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Reception of religion and media 145

traditional religious broadcasting and the spiritually significant “secular”
media she consumes. Judy’s distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” in
these latter programs is another interesting classification. For her, the “in-
home” religion and the media that she negotiates into that spirituality are
particularly meaningful because they are rooted and grounded in historical
experience and in what she sees to be “real life.”
Distinctions for the Castellos, the Johnsons, and Wyonna Fallon are
more technological. The Johnsons are concerned about the Internet, seeing
it as particularly portentous for their children. Wyonna likes being able to
program her own media diet using a VCR, and has even made video
viewing a central ritual of family life. The Castellos’ distinctions are more
typically class-oriented. They have a clear suspicion of “screen media,”
based on both their potential as persuasive media, and on their feeling that
time spent in front of a screen is wasted time. They much prefer print
media, the Internet, popular music, and film. And, it is important to add,
for all their class-relevant distaste for media, they do find spiritually mean-
ingful material there. The media are classified and made distinct in these
accounts, and these distinctions are, in part, statements about religious and
spiritual meaning and value.
The naturalization of media in these homes is also significant. For Judy
Cruz and the Johnsons, there is a sense that the media are part of the home
environment and that they are more or less unproblematic there. For the
Castellos, there is a more fundamental map, one that draws a line between
media and their lifestyle. All media, but particularly television, are simply
antithetical to the kind of holistic atmosphere they are attempting to create
in the home. This is a sentiment shared broadly among their social
networks, apparently, and is taken-for-granted at their children’s school.
When any of these interviewees moves to the level of accounting for
their own engagement with specific media, they recount a certain kind of
practice. As they negotiate media material into their spiritual and religious
lives, playfulness rather than deliberation is the best description.
Consistent with ideas about media practice such as Henry Jenkins’s well-
known notion of “textual poaching,” these interviewees can be seen to
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approach media with a sense of experiment, testing, and appropriation.
That is not to say that this is not a serious matter for them. Butch’s
encounter with Deepak Chopra’s book has clearly been very significant in
his life. But this playfulness takes on another meaning in a context where
people are using these media-based resources to negotiate against the more
rigid orthodoxies of received religious practice. In Butch’s case, his seeking
sensibility thus allowed him to negotiate around the hard realities of tradi-
tional faith (including – in his case – “orthodox” Buddhism), finding a
“playful margin” where he encountered Chopra and the inspiration he
found there. For Judy, the harder, more solid, structural/institutional
claims of traditional Catholicism are held at a distance, while the more