Page 112 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 101

kind of “depth” as over against media superficiality. To Glenn, then, a
program like Touched is to be evaluated for its spiritual or religious signifi-
cance not in terms of the symbols and values it contains but how those are
put to the purpose of convincing people of the need for an intense and
personal salvation.
Perhaps because Glenn has been somewhat fluid in his own religious
trajectory, having made a rather large change in his own religious identifi-
cation (from Catholic to Evangelical Protestant) he maintains something of
an interest in religious diversity, and reports having sought information
about a variety of religions, at least while he was on his own religious
quest. In response to a question about whether he’d ever explored non-
Christian traditions, and which ones, Glenn responds:

Glenn: Taoism, Buddhism, and the Koran. I’ve read a lot of information
about a lot of different religions and how they operate and I looked at
why the Baptists are the Baptists, why Evangelicals are Evangelical,
why Lutherans are Lutherans, Mormons. I was very interested in all
that. What is this all about? What is their search? Why are they
looking?
Interviewer: So, why did you stop exploring non-traditional paths?
Glenn: I stopped exploring non-traditional paths because I found that there
was so much diversity in all those paths that there was something that
was not right for me in all that. . . . And the conclusion I came to is
that we are all searching. We all have that spiritual hole that needs to
be filled and it is a matter of where you choose to plug in but what I’ve
found is that when I had a relationship with Jesus Christ . . . after that,
it was developing a relationship with Jesus. There is only one way, as I
see it now today. I was searching in all places but nothing filled me. . . .
And, I am very analytical. That is part of my problem that I look at
things in that regard. So, what I needed to do was, I said to myself
“What’s common in all these things?” Well, everyone is searching for
God. Okay? But is Buddha a God? No. Because Buddha was dead.
Buddha was never resurrected. The only person that was ever truly
resurrected that they have proof was Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ had over
600 prophecies come true. What was his name? . . . Nostradamus,
right. He was lucky if he got one out of 10 or 1 out of a 100. So to me,
I look at the Bible . . . you can pick the Bible apart and say it is this,
this, and this, but if you look at the prophecies there are people proph-
esyzing 400 years before an event happened and that event happened.
Isaiah did it. So, what I’m saying to you is when I started seeing that I
was like “This is historically correct.”

It is perhaps not so clear from this passage that a great deal of the
exploration that Glenn has engaged in has involved mediated sources.