Page 188 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Believers, dogmatists, and secularists 177

Metaphysical believers and seekers
In discussing this category of contemporary religiosity earlier, I suggested
that their relationship to media might differ markedly from the others. As
the Roof category that most centrally represents the practices and sensibili-
ties of autonomy and “seeking” or “questing,” we might expect that the
metaphysical believers and seekers would be the most open to the range of
symbolic and spiritual resources available in the media sphere.
Characteristic of this group is a deep separation from, even a critique of,
traditional religious institutions and religious culture. Thus, there is reason
to look for them to be more active in acquiring and assembling religious
and spiritual senses of themselves using resources from a variety of
sources, most of which are available to them through the media. Without
the intervening frame of clerical or institutional authority, they should be
the group most active at the boundary between “media” and “religion.”

The Stevens-Van Gelder family

Vicky Stevens, age 46, and Jan Van Gelder, age 44, are a lesbian couple
who have celebrated a commitment ceremony and are the parents of Brett,
age 9. They live in a small city in the west, in a two-story frame house. 1
Vicky and Jan are both social workers, and Jan also invests in real estate.
They are a solidly middle-class two-income family. Brett attends a non-
traditional elementary school, but also goes to religious school weekly at
the local Jewish Renewal Community, where Jan is a member. Vicky
attends a Church of Religious Science. In spite of their holding member-
ships in religious organizations, Vicky and Jan are decidedly “seekers,”
and are not clearly identified with any such body. It is Brett who observes
to the Interviewer how unusual it must seem to have one of them identify
with a Jewish center and the other with a Christian one. Vicky admits to
having also identified with Judaism from time to time. “Yes, I’m eclectic in
my spirituality,” she says. All three of them seem very comfortable talking
about their religious lives, using the language of “spirituality,” which they
prefer to “religion.” Their views about the relationship between their spiri-
tuality and their religious organizations show a negotiation between their
autonomous seeking and a taste for some sort of religious grounding or
structure, however limited. They attend, as a family, both the Renewal
Community (which meets once a month) and the Church of Religious
Science (which meets weekly).

Vicky: We all kind of go to all of it. Because they don’t contradict each
other at all. The Jewish Renewal is like the most very liberal end of
Judaism and Religious Science is probably the most liberal end of . . .
Brett: Christianity.
Vicky: Yeah. So they don’t contradict each other at all.