Contemporary Christian Music in Hong Kong: Mediating Religion through Song, Performance and Stardom

For 30 years, the local CCM production community has been trying to find the right mix for the genre and push the music to a secular audience since CCM took shape in Hong Kong in the 1980s. CCM is more widely known as gospel music or contemporary hymnal songs in Hong Kong. This study examines the past and present shape of the local CCM scene to provide a historical perspective for interpreting its trajectory. This study sketches a brief history of local CCM in Hong Kong from the late 1960s to 2010 which helps to understand how local CCM has interacted with the commercial music scene including popular music trends and the pop industry environment throughout its development as well as church responses along the evolution of local CCM.;This study investigates how the local CCM production community grapples with the complexities of fusing religion and media and negotiates the tensions and opportunities that arise between media conditions and assumptions and the religious sensibilities of CCM. By doing so it also engages in a current theoretical discussion about mediation and mediatization in the field of media and religion. This dissertation approaches CCM production as part of the process of mass mediation of religion, through which religious meanings are constantly constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed as practitioners negotiate the multiple conflicting, integrating and interpenetrating forces. In specific, this study addresses practitioners' negotiations between the media-based orientation frame, which include such factors as commercialization, industrial norms, cultural values in the media environment, and the religious orientation frame, which include a range of symbols, moral codes, doctrines, and resources that are religiously meaningful to individuals.;Practitioners' negotiations in CCM production are discussed on three dimensions: song text, performance and stardom. Each of these dimensions highlight common and unique opportunities and tensions in the mediation process, including commercialization, creativity, entertainment, hyperindividuality, evangelism, ministry efficacy and religious piety. Practitioners' negotiations between these interpenetrating and contesting elements shape CCM on the three dimensions.;Finally, this dissertation connects practitioners' autonomy in the production process to the independent production mode of local CCM. Although this production mode presents practical obstacles for local CCM practitioners, it has also allowed practitioners relative autonomy in their decision-making. This thus also bears implications for local CCM's contingent future including the possible scenario of mainstream co-optation.