Page 118 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Articulating culture in the media age 107

values. Further, he assumes the received idea that the media are by defini-
tion on the other side of a boundary separating the “sacred” from the
“profane.” The connection between media and faith, for him, is further
interconnected with a set of ideas about contemporary social values,
including particularly race, but also gender. This is illustrated by his feel-
ings about the social meaning of the Andy Griffith Show, which he
considers to be valid, but it is in the past. For Glenn, there is a natural
order of things that has somehow come to be disrupted in modernity, and
the media are both a cause and a measure of that disruption. They serve it,
but they also are emblematic of it.
At the same time, though, media of certain kinds are integral to
authentic faith and spirituality for Glenn, specifically Christian media such
as the books and other resources of Focus on the Family and the Promise
Keepers, and the books of authors such as Tim LeHaye and Chuck
Colson. He even accepts the notion that the purely “secular” media such
as Hollywood films might have the capacity to convey important
“nuggets” of value. As a whole, the fact that certain media might relate to
authentic faith is a tacit understanding for Glenn. At the same time,
though, he struggles against a taken-for-granted distinction between the
profanity and anti-religion of the secular media (religion linked closely
with social and political ideas as we have seen) and the sacrality of
authentic and faithful life, and the media connected with faith.
Seeing these accounts from Glenn as parts of his larger “plausible narra-
tive of the self” enables us to position his ideas here as representative of a
number of things. First, he strives for coherence and consistency, even
against some contradictions. This is particularly obvious in his discussions
about manhood and spirituality. Consistent with traditional views in
conservative Protestantism, he sees male spirituality as an autonomy
expressed in spiritual “headship” (to use the Evangelical term of art). At
the same time, his narrative reveals a struggle with contemporary gender
roles and gender relations. He further proposes an approach to under-
standing gender that is no doubt inflected by his experience with the
Promise Keepers organization, which stresses a more balanced view of
manhood. He suggests that men need to develop their “feminine” side.
Second, his descriptions of his views of parenting carry with them some-
times uncomfortable markers of reality and the claims and values of
modernity, with these elements needing to be made coherent and consistent
within his description. On the one hand, he strives to express his spiritual
leadership in the home, but on the other hand is reluctant to be seen as
directive or coercive. He clearly understands media, books, magazines,
television, film, and popular music to be important cultural markers and
resources. He is at the same time reluctant to control them. Like many
other parents, as I said, he wants to describe a situation where his spiritual
leadership has educated his children by example, and they therefore make