong religious connotations since it involved the dates of the major annual feasts celebrated by the three majority monotheistic religions, i.e., the Christian Easter, the Muslim Ramadan and the Jewish Passover. As a result, we noticed that the production of meaning in terms of social sustainability was simultaneously anchored in the accumulation of four contextual “social worlds”: (a) that of social transformation induced by mediatization, (b) that of the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that is neither social, economic, or environmental, but with consequences on the three levels of reality mentioned above, (c) that of spirituality during the time of the great monotheistic religious feasts and (d) that of the national culture of Romania, statistically the most religious country of the European Union.

The present article aims to analyze the representations and the role of symbolic forms of mythical-religious thought in the mediatization of sustainability. A main corpus of items, composed of the media information and news offer covered by the mainstream French media, and a secondary corpus, as important, related to Francophone scientific articles, was considered. The study, conducted on French media news referenced by the Google search engine between 2009 and 2018, highlights a production of secular meaning of sustainability through mythical-religious references, a growth in the spiritualization of media content of the journalistic offer on sustainability, and the hegemony of the media, the omnipotence of the mediatized thing producing “an effect of Church” by legitimizing a certain “truth” of the information.

Studies on religion in the former communist countries show that the cessation of the socialist repressions against the church and religion was followed by a revitalization of religion. Contributions supporting the model of market religion conclude that there is a higher chance of increasing religious competition and pluralization due to the opening of the religious markets, which ultimately led to an increase of religious vitality. Studies arguing for the secularization paradigm consider that the changes in the former communist countries (including Romania) rather reflect a premature secularization (Pickel, 2012). In this view, after an initial boom of religious sentiment, there has been no significant return to religion. This article provides an overview of Romanian religious media and presents the transformations of the Romanian religious media landscape by proposing the hypothesis that the religious media scene in Romania is impacted by the effects of the two co-existing opposite tendencies: religious vitality and incomplete secularization.

This article outlines and discusses two aspects of the French mediatization of Tu ne tueras point ( Hacksaw Ridge) film: the relationship between media, normative secularism and religion in the context of the hegemony of mediatization as ‘media and communication-centered’ phenomenon. Based on the content analysis and discursive strategies of the biographical war drama chronicles, the contribution points out less developed empirical aspects in France regarding the relation between religion and media: (a) the media discourse is dependent on a normative narrative of secularism, (b) the media discourse represents and expresses a confusion between the sacred, religion and faith, deliberately created and maintained by the journalists, and (c) the media discourse is based on a conception of violence with modern origins.