Page 221 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

210 Representing outcomes

inspired by . . . a movie Rocky, you know, that’s an inspirational
movie and makes you want to try, you know, go for it basically. And I
think that in some ways that’s kind of a religious type. I think that
anything you do really to better yourself is almost spiritual. I think the
working out is, that is spiritual in a lot of ways, for me it is.

This is a fascinating idea, given what we’ve seen about the way most of
our interviewees classify “religious” and “secular” media. Chris makes a
clear distinction here between those kinds of media. He chooses a secular
film as his example of inspiration, though “not in a real Christian way”
and yet feels that there is a kind of “religious type” there, meaning that,
even though Rocky is not a religious film and not about self-consciously
religious ideas or motivations, it does deal in a kind of inspiration that is
religious in a way.
Rayna Hancock is a 37-year-old Mormon single mother. She was not
5
raised Mormon, but joined as an adult, and still thinks a lot about how to
bring this new faith and her life together. When asked about inspirational
media, she begins with programs from her childhood, and connects them
with the quality of “inoffensiveness” we’ve seen in a number of our inter-
views.

Rayna: When I was growing up, there was all these good . . . you know,
Little House on the Prairie....
Interviewer: Yeah, Brady Bunch.
Rayna: [laughs] I don’t know if that was such a great show, but. Um, it
just seems like there was better quality. Now it’s all partying,
violence . . . I don’t know of a really good . . . other than the things
they show on PAX . . . with the Touched by an Angel and It’s a
Miracle . . . uplifting . . . um, positive shows.

For Rayna, certain media are markers of a social trajectory she is uncom-
fortable with. She is aware that the Brady Bunch might not have been
critically acclaimed, but, somehow, it was just better quality. Combined
with some of the more intentionally religious shows on the PAX network,
she seems to think she can find a media diet that is inoffensive, even inspi-
rational. More interestingly, Rayna suggests that when she was younger,
before her conversion to Mormonism, her media diet did not reflect her
faith as much. She finds herself now negotiating between media that she
finds inspirational and what she sees to be the Church’s self-imposed
distance from media.

Interviewer: So when you were younger, you didn’t feel like you could be
close to the Church and religion and all that.
Rayna: Huh-uh [no]. Right.