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146 Reception of religion and media

voluble meaning-making around angels, aliens, and afterlife can flourish
“in the home.”
Like Butch, Priscilla and Judy also recognize the extent to which these
spiritually meaningful media contrast with the claims of authority and
orthodoxy. For each of them, there are saliencies to the media that invoke
various of the “repressed modes” of religious experience I introduced in
the previous chapters. For the Castellos, this is clearly music; for all of
them, it is the notion of “experience” itself, as well as ideas of voluble spir-
ituality.
We’ve seen here that the media are an inescapable, even pervasive,
dimension of modern life. We’ve further seen evidence of how the media
relate to spiritual and religious lives in these households. The differences
and the commonalities between what should have been quite distinct
contexts – the Castello and Cruz households – are provocative. In the next
chapter, we will look at a larger number of households using Roof’s classi-
fication more directly. In this way, we’ll hope to further elaborate the ways
that media are coming to significance in daily spiritual and religious lives.