Page 209 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

198 Believers, dogmatists, and secularists

enjoy or identify with. For Sheryl, that is the British crime series Prime
Suspect, where the lead character is a strong, professional woman. “I
relate to all woman detectives,” she says, noting that crime novels are one
of her guilty pleasures.
Along with their idea that they are distinct because of their attitudes
about media content, Sheryl and Lanny also see a difference between
themselves and other families in terms of their consciousness of the
dangers of that content.

Sheryl: I think in lots of families, it’s not so much that they’re family
values versus media values. If I see anything, it’s an indifference among
families about the values their kids are getting. And I see the same
thing with a lot of Paul’s friends. I mean, I’m sure there are values.
And if you said, “Are you for violence?” they would say, “No, I’m not
for violence.” But they think they survived seeing movies, so their kids
will survive seeing movies.

The Murphy-Gordons are among the most self-conscious about relations
between media, parenting, and family identity of any family we’ve inter-
viewed. They articulate clear and complex accounts of media in their lives,
and use media as a way of making distinctions between themselves and
other families. They disagree with others, including the dogmatists we just
heard from, on questions of which kind of television and film content are
acceptable and which are not. They clearly do not place a high value on
the kind of inoffensive television that others identify as good program-
ming. For them, that would be too bland. They want their children to be
exposed to significant films, books, and (to the extent such things exist –
in their view) television. Religious belief is related to their feelings about
media, but only through the pathway that links their religious back-
grounds with their present values. There is such a linkage, but it flows
through their own autonomously established independence in values and
ideals.

The Abraham family
A second “secularist” family, the Abrahams, share a good deal in common
with the Murphy-Gordons. Susan and Joseph Abraham, both 50, live in
the suburbs of a major western city with their son, Zed, 16. 13 The
Abrahams both have graduate degrees, and work in professional capaci-
ties. Both Susan and Joseph were raised Jewish, and still belong to a
synagogue today, but do not go frequently, and do not identify with it to
the extent Roof’s “mainstream believers” would. When their sons (an
older son has now left home) were of the appropriate age, they did cele-
brate bar mitzvahs for them, wanting to give them the option of