Page 50 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Audiences 33

put audiences more in control (audiences can “pull” out what they want).
The digital media are prominent examples of the second sort, in that they are
claimed to constitute contexts of more or less infinite “supply” of resources
from which audiences are more or less free to select.
The central emerging arguments about the nature of audiences for religion
and spirituality in fact see such a shift in focus as paramount. This is rooted
in changes that are fundamental conditions for both “religion” and “the
media.”
For nearly two decades now, religion scholars have been charting a decline
in the importance and authority of religious institutions and a simultaneous
rise in the authority and autonomy of individuals in charting their own
religious and spiritual lives (Warner 1993). The resulting mode of religious
and spiritual practice has been called “seeker” or “quester” religiosity (Roof
1999). This mode of practice is rooted in a contemporary cultural logic that
encourages a quest for the ideal “self.” Prominent social theorists, including
Anthony Giddens (1991), have argued persuasively that the conditions of
social life today encourage the individual to turn inward for the resources
that were once found in the external social environment to support the
development and maintenance of selves and identities.
This view puts the individual in a particular kind of position with
reference to religion and spirituality. Though traditional sources of authority
are losing their power to define and determine, individuals nonetheless
must find meaningful and coherent sources to their quest (Clark 2003).
Religious traditions of various kinds are ready sources but, in the present
era, it is the individual who authorizes them in terms of their meaningfulness
and legitimacy. There is a kind of dialectical relationship between the
autonomous actor and the historically rooted symbolic and other resources.
The individual’s autonomy is not absolute in that there are limits to the range
of things that might qualify as “religious” or “spiritual,” those limits set to
an extent by received categories of what defines “the religious.” What is
questioned in religious authority is not the nature or content of the symbols
but the power and authority of religious institutions and leaders to define
and determine the meanings of those symbols.

Religious authority and media authority

The decline in religious authority has two kinds of implications. First, there is
the implication of the legitimacy of the symbols themselves (i.e., the stability
or institutional fixity of their meanings and associations). Second, there is the
question of the legitimate contexts for their presentation and consumption.
Emerging audiences for religion and spirituality are then composed of people
for whom the media context is a potentially legitimate source of religious