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Reception of religion and media 125

Bonnie: Yeah.
Interviewer: You don’t do that together as a family?
Dale: Well, right now we each read our Bibles and then we go to bed.
Interviewer: You have prayer, though?
Dale: Yeah, we pray with the boys upstairs, the Lord’s Prayer. Well, some-
times in the past before I started this internship, we used to read Bible
stories to them. We have a couple books of Bible stories.

This comes up at another point in the interview, and this time, the report is
slightly different:

Dale: The reading that we do mostly consists of the Bible.
Bonnie: The Bible, at night. . . .
Dale: Before we go to bed.
Interviewer: As a family?
Bonnie: By ourselves. He reads his Bible, I read mine.
Dale: We used to anyway – we need to get back into it – we used to read
the kids Bible stories, or just a book before they go to bed. We do say
prayers before they go to bed.

The messiness of daily life comes through here. Families such as the
Johnsons clearly must constantly negotiate their way through the hurdles
that challenge their plans for where to invest time and attention. Most of
us can empathize with them, and few of us could probably describe our
lives in as straightforward a way as we would like. We strive to be consis-
tent and to act in ways that reflect our values. And, like the Johnsons, we
would be likely to describe ourselves in the first instance as being
successful in doing so. Also like the Johnsons, it would probably become
clear the more we talked that we are not always the people and families we
wish to describe.
The Johnsons help us understand how the media are integrated into
daily life. They are inescapable, troublesome, contradictory, and complex
in their role. That is clear. It is also clear that for the Johnsons at least, and
for the others we will hear from, the question of the role that the media
may play in religion and spirituality will also be inescapable, troublesome,
contradictory, and complex. We will now begin looking at the question of
the relationship of religion and media in daily life more directly.
We are moving through an analysis that looks within the sociocultural
landscape of religion and spirituality for ways in which the cultural
resources of the media sphere serve contemporary projects of meaning and
identity. In previous chapters, we considered emergent changes in that
landscape that substantially alter traditional and received ways of looking
at religion. We’ve seen that contemporary religion scholarship describes
religion in terms of its meanings achieved more than meanings ascribed,