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206 Representing outcomes

in the media. This holds even for people whose religious and spiritual
beliefs and practices might be expected to place them at some distance
from the values of the so-called “secular media.” For families with chil-
dren, there is a kind of relentless pressure supporting media consumption
that is rooted both in children’s natural attraction to media and in the way
that media serve to articulate child and youth culture in contemporary life.
At the same time, though, adults seem also to be attracted to media and to
want to be part of a larger mediated cultural discourse.
This means that, as a kind of baseline, we can expect to see media to be
a taken-for-granted and tacit reality in most homes across a range of reli-
gious traditions and backgrounds. It also seems that people have some
difficulty making a clear and straightforward connection between their
media lives and their religious or spiritual lives. Their accounts of media
reflect a commonplace assumption that the media should not have a posi-
tive relationship to spirituality or religion. This is confounded by the
seeming tendency for these accounts to also assume that only those media
that are self-consciously religious or spiritual to be obviously involved (or
alternatively not involved) in individual, family, or collective religious or
spiritual experience.
The effect of all this is that, in most of our interviews, people have not
readily described a role for their media lives in relation to religion or spiritu-
ality in their narratives of self. At the same time, though, media are such a
common and pervasive aspect of those lives, that some kind of connection
seems inevitable. What appears to happen is that, for most of them, what we
have been calling their “accounts of media” intervene between their media
use and their understanding of the ways that media connect with their reli-
gious and spiritual lives. This means that, in most cases, we have had to get
at these questions in a more indirect way. As we saw with Glenn Donegal in
Chapter 4, for instance, there are often a number of ways that people can
and do describe media in relation to their religious lives, but that deeper and
more directly meaningful connections come only after some reflection and
conversation. In Glenn’s case, for example, the classic television series The
Andy Griffith Show represented for him senses of his religious, spiritual, and
moral selves in a fundamental and meaningful way. He was able to articu-
late a complex and meaningful account of how the program connected him
with vital senses of self, identity, and normative values. And yet, this did not
come easily. He and the Interviewer needed to cover a great deal of narrative
“turf” before Andy came up. And when the program did come up, it clearly
served important ideas and meanings for Glenn.
We saw in the last chapter that received categories of contemporary reli-
gious experience and practice do not readily correlate with ways of
thinking about and using media. The commonalities there seemed to be
more important than the differences. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of
our interviewees from a very different perspective. In the last chapter, we