Page 143 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

132 Reception of religion and media

media as a field of negotiation over appropriate and inappropriate presen-
tation of such symbolism. She expresses an interesting and subtle “account
of” programs like X-Files as delving too much into “fantasy” and not
enough into “reality” when contemplating aliens from outer space. These
media then help her define her own beliefs, they are involved in compelling
practice, and they serve identity on more than one level.
As I said, Judy defies some of the categorization we brought into this
analysis. As someone who we might have expected – demographically – to
be rather conservative or traditional in her religiosity or spirituality, we
might also have expected her media tastes and practices to represent that.
As a devout Catholic, we would expect that she might not be that inter-
ested in media representations of religion, or in specifically Catholic
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representations if so. We have found something quite different. On one
level, she is like we would have expected her to be. She attends services
with some regularity, does not like televangelists (though she does watch
them), and draws a bright line between her sense of her Catholic faith as
“out-of-home” and other things “in-home” that have another status for
her. But there is where the great difference lies between what we might
have expected and what we found. Her “in-home” practice opens up into
an interesting and complex set of beliefs and ideas, a personal sensibility of
“seeking” or “questing” (though not described in those terms), and a
negotiation with cultural commodities in the achievement of meaning and
understanding, and the experience of salience or even effervescence (to use
a Durkheimian term).
Next is a case that should, on the face of it, provide a contrast. Against
Judy, who by conventional measures would fit into Roof’s category “main-
stream believer” or perhaps even “dogmatic,” we’ll now go to the other
“pole,” a family that resembles much more Roof’s description of a “meta-
physical believer and seeker.”

“New Agers?”

Butch and Priscilla Castello live in a large bedroom community outside a
major city. Butch, 34, is Latino and Priscilla, 39, is of Italian descent. They
have two small children, Leah, aged 5, and Corey, 8, who attend an alter-
native school nearby. They live in a large, comfortable home in a relatively
new neighborhood. Butch works in sales for an international telecommuni-
cations firm; Priscilla is a homemaker who writes fiction. Their family
income is over $75,000. They were both raised Catholic, but now identify
themselves primarily with Buddhism. They are very much like Roof’s
“metaphysical believers and seekers” in that they describe themselves as
still seeking the right religion for them. In some ways, Buddhism seems
more like a lifestyle than a spiritual choice for them, both of them agreeing
to the Interviewer that they have not yet found the “right” religion or