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Chapter 5

Reception of religion and media

There are a number of ways we might have looked at religion in the media
age. There are, admittedly, large structural, political, and social implica-
tions of a point in history where the means of communication have
become institutionalized, commodified, and routinized. The argument I’ve
been developing here is rooted in two assumptions about the situation that
results. First, thinking of religion and media only in institutional-structural
terms ignores the way that media and religion are coming together in
important ways in contemporary life. Second, those changes militate in
favor of a particular kind of analytic strategy: one that focuses on the
reception of media, and looks at both the texts and practices of consump-
tion that result.
We have gradually focused on the central task of field research that
looks at media texts and media reception related to religion and spiritu-
ality. As I’ve said, it might seem like a rather straightforward task to
simply “go and ask” people about the media they see, about what they do
with those media, and how those media relate to those moods and motiva-
tions we in another time would have called, simply, religion. As we will
see, this task is not nearly so straightforward.
To begin with, it is important that we ask such questions in such a way
as to not “salt the mine.” We talked in Chapter 4 about the phenomenon
1
we call “accounts of media,” which can be described in certain contexts as
an effect of “social desirability,” or the tendency to give the “socially desir-
able” answer. We can then expect our conversations to entail such answers
to some extent. This would be particularly so were we to ask a question
like, “How do the media affect your religious or spiritual life?” right off
the bat. While we do get around to this question at some point in our
interview guide, we begin far less obtrusively. This is because the strongest
or most convincing evidence of a role for media in religion/spirituality
would be from a conversation about religion/spirituality where reference
to media simply “comes up” on its own. We’ll also see that, in a way, this
does happen. Media do appear in conversations about religion/spirituality,
and religion/spirituality do appear in conversations about media. Far more
often, though, we have to probe to make those connections. We don’t start