Page 57 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

40 Stewart M. Hoover

coalesced around this film as an important theological statement and as an
opportunity for the expression of identity through aggregation around this
important alternative media expression. These audience identity claims thus
form important framing devices both for audience practice (conservative
religious parents claim certain kinds of rules and behaviors surrounding
media in their homes) and for identity (the sort of affinities discussed above).
Those on the other end of the religion-spirituality spectrum have proven just
as likely to narrate their media consumption, though with different objects.
In 2004, for instance, they were more likely to identify with What the Bleep
Do We Know or Farenheit 9/11 than with The Passion of the Christ. And, they
were also likely to actually derogate the media on the other side, wishing to
make themselves distinct from the latter film and similar materials.
Both religious liberals and conservatives resemble others in their social
class in their attitudes about media. Spiritual seekers, likely to be better
educated and higher-income than those who are more conservatively
“religious,” are attracted more to elite media than to popular forms. Thus,
their identity statements regarding media frame public television and radio,
art films, and other such materials as preferred. They also tend to take a
particular view of the major popular-media framing categories: questions
of “sex” and “violence” in television and film. It is commonplace to expect
religious conservatives to be more concerned about sex and religious liberals
to be more concerned about violence. This does tend to be the case, but more
important to our discussion here, those on the Left reflexively understand
the stereotype and have been known to make openness to sexuality in media
an important point of identity.
Across audience categories, there is a rather consistent tendency for these
identity statements vis-à-vis media to be contradicted by behavior. People
tend to say one thing and do another when it comes to media consumption.
A widely circulated example of this is the success of the salacious prime-time
drama Desperate Housewives in the U.S. Bible Belt during its early seasons.
Though it had lower ratings there than elsewhere, its viewership in this
conservative region of the country was higher than one would have expected
if the widespread religiously conservative critiques of popular culture were
also determining viewing behavior. Many studies find this to be the case
at the individual household level as well, that even in households where
the media critique is the most explicit and focused, derogated media are
nonetheless consumed. Thus, we can say of audiences that their attitudes
about specific genres and forms are important, historically lodged statements
of identity and meaning, while at the same time, the attractions and pleasures
of actual media consumption is a different, though related, matter. And, as
religiosities and spiritualities often necessarily carry with them commitments
to certain normative ideas and values, those who would identify with religion