Page 211 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

200 Believers, dogmatists, and secularists

between media and religion or spirituality. The fact that these secularists
are so similar to the others we’ve interviewed is therefore striking. We
might have expected that families like the Murphy-Gordons and the
Abrahams would differ markedly from other, more religious families in
both their media behaviors and their self-descriptions. These secularist
families do clearly understand themselves to be different from mainstream
media households, and are proud to describe those differences. They see
their approach to media as self-consciously less judgmental than they see
others to be, and they report with some pride that they are less moralistic
in their media choices. They also seem to analyze and critique media using
categories and ideas drawn from art and film criticism. Where other fami-
lies seem to interpret media more through the lens of parenthood and a
kind of prescriptive parental practice, these families are more distant and
evaluative in their orientation.

Conclusions and reflections on all five categories
There seem to be more similarities than differences here. We began this
review expecting to find some clear distinctions between the various cate-
gories that we might be able to describe as approaches “typical” of those
categories. Instead, there are striking commonalities. The most important
of these commonalities derives from the idea that the media – and particu-
larly television – seem to constitute a “common culture” in which all of
these families live and to which all of them – on some level – wish to
subscribe. We saw evidence of this in earlier chapters where we discussed
the transparency, ubiquity, and pervasiveness of the media as everyday
social practices in the home. For most families, even ones who clearly iden-
tify themselves as distinct in religious terms, there is a powerful set of
motivations to consume the same media everyone else is.
In these interviews the idea of television being a taken-for-granted
“common culture” expresses itself on three levels. First, there is the notion,
expressed most clearly by Jay Milliken, that television is a kind of expecta-
tion or right. He simply assumed that he would watch television, with his
specific choices determined by the fact that the family could only receive
two channels. Television seems to be something that, on a very funda-
mental level of practice, is simply expected and done. This is even more
obvious with children, of course, with many of our families (and many
other studies) showing that, for children and teens, television and other
media are simply a fact of life.
The second level on which media constitute a “common culture” is in
the idea that they are a common set of languages, symbols, and ideas that
our families want to participate in in order to be culturally “current.”
Even our most dogmatic and anti-media couple (the Donegals) watch the
late-night talk shows before they retire for the night. Most of our intervie-