Page 117 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

106 Articulating culture in the media age

that to “cross over” from secular to religious, the basic formula calls for
secular films or other media to be rather bland and inoffensive in conven-
tional terms. But Glenn encountered in this experience another
perspective – that one could look at film more symbolically or metaphori-
cally. He describes himself as gradually coming to the view that there can
be a nugget of truth in such films, a nugget that is so profound that the
dominant culture – represented in the media – must not have been aware
that it was there. Someone sneaked it in, he speculates.
Glenn has a decidedly apocalyptic sense of the world, something that is,
as I said earlier, connected with some dominant streams of contemporary
Evangelical pop culture. He sees the boundary between the sacred and the
profane clearly inscribed in the contrasting media cultures of the secular
and Evangelical worlds.
Glenn: When you pick up a magazine off the rack, half of it is just garbage.
It really is. There is nothing edifying. You go to a Christian bookstore
and find edifying things. . . . Oswald Chambers, all those things that
are great literature to read. James Dobson has some wonderful things,
Chuck Colson, there are so many people out there but they are just
such a small portion. And then if you pass one of those good books to
somebody they say “Whew, I’m not reading that crap.” So it is our
responsibility in society to establish some sort of norm here. We are so
sideways. To me it is Sodom and Gomorrah. But, I’m overly critical.
But I firmly believe that the Lord is going to be here. I really look at the
Bible and I read that the end times are close at hand. I don’t think they
are that far away. . . . You look at the Temple being rebuilt; you look at
what is happening with the common market. The Eurodollar. All those
things are really leading to what the Bible says in Revelation about
what will happen in the end time. The war, the feast, the famine. It is
all happening and it is being accelerated.

At a later point in the interview, Glenn reflects on something specific from
the media that he finds to be particularly profound and meaningful: the
Andy Griffith Show. 38 Glenn connects the character played by Griffith
with normative ideals of fatherhood and parenthood, and the character
played by Ron Howard (during his days as a child actor) with an ideal of
sweet, innocent boyhood. Ironically, Glenn contrasts the character of the
son with what he sees to be the profanity of Ron Howard’s profession
now, as a film director. 39
Like many of our informants, Glenn initially found it difficult to
connect media with his faith and spirituality. As the interview continued,
though, it became clear that, in important ways, he sees these issues as
integrally related. His views are strongly inflected with “accounts of”
media as, first and foremost, a source of negative or anti-social ideas and