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Born-agains and mainstream believers 157

culture. In spite of the fact that this program has, over the course of its run
on the air, repeatedly been the object of severe criticism particularly from
conservative and so-called “pro family” voices in the culture, this family of
born-again believers rather unproblematically watches it. Our expectations
about the way such families would relate to television probably would
have been for particular and focused religious or spiritual meanings and
values to be brought into play in viewing choices and in reception of televi-
sion programs. We might ask, with reference to the Millikens, “What is
essentially ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ about their consumption of television?”
The answer is really “nothing,” and that is interesting. Their “accounts of
media” are thus less complex and articulated to their faith than we
expected.
We might explore some possible reasons why the Millikens don’t apply
categories of value out of their religious lives directly to the media they
consume. We saw that Lynn, at least, does not identify strongly with insti-
tutional or doctrinal authority in her religious and values self-understandings,
and there is little evidence that those sources mean much for Jay, either.
Where might a values discourse focused on television emerge from in that
case? In addition to the possibility that the Millikens might lack the
“moral compass” we’d expected to find because of their relative distance
from institutional authority (not forgetting, of course, the evidence that
such institutional suspicion is a more general feature of contemporary
Evangelicalism, and thus they may be more typical than we’d prepared
ourselves to think), there may be another factor. The Millikens seem to be
rather unfocused and unreflective about their media behaviors. Jay’s
seeming notion that television viewing is somehow a commonplace
behavior that is simply “expected” evokes the kind of stereotype
commonly identified with the label “couch potato.” In order to pursue
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this further, let’s turn to a family that seems on its face to be somewhat
different from the Millikens in some important ways.

The Callahan family
The Callahans are a two-parent family living in the suburbs of a major
city. Karl, 45, and Dinah, 37, have three children, twins Lisa and Cathy,
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age 8, and young Brent, age four. Karl and Dinah are registered
Republicans, and readily describe themselves as both politically and reli-
giously “conservative.” They are a solidly middle-class, two-income
family, though Dinah works half-time as a registered nurse. They are
rather emphatic about identifying themselves as born-again Evangelicals,
though they are in the process of moving from a Presbyterian to a Baptist
church. “We’re going to a Baptist church – that’s really of secondary
importance to the overall church offering – but it is a Baptist church,” Karl
notes.