Parasocial Relationships with the Gods

Rupert Pupkin, in the Martin Scorsese film The King of Comedy, is an aspiring stand-up comedian who idolizes the celebrity talk show host-comedian Jerry Langford.

Pupkin meets Langford briefly after waiting at his stage door. On this basis, Pupkin’s long-standing imaginings about what he envisions as his close relationship with Langford only increase. Convinced that his career will take off if he can perform on Langford’s show, Pupkin is repeatedly rebuffed by Langford’s staff and, eventually, by Langford himself.

Pupkin finally gets his chance after kidnapping and holding Langford, whom he will only release once he gets a chance to open Langford’s show. He appears on the show, is arrested, convicted, serves time, is paroled, publishes his autobiography, and subsequently appears in his own TV special.

Relationships Based on Illusions

Pupkin has what prescient social scientists from the 1950s, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, call a “ parasocial” relationship with Langford. Horton and Wohl invent this concept to account for the imaginary relationships that humans are wont to entertain in response to performers on the new mass media of the mid-twentieth century, namely, radio, movies, and, especially, television.

Television, particularly, produces the illusion of having face-to-face relationships with people on the screen and creates “personalities,” who have little or no notability beyond the medium itself. Such personalities’ performances create illusions, first, of intimacy with the members of their audiences and, second, of persisting relationships that acquire a history in the minds of audience members and that elicit their loyal following in response to the personalities’ fabricated sincerity.

Horton and Wohl highlight a host of strategies still employed today for enhancing these illusions, including mimicking the style of informal conversations, including various subordinates (announcers, sidekicks, bandleaders, etc.) in the conversation, and mingling with studio audience members or, even, with people on the streets. Crucially, such strategies cue audience members to imagine, like Pupkin does with Langford, rich personal relationships with these personalities. Horton and Wohl offer a half dozen real-life examples from their era of audience members’ otherwise bizarre conduct rooted in such imaginary, parasocial relationships—including the thousands of marriage proposals that poured in for radio’s Lonesome Gal.

As means of mass communication have proliferated, parasocial relationships have attained an ever more prominent role in contemporary culture. We now live in an age of social media influencers, who have developed further strategies for stimulating imagined parasocial relationships among their followers. To build what is, perhaps, an even greater sense of intimacy than any television personality can offer, no detail about an influencer’s life is too trivial to be shared on social media. Hundreds of thousands of followers learn what influencers had for lunch yesterday or whether influencers have decided to change hairstyles, let alone separate from their domestic partners.

Parasocial Relationships in Religions

Nothing requires that the other party in a parasocial relationship be empirically detectable. The Stanford University anthropologist, Tanya Luhrmann, holds that the concept can be readily extended to a host of additional cases—from children’s relationships with their imaginary friends to many readers’ (and novelists’) ongoing relationships with fictional characters. Well-drawn characters in compelling narratives induce similar cognitive and emotional responses from readers that real social interactions do. People’s imaginative efforts at “kindling the presence of invisible others” (as Luhrmann puts it in the subtitle of her recent book) help to make the relationship feel real.

Luhrmann holds, in effect, that religions tap into the same proclivities. Participants’ relationships with the gods are parasocial, induced by narratives and a variety of practices to enhance the probability of such an outcome and resulting religious conviction. She has spent more than a decade studying the ways that religions cultivate the imaginative capacities that stand behind this process of constructing parasocial relationships and kindling feelings of the presence of invisible agents. As Luhrmann notes in an earlier book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, various religious groups, including some evangelical Christian groups, are straightforward and open about the need to exercise and foster such imaginings.