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Reception of religion and media 143

sees these programs as actually evangelizing about a kind of “theology” of
aliens and miracles. Even more interesting, she makes a distinction within
these programs, finding some of them excessively commodified and
fantastic, and others more satisfying because they are more “real.”
Judy further makes a distinction between “in-home” practice and “out-
of-home” practice. In a way that is reminiscent of some of Roof’s and
Wuthnow’s ideas about the dynamism of the autonomous, seeking, self,
she wants to see her more authentic spiritual practice as something that is
closer to home, that is more domestic. Like the Castellos (as well as
Wyonna Fallon and the Johnsons), autonomy and seeking are important –
even vital – to her, and she shares with the others a concomitant suspicion
of clerical and institutional religious authority. There is a good deal of
evidence here, then, for the notion that a “seeking” sensibility around reli-
gion and spirituality transcends the expected or received social or cultural
categories. It has been a too easy assumption that “seeking” is more of a
phenomenon of upper-socioeconomic status households and individuals
within them who are interested in practices such as the so-called “New
Age.” That is, people like the Castellos.
Another prediction from Chapter 3 was that the evolving religious/
symbolic marketplace would be a place where new, more focused mediated
symbolic and practical material would be made accessible to interested
receivers. There is much evidence of this in these interviews. Judy, Butch,
and Priscilla each have their own favorite media-based spiritual commodity.
Each of them is “multi-media.” For Judy, the best example is John Edward
and his program Crossing over. While primarily a television program,
Edward has an extensive Web presence, and a set of commodified media
services and materials available. For Priscilla, it is the ministry of Gayuna
Cealo, which she has accessed both online and in person, finding the online
version an intriguing confirmation of her larger self-narrative. For Butch, it
is Deepak Chopra, who he experiences most tactilely in the form of his
book, which seems to have an almost mystical inspirational power for him.
For Priscilla and Butch, Cealo and Chopra evoke symbols and ideas that
are loosely related to their quasi-Buddhist practice. Chopra, Cealo, and
Edward are, further, extensively commodified, and really “media
phenomena” in the sense that they could not exist in anywhere near their
present forms without the media. Their accessibility in the Cruz and
Castello households demonstrates the value of mediation in bringing
specialized symbols such as these within reach of the domestic sphere.
There is also a sense in which these secular media-based programs and
services constitute a kind of necessary challenge to more traditional ways
of looking at things. The cultural salience of Monty Python’s Holy Grail
for the Fallons, for example, drew them into consumption of a film that,
on its face, would be found to be antithetical to the traditional ideas about
Christianity that we’d assume would be conventional in the church they