Page 161 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

150 Born-agains and mainstream believers

kind of playfulness. People like Judy Cruz and the Castellos engage media
in spiritual terms through a style of appropriation (consistent with ideas
about reflexivity in modernity) that is experimental, voluble, and efferves-
cent. What may result for Judy is a bricolage to a certain extent, but one
that is both “fluid and grounded.” This means that her religiosity and spir-
ituality are not static in a way that makes them easily amenable to
classification. There is a further complexity in the place that media play in
Judy’s (and others’) seeking and questing. For her, the media are also a
playful context in that they seem to provide a relatively “low-stakes” place
to explore. For her and the others we will look at in more detail in this
chapter, media meaning-making thus varies from what we might expect to
see in encounters with the symbolic resources of the culture. Judy and
other of our interviewees treat the media as a context as well as a symbolic
inventory, thus its contribution to their identities and meanings may well
be less formal than we might have expected.

Born-again Christians
I noted in Chapter 3 that Evangelicalism has been more oriented toward
media than other traditions. I suggested that we might therefore find more
acceptance among our born-again informants of the idea that at least
certain kinds of media would be appropriate to religious meaning and
questing. We might also expect that they would draw clear distinctions
between various media, seeing the “secular” media as less appropriate
than “religious” media as conveyors of normative ideas and values. I also
suggested that we might see class tastes represented in their interpretations
due to the traditional tendency for Evangelicals and “born-again
Christians” to be over-represented among lower social and economic
strata (though that distinction has eroded in recent years). At the same
time, though, Roof makes the point that even among born-again
Christians there exists a dimension of autonomous seeking and suspicion
of religious authority. Thus received categories of “good” and “bad”
media might make less sense to them than would be the case with more
traditional or dogmatic interviewees.

The Milliken family
The Milliken family live in the suburbs of a major city. They are a two-
parent family, and both parents, Lynn and Jay, work outside the home. 8
They think of themselves as born-again Christians, but had joined an inde-
pendent Pentecostal church through baptism shortly before our interview.
Lynn and Jay had been raised in Mainline churches, but recently began a
quest that resulted in their finding their current church. Lynn and the chil-
dren attend more than once a week; Jay is not able to attend that