Page 219 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

208 Representing outcomes

The categories we will look at here are described from the perspective of
the individual as he or she reflects on media roles and media effects. They
are: 1) “It moved me”; 2) “It inspired me”; 3) “It leads me to think or
behave”; 4) “It informs me”; 5) “I want to identify with it”; 6) “It describes
me”; 7) “I describe myself using it”; 8) “I want to contest/reject/endorse it”;
and 9) “I use it to talk with my kids or others about values and morality.”
It is important to reiterate the interview approach that has generated
these narratives. I said earlier that we try very hard to be as unobtrusive as
possible in the ways that we discuss these things with our interviewees. We
do not want to lead them to conclusions, or to inordinately define the
terms of the discussion or analysis. We prefer that the learnings emerge out
of the conversations, not be directed by them. What we’ll be looking at
here, then, are the results of such a semi-structured and nondirective and
(aspirationally, at least) unobtrusive process.
What follow then are a set of ways that seem to emerge from our inter-
views as people reflect on their more direct experiences with media
symbols and products. We have heard from some of these people before,
and these accounts are interesting in light of those earlier conversations.
What we are seeing here are the ways the people we’ve interviewed talk
about media as active inputs or influences on their experiences.
The first three areas fall generally under the heading of primary religious
or spiritual functions of media. These are the presumed functions or affects
where media might be seen to either influence, compete with, or replace
what we think of as the “essential” features of religious piety and practice.

“It moved me”
Much of the received discourse about relations between media and religion
has assumed that, on some level, media materials possess unique powers of
persuasion and influence. Some of the voices we heard in Chapters 1 and 2
even seemed to suggest that media might have an unparalleled power to
compete with spiritual and religious influences in individual lives. We might
have expected, then, to find it to be common for our informants to rather
easily identify media that had such power. In fact, as we’ve seen, our inter-
viewees were often reluctant to grant wholesale influence to the media. Here
are two examples where such a role for media was identified in the sense
that media could be seen to have a kind of emotional force. Fred Kline, a
50-year-old father of two, responded this way to the question of whether he
ever saw anything in films that he found spiritual or inspirational.
. . . the top of the list [would be] To Kill a Mockingbird. I saw that
when I was actually only 8 years old. . . . I was absolutely enthralled
and moved by it. I immediately read the book and part of it was
because it was in black and white and it was a simple, moving story