Page 187 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 7

Cultural objects and religious

identity among metaphysical

believers, dogmatists, and

secularists

The categories we considered in the last chapter represent the two most
significant “poles” of (at least) American religious history. The evolution
of the Evangelical movement in the middle of the twentieth century left
Protestantism with two important “faces”: those individuals and move-
ments that came to identify with Evangelicalism (those likely to describe
themselves as “born again”); and those who did not. As Roof has
suggested, what may form the core of identity for the latter group is that
they are not part of the former. At the same time, people on both sides
share a great deal in common, particularly as regards an identification
with Christian and Protestant tradition in some specific and formal way,
and a general Protestant sensibility to be open to the culture, though the
two “sides” do so in different ways.
They also seem to share a good deal in common in terms of their
approaches to media culture, which is our central concern here. Issues of
choice and control, as I have said, are major themes of their self-reflection
on their relationship to the media sphere. They also seem to share a partic-
ular focus on the idea of parenthood and the objectification of the
experience of their children or others’ children as important dimensions
defining media practice. For all of them, there is a shared implicit sense
that they are, or should be, at the center of the religious landscape. The
people we will hear from here do not share that view.
In this chapter, we move a bit more to the “sides” of the religious/cultural
current. The differing flows of Evangelicalism and mainstream identity derive
from a sense of relationship to tradition, yet, for the categories we will see
here, tradition itself becomes the important issue. For the first category
below, the “metaphysical believers and seekers,” contestation of the notion of
traditional religion becomes an important point of identity, as it does for the
“secularists” we will end with. For the “dogmatists,” in the middle, tradition
is something that absolutely must be embraced and honored. What we see
here, then, are categories of practice for whom the idea that there are received
religious histories and traditions is probably more important than it was for
the people we heard from in the last chapter. We will end with an overall
review of all five categories and what we seem to have learned along the way.