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166 Born-agains and mainstream believers

media (with Karl Callahan going so far as to say that “entertainment” is
also a positive value of the “visual” or “screen” media as well).
At the same time, even though they are identified with a side of the
American religious landscape that is generally seen as conservative and
moralistic, all of them fight that stereotype, and recognize that their judg-
ments and behaviors around media are commonly understood markers of
their place on that map. That is, they understand that conservative
Christians are expected to be restrictive and moralistic about media, and
they resist that role. They know that it is important to make distinctions,
yet they are reluctant on some levels to do so. On reflection, this makes
some sense. Contemporary religion, as we have seen, is oriented toward
the autonomous self. Born-again Christians express their own version of
this, as was clearly said by a number of our interviewees among these
families. Traditional institutional and clerical authority is resisted, and,
within the home, traditional parental authority is to be felt in teachable
moments about and through media. No one wants to raise automatons.
Everyone wants their children to think for themselves, and these families
exhibit that sentiment, rather than a “prohibitive” one.
Interestingly, none of these families showed a particular interest in
religious television. In fact, several interviewees were actually critical of
that genre. Most of these families were familiar with, and many used,
religious media of a variety of kinds, including Contemporary Christian
Music, cassettes, videos, and books distributed by religious producers
and publishers, etc. These media do provide an alternative to the
“secular” media for many of them. At the same time, however, these
alternatives do not substitute for what they all accept is a commonplace
of American cultural participation, watching television, listening to
radio, going to movies, and surfing the Internet. Their choices within
secular media are in part defined by notions such as the idea that senti-
mental or “inoffensive” or “traditional” television programs are by
definition good. There is also some evidence of the kind of class tastes
represented by Karl Callahan’s ideas about the problems with “visual” or
“screen” media. Thus, some of our expectations for our “born-again
believers” were met and some were not.

Mainstream believers
Those people Roof calls “mainstream believers” are more closely identified
with religious institutions than are born-again believers. As he points out,
they think of themselves as mainstream in important ways, and identify
with religious traditions both as matters of their own identity and through
extended family associations with those traditions. In Chapter 3, I specu-
lated that they might well be the group most likely to identify with the
so-called “mass-culture critique” of the media, being thus more oriented