Page 186 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Born-agains and mainstream believers 175

A broad center
The narratives here raise some themes and values that seem common
between “born-again” and “mainstream” believers. First of all, most of
those we’ve heard from so far seem comfortable with the idea that their
values and their expectations should somehow be represented or expressed
through the media they consume and through their families’ practices of
reception. There is an idea here that the media represent some sort of a
broad cultural surround to which they should be expected to relate on
some level. It is the legacy of their location on the cultural landscape that
they should have an opinion about the media that are available in their
homes. In this context, they seem also to share the perspective that issues
of choice and control should be central to their responses to media. There
is a kind of shared idea that the media demand a response and that
response is expressed either through control, through choice, or through
some combination of the two.
For most of these interviewees, ideas of choice and control imply a kind
of autonomy in relation to the media. No one wants to be a passive
viewer; everyone wants to think of himself as critically and dynamically
involved in his media viewing. It is also common across these interviews
that the concern parents have for children, and the way that children are
to come to consume media, are important distinctions as well. We will
consider this in more detail in the next chapter, but few of the parents here
want to think of themselves as exercising direct control over their family’s
viewing habits. Instead, most of them preferred to wish for their children
what they saw in themselves – autonomous action in careful choice as to
what is viewed or consumed.
The distance between the aspiration and the reality here is an important
and fascinating dimension of these interviews. As we noted earlier, a set of
received ideas or “accounts of media” play a role in the way people think
about and represent media practice for themselves in their households.
What we begin to see here, and will discuss in more detail later, is a
growing sense that these received ideas are at odds with the realities of
media consumption on some rather fundamental and determinative levels.
It is not a trivial matter such as a lack of moral will that keeps a parent
from being the kind of media consumer they present themselves as being.
There are a broader set of social and cultural forces at play.
We will gain some additional insight into these and other dimensions of
media practice vis-à-vis religion and spirituality in the next chapter, where
we will move on to consider interviewees who represent the rest of Roof’s
categories. That chapter will end with an overall assessment of what we
have learned by looking at matters in this way.