Page 142 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Reception of religion and media 131

things, let alone if people can do that that’s fine because they can use
their gift into making money and they’re not hurting anybody but then
you have these programs that come on that are kind of like messing
with your head and. . . .
Interviewer: Messing with your head meaning?
Judy: Yeah, they’re putting fantasy in your mind and they’re projecting
you again into what’s fantasy and what’s reality.
Interviewer: For you, angels, aliens and afterlife, this is what you’re calling
real?
Judy: Yeah.

Judy is a fascinating case, illustrative of the complexity we’ve been talking
about. While the media play a role in her self-understandings around spiri-
tuality and belief, it is a negotiated self-understanding. She sees the media
landscape as a place where religious meaning and religious difference are
represented. A kind of religion, that she calls “out-of-home,” plays an
important role for her. She is Catholic, and always has been. She has tried
other faiths, but always comes back to Catholicism. But that is not all
there is to her beliefs and spirituality.
She is attracted to programs that exist on the boundary between tradi-
tional belief and her own sense of existential reality. Angels are important
to her, representing values and sentiments that she wishes to identify with,
for example. So there is, within media, those media that are authentic and
attractive because they are “real.” By “real” she means that they deal in
episodes that are concrete representations of daily life and perhaps of ordi-
nary people. She has no time for media that present themselves as
“religious.” Even within the category of media that focus on themes she
finds interesting – aliens, for example – she is skeptical of their claims on
her attention and beliefs. She wants to make up her own mind. “I do that
on my own time,” she says. In the end, the “fantasy” that she sees in many
programs falls away when she can encounter the “real,” put by the
Interviewer as “angels, aliens, and afterlife.” That is reality, and thus
authentic, for Judy.
It is also interesting how Judy defies in a way the earlier characteriza-
tion of the “symbolic inventory.” If, by that, we meant that media
symbolism and practices would exist on a shelf to be accessed as resources
out of which people might construct new senses of who they are religiously
and spiritually, Judy shows us that that description is a bit simplistic.
Certainly, there are ways in which Judy does use media as a resource. She
would have that intention in seeking things on the Internet, for example.
And, there are undoubtedly elements within It’s a Miracle or Crossing over
that she would find useful and memorable. Her “experiences in” those
programs would result in things that would serve to build and extend her
understandings of things. At the same time, though, she clearly sees these