Page 212 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Believers, dogmatists, and secularists 201

wees are interested in the latest trends and genres of television, and even
watch them regularly, across all of the categories here. The born-again
believers express clear ideas of distinction between their faith and the
faiths of others – even with regard to tastes in media – but nonetheless
seem much more like others in their media attitudes and behaviors.
The final level on which media are a “common culture” is in the
capacity media have to present culturally relevant and significant ideas and
symbols in a powerful and attractive way. The media are the public media
in part due to their ability to do this, and to center themselves aesthetically
within broad cultural norms and ideas. Nearly all the people we spoke to
here recognize and respond to this capacity of the media. At the same time,
this seems to be a capacity particularly of the so-called “secular” media,
with even Evangelical and born-again informants preferring secular over
“religious” media.
The intra-household dynamics of the media as “common culture” are
also important. There are clearly generational and gender dynamics at
work. As has been widely noted elsewhere as well as within these pages,
children and youth consume media in very different ways than their parents
do. And the common youth culture seems even more important than is the
case in general. There are also interesting distinctions between men and
women. While men and women share common interests in media, men tend
to consume their own media in a less self-critical way than do women, and
women tend to more commonly see and think of media through the lens of
parenthood than do men, at least among these interviews.
Another area of similarity between these categories is in a broad agree-
ment on what we have been calling “accounts of media.” The greatest area
of agreement seems to be that it is important for children to develop their
own skills at media consumption rather than having their choices perma-
nently determined for them. With the exception of the dogmatists, who
seemed to be the most interested in actually controlling their children’s
media, all others wanted for their children what they valued for them-
selves: the ability to make their own autonomous choices about what they
watch and what they do. There is less agreement on accounts of specific
kinds of programs, genres, and values in media.
For all categories, “accounts of media” seemed to be important turf on
which to draw important and clear distinctions between their religious or
spiritual identities and the identities of “others.” The nature of these
accounts vary, however. For the secularists and metaphysical seekers, it
was important to distance themselves from the moralistic critiques of
media content on such issues as sexuality and profanity. Predictably,
dogmatists and born-again believers seemed to be the most concerned
about those latter issues. For mainstream believers, seekers, and secular-
ists, violence was mentioned as a more important concern, but it was also
a concern of the born-again believers.