Page 214 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Believers, dogmatists, and secularists 203

these levels are nonetheless encountered, negotiated with, and used.
Distinction seems to be an important element of the judgments and
ideas expressed here. Born-again believers and dogmatists see themselves
as distinct from mainstream culture in terms of their attitudes about media
(while not necessarily behaving in ways that are that distinct). Secularists
and metaphysical seekers see themselves as distinct from the moralists on
the other bank of the cultural mainstream. Interestingly, the mainstream
believers seemed to be the group least able to articulate distinction. It
seemed that, for them, it was important to be simply “mainstream” in
their attitudes about media as well as their religious beliefs and behaviors.
This is important and interesting. There is evidence here that “accounts of
media” as expressed in these narratives of self are significant ways that
individuals, families, and groups map themselves with reference to the
cultural mainstream. While it is not easy to describe ways that media
directly relate in authentic ways to articulated senses of religion or spiritu-
ality, it is almost a given that self-understood faith, belief, or behavior
should predict clear attitudes about media.
The fact that we did not find the clear distinctions between
religious/spiritual categories we might have expected here warrants some
reflection. The primary reason may be in what I’ve noted above, that, in
some important ways, people want to relate to certain media, at least, as
resources in a “common culture.” Further, from a variety of religious
perspectives, they do not easily relate media to central facets of their reli-
gious lives. This is not to say that there is no connection, because we have
seen (and will see) that there is a connection. It is to say that for a variety
of reasons related to the received public scripts out of which we derive our
accounts of media, we do not easily recognize or articulate a connection.
We do not want to think of ourselves as subject to the influence of media
(or – interestingly – of clerical or institutional religious authority, either).
This means that the received understanding that media are primarily
significant for their effects makes it difficult for us to think of media
“affecting” our religious or spiritual lives. At the same time, we don’t want
to think of ourselves as needing to slavishly follow the dictates of others,
so it is also difficult to think of religion or spirituality “affecting”
media, too.
We also saw here that some of the easy assumptions about the basic
taxonomy and our expectations need some critique. In one way very
important to our considerations here, there is less difference than we
expected. That is in the area of the self-conscious autonomy with which
people today think of themselves with respect to cultural and social prac-
tice. Nearly all of the individuals and families we saw here want on some
fundamental level to think of themselves as having primary responsibility
for their religious lives. This language was nearly as common among the
households we’d typified as born-again believers as for the metaphysical