Page 152 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Reception of religion and media 141

Like Butch, she finds music a much closer connection to her spirituality than
other media (another example of one of the “repressed modes” of religious
expression). When seeking out screen media, her equivalent to Judy’s “angels,
aliens, and afterlife” is “goddess stuff or Buddhism.” When pushed further by
the Interviewer to describe any characters or roles in TV or the movies that
are most like her spiritually, Priscilla cannot think of specifics, responding that
“I do like a lot of movies that are about people, just snapshots of culture...
mostly foreign films are so full of life and color and music.”
The distinction between Judy and Priscilla is provocative. These tastes
and interests are definitive on a number of levels. They reveal class and
educational tastes. They reveal the possibilities of spirituality in contempo-
rary culture. The fact that the only screen medium Priscilla is able to see
unproblematically is film – and preferably foreign film – reveals a real
distinction on that level, as well. A key difference is in how media relate to
their respective spiritualities. Judy’s voluble spirituality is engaged and
supported (and negotiated) with reference to screen media. Priscilla and
Butch see their autonomous, seeking Buddhism as very much in contrast to
most of screen media. For Judy, media are part of daily life; for the
Castellos, the media undermine their normative ideal of daily life. Thus,
these two “poles” illustrate some important and provocative capacities of
the media sphere to support contemporary religiosity. The extents and
limits of the various media are not as straightforward and clear as we
might have expected. Importantly, it is in some ways through these
accounts of media that we can draw important distinctions between the
Castellos and Judy Cruz. There are some other insights here, as well.

Negotiating media in everyday spirituality
These conversations reveal the challenge of asking people about media and
religion. Our interviews attempt to get at these questions in a number of
different ways, and we can see here the utility of such an approach. We
learned more each time we circle back to questions of relations between
religion and media, no matter how we asked the questions. As I said
before, part of the reason for this is to be unobtrusive, to let these relations
emerge in the narratives as they unfold. The interviewer’s role is to follow
the narrative in a way, guiding it and guiding it back, as necessary. It is
important to emphasize that what results from these interviews are narra-
tives that tell us some very provocative things about media, religion, and
culture in general, and provocative things about these individuals and
families in particular. The point is not to generalize from these individuals
as representative of their demographic categories, but instead to under-
stand what their stories tell us about how people in those categories use
media, think about religion, and bring the two together. They tell us about
the capacities of these things to relate in the context of domestic life.