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142 Reception of religion and media

So, what have we learned? I will summarize in terms of what we’ve seen
and heard in these accounts that are indicative and provocative.
We began by observing that the media are a necessary and inescapable
dimension of modern life. Each of the cases we saw demonstrated this to
a greater or lesser degree. Children and young people tend to experience
this most directly, and parents feel it at least indirectly. Even for the
parents in these interviews, there is a way that the media are taken-for-
granted, something that is a tacit fixture of modern life, through which
and about which a good deal of discourse and meaning-making is made
possible. We saw that they play a tacit and subtle role in these households
and lives. I’ve also described the role as a complex one, a matter that has
a number of dimensions.
It is interesting that for most of these interviewees, “the media” are a
“package,” not necessarily discrete channels or services. Differences
between kinds of media do make a difference, but, at the same time, it is a
technological fact (experienced in these homes) that we are in an era of
“multi-media.” This means that the program on Cartoon Network or the
PAX network also has a website, and a magazine, and perhaps a video
game, and other “spin-offs” as well. Importantly, there is a tacitness to the
way people consume these media across these platforms. What they know
and what they do from one bleeds over to the other.
Even though much of what we want to know about is the way that the
media may or may not be “religious” or “spiritual,” they do seem clearly
to be “culturally” meaningful, too. They make sense in the culture that
produces them (not surprisingly). This is most clearly expressed by Butch
Castello’s reflections on his youthful attraction to The Terminator. He got
what he described as “inspiration” from that film, but it is a “secular” or
“cultural” inspiration, not a spiritual one, that he is talking about. The
media are successful because they are able to invoke and trade on tropes,
values, symbols, and ideas that are salient in the culture. They are attrac-
tive, even pleasurable. On the most basic level, then, it makes sense for us
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to think of them as articulated into the culture in fundamental ways.
On the question that brought us here, the media do contain religiously
and spiritually significant material. Consistent with the arguments in
Chapter 3, there is a good deal of material in what we otherwise would
call “secular” media that connects with the religious and spiritual quests
expressed in these narratives. This is most interestingly found in Judy
Cruz’s consumption of material related to “angels, aliens, and afterlife.”
We might expect Judy, as someone who demographically looks more tradi-
tional or conservative in her religious views, to be particularly unlikely to
venture into territories like these. Instead, she rejects the derogated cate-
gory of traditional religious broadcasting (even though she watches
enough of it to critique it) and finds the more “secular” programming
more interesting, even intriguing and spiritually satisfying. In her view, she