Page 109 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

98 Articulating culture in the media age

reflexive autonomy of the self or as something darker and more disem-
powering is an issue we may well hope to address through our
investigations. It is, in any case, part of the contextual surround of the
culturally appropriative practices we will be attempting to assess through
these interviews.

Interviews and narratives

As a way of considering how interviews may reveal or relate to the notion
of the “plausible narrative of the self,” let’s look at a particularly inter-
esting and complex interview. On the most straightforward level, these
interviews involve simple questions. We “go and ask” people how they use
media, what they think of media, about their religious and spiritual lives,
and about how media might or do relate to their lives as individuals,
parents, members of groups, and as religious and spiritual beings. What
then remains is to try to account for their responses. This becomes a
complex task because their answers are far from systematic and straight-
forward, as we will see. Having a heuristic through which to understand
what is going on in their accounts is a virtual necessity.
Glenn Donegal is 47 and is a self-employed contractor. He lives in the
suburbs of a large midwestern city with his wife, Liz, age 50, and their two
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sons, Robbie, 16, and Quinn, 12. Glenn was raised Catholic, but is now
an Evangelical Protestant, and an active member of the Evangelical
“Promise Keepers” men’s organization. His religious conversion is linked
with his recovery from alcoholism, which he attributes to finding a strong
and focused faith. He is a regular reader of “Christian” literature,
including from the “Focus on the Family” organization and the popular
Left Behind series of novels discussed in Chapter 3.
At one point in the interview he notes that he believes that fathers
should be the spiritual heads of their households. The interviewer follows
up:

Interviewer: Okay. When you say you see yourself as the spiritual head of
the house, is that because of your gender or because you are more
knowledgeable than other members of the family about Christianity or
what does that role mean to you?
Glenn: It really has nothing to do with masculinity. It has more to do
biblically. We are called out as men to be heads of our households and
spiritual leaders. Now that may translate into masculinity for someone
else but for me personally, there is a big difference between being a
man and a woman and I am not by any means a male chauvinist but I
firmly believe there is a place for a male in his role in the family and as
a spiritual leader I am biblically responsible for my kids and my wife
and our family as far as what the Bible tells me I am supposed to