Page 200 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Believers, dogmatists, and secularists 189

minister, then of course I’d be sitting there thinking about God. Or if
it’s some news show about a religious sect, it would bring my spiritual
thoughts into it. But other than that, no.

Mark’s and Gabriel’s ideas here seem to be related to a number of impor-
tant issues of identity for them. They feel that it is important for them and
Lisette to make their own decisions about things without the intervention
of history, doctrine, or clerical authority. The media should not be more
authoritative than one’s own judgment, Gabriel asserts. “Just because you
read it or hear it, you don’t have to swallow it, and to form your opinion.
It’s just kind of a tool, it’s not written in stone, that type of a thing,” he
says. Their feelings about religion are similar, that it is something about
which they need to form their own opinions. Because they assume that the
media need to be greeted with a kind of skepticism, it is hard for them to
see how they could provide any sort of authentic or meaningful resources
to religion or spirituality, which also require a good deal of personal
autonomy to work out. Where religion or spirituality enter into media in
significant ways is in cases where a given program or source is self-
consciously labeled “religious,” or where news programs cover themes or
topics that can be straightforwardly labeled “religion.”
The fact that they are a gay couple may make Mark and Gabriel partic-
ularly attuned to distinctions in the realm of religion and media. As an
example, Mark describes his interactions with Lisette over a conservative
Christian magazine she receives, subscribed for her by one of her aunts.
Mark: She’ll get it in the mail and she’ll read it, and I’ll say, “What are
you thinking about this stuff?” And she’ll say, “Oh, that’s silly. Don’t
bother me with that.” So I’ll read it and there’s all this stuff. It’s very
anti-gay, very, very conservative. And so I’ll wanna talk about it with
her, and she just says, “Well, don’t worry about it.” And so then I try
not to worry.

The overarching theme for them, then, is the parent–child relationship and
the ideal that Lisette come to take responsibility for her own choices. What
is important is not the specifics of the content that Lisette consumes or
avoids, but the fact that she can and does make such choices for herself.
Religion and media interact for them in the way that media with religious
themes or ideas are an important and consistent dimension of the media
marketplace. There is no sense in which they religiously seek “through”
the media. Instead, it is important for them, as seekers, to maintain the
same sort of critical distance from media that they do from religion.
Butch and Priscilla Castello are in their thirties and the parents of 8-year-
7
old Corey and 5-year-old Leah. Both Butch and Priscilla were raised
Catholic, but now identify much more with Buddhism, after having lived in