Page 158 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 6

Cultural objects and religious

identity among born-agains and

mainstream believers

American and Western religiosity is currently undergoing great change.
Many of the received and remembered ways of thinking about religion no
longer hold sway, while these shared memories of religion continue to
determine much of what we consider to be normatively “religious” or
“spiritual.” The newer ways of looking at religion represented by the
work of scholars including Robert Wuthnow, Steven Warner, Nancy
Ammerman, Catherine Albanese, and Wade Clark Roof provide important
markers of the changing face of religious experience and expression. The
families and individuals we heard from in the last chapter illustrated some
of the significant characteristics of religious and spiritual expression today.
There is reason to believe that much of this new religiosity should be
particularly connected with culture and with media culture, as I have
argued along the way.
We will now turn to a more direct appraisal of contemporary religious
experience and its connection to media. In order to do so in the context of
current thought about religion, we’ll turn again to the taxonomy of “Baby-
Boom” religiosity developed by Wade Clark Roof. It is important to keep
in mind that Roof’s analyses, described in two influential books, have
derived a classification of religious practice out of surveys and in-depth
interviews. They were not inductive categories for him, but rather ways
that his informants thought and talked about religion and spirituality,
grouped according to commonalities of perception, identity, self-descrip-
tion, and practice. They are rooted in the religious sensibility that Roof
identified in his work in the 1990s, one defined not only by a concern with
identity, but also with authenticating that identity in a particular way. As
Roof puts it, “the emerging forces arise out of quests not so much for
group identity and social location as for an authentic inner life and person-
hood.” 1
Roof suggests that this situation has three significant dimensions. First,
the numbers of people involved. It is, in fact, a widespread movement
toward “questing” or “searching” that transcends demographically the
social and religious categories where we might have expected it to be
strongest. Second, according to Roof, is the self-consciousness and self-