Pitfalls of Faith: reflections on religious intolerance from a dark telefiction

Abstract

In the light of the epistemology of Cultural Studies (HALL, 2004; 2016), this text problematizes the horror miniseries Midnight Mass as a starting point for understanding religious intolerance, a phenomenon that threatens coexistence in society contemporary. The linguistic movements of representation, appropriation, intentions and symbolic disputes of the fictional product under study allow us to visualize the religious archetypes and the conflicts created by the popular imagination as inducing elements of social segregation. Despite referring to another spatiality, the context instigates timely reflections on prejudices, stigmas and tensions that affect minority beliefs in our country, especially those of African origins, whose rituals and adherents tend to be demonized by the public sphere, silenced and viewed under suspicion. by Christian strands. Thus, the fictional genre of horror, due to its mechanisms of fruition and production of meanings, can favor conditions of intelligibility about this theme.