Page 125 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

114 Reception of religion and media

there; we go there after first beginning conversation about religion and
then about media.
We will think of what we see here as passages from the narratives of the
self we discussed in the last chapter. These narratives are self-descriptions
that weave together interviewees’ experiences, values, ideas, and ideals into
what they hope to make a seamless whole. They are not always successful.
There are gaps, tensions, ruptures, and struggles, as there are in life. Each
of our self-narratives necessarily carries within it the tracings of experi-
ences and relationships that, because they existed in history, need to be
accounted for in some way in their roughness and discontinuity. As I said
in the last chapter, though, the question for us is not how well our infor-
mants are able to weave seamless narratives, or what those narratives
reveal about how things “really are.” Our project is to understand how
symbols, practices, and discourses from the media sphere relate to those
meanings and motivations that we and they might identify as “religious”
or “spiritual.” So, in a way, it is the ingredients or elements that make up
these narratives that most interest us, along with how they are brought
together, and what they seem to contribute to the project of the whole.
We’ll begin by considering one of the fundamental issues we’ve been
discussing all along, the extent to which media are or are not an inevitable
dimension of contemporary life, and, by extension, of religious and spiri-
tual meaning quests.

The pervasiveness of media
Brenna Payton is a 12-year-old middle-schooler who lives on the edge of a
medium-sized city with her mother, Corrine, and her sister, Sally, who is two
years older. Brenna and Corrine have featured in an extensive analysis by my
2
colleague Lynn Schofield Clark, who looked at them as an example of distinc-
tiveness in terms of media consumption. I want to reintroduce them here
3
because they illustrate a point that Clark also made about them – the difficulty
all families have in avoiding the pervasive reach of media. Corrine Payton’s
4
great passion is ecology and living a balanced, holistic lifestyle, something she
tries hard to instill in her daughters. For her, this holism does not include
media, which Corrine, who happens to be a Unitarian, considers to be too
materialistic and a waste of time. Corrine does not make a clear connection
between her Unitarian faith and media use, per se, but, rather, her faith inter-
acts with her ideas about holism, and that in turn leads to what she considers
5
to be logical conclusions about what is appropriate in terms of media. Brenna
and Sally do watch television at their father’s house on weekend visits, but
their primary identification is with their mother’s place, which is “TV free.”
Corrine muses that she might consider getting a television set at some
point in the future, in part to address any unintended consequences for
Sally and Brenna of her stance on TV.