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Born-agains and mainstream believers 165

program was “spiritual” for her, “because I think when you’re talking
about higher powers and higher beings and that type of thing, that there’s
an undercurrent of spiritualism in that.” The same goes for the X-Files,
but in describing it Rachel goes beyond merely attributing religion-like
qualities to the program, and struggles with her own attraction to some-
thing about it that she resists and can’t quite define.

Yeah, [X-Files] is like another kind of religion, basically. People can
really get involved with . . . but I don’t look at it that way. “Well, the
truth is out there.” Well, what truth? It’s a whole different branch...
the hereafter, the here and now. It’s out there, I guess. I don’t know. It
could be. I guess you could say it’s spiritual, or you could just say it’s
science fiction. I don’t know. I don’t really watch the shows based on
that.

Like the others, then, the Alberts do not inscribe a bright line between reli-
gious and secular media. In important ways, they live more on the
“secular” media map than they live separately from it. They implicitly
recognize that their role as parents is not to cordon their children off from
the influence of profane secular-humanist culture, but to learn to negotiate
with it. And, they find important symbolic, cultural, and even religious
“capital” within it.
The Alberts illustrate more clearly than the others something that all
three families seem to have in common. The choices they make in the
media sphere – the “accounts of media” through which they describe their
relationship to media, the practices of media consumption they engage in
and attempt to educate their children about, and the meanings they nego-
tiate and derive from media content – all serve as important markers of
their negotiations between the various worlds they inhabit. These
contexts – their faith; religious symbols, claims, and traditions; the
symbols, claims, and traditions of the broader culture; and the media – all
insist on certain kinds of identifications, practices, and loyalties. Each has
its own saliencies and its own dangers. Significantly, though, it can be seen
that the media sphere is active in providing both pointers to the other
contexts, and ways of navigating them, and is in some ways the “home
base” from which this all takes place.
We can see that much of what we expected to find among families that
fit Roof’s “born-again” category was a bit off the mark. Each of the fami-
lies we’ve seen here, as well as others in our sample and ones we met in
previous chapters, endorses some of the most basic “accounts of media”
shared by the culture at large. In terms of parenting, there is a consensual
expectation that parenting involves a kind of “media education” for the
children. Some media are good and some are bad. These born-again fami-
lies agree that education and enlightenment are important values of the