Spiritual Nontroversies: Framing Conflicts and Controversies of Religion and Spirituality in Danish News Media

This article analyzes two Danish news stories in order to discuss the reasons that spirituality seems to be less newsworthy than religion. Drawing on Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, and Luhmann’s account of the mass media in a modern functionally differentiated society, I argue that spirituality seldom registers as controversial in the news stories. It lacks the scale necessary to be selected as newsworthy. Additionally, it is not a natural source of systemic irritation for many subsystems, probably only for the systems of religion and science. The two cases involves media controversies on news production on mindfulness in the health system and on the use of animal telepathy in the majority church.