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Representing outcomes 215

what his view was. And it was quite interesting, what his view was. I
only caught it for two, or three minutes.
Interviewer: So you do a lot of channel surfing?
Bill: I do [laughing]. Donna doesn’t like it, but – you know, I didn’t just
say, “Ah, I’m not hearing this.” Yeah, I gave him a few minutes and
said, hey, what’s his point. What’s his fact/counter-fact type of thing.
And I said, “That’s quite interesting just that little bit that I caught.”
So I am open to that.
Interviewer: So you won’t just switch it when it’s something different?
Bill: No. I’ve made an impression on the kids, even though it’s different
you still need to keep an open mind to that so you can know how
other people believe. So you’re not naïve to how they believe and, you
know, their stance. Because you can’t say to somebody, “I don’t
believe in what you believe in, if you don’t know what they believe
in.” And I try to tell [the kids] that too.

Bill’s view is thus based in ideas we’ve seen before – that it is important for
people to feel that they have the autonomy to make up their own minds
about things. The atheist Bill refers to would be someone he’d naturally
disagree with, yet he feels it is important to be able to say he’s given him a
fair hearing – and to model this behavior for his sons. This also introduces
the issue of the kind of information we might mean when we talk about
“information about religion.” Bill’s examples here seem to relate most to
religious controversies or issues that have a public policy or political
dimension to them.
There are other kinds of religious information, though, as illustrated by
an interview with Megan Sealy. Megan is 40, and a single mother to Dell,
age 17. A Southern Baptist, she was raised Catholic, but has also attended
9
a Presbyterian Church. Her parents are now “New Age,” she reports,
being interested in “very Eastern religion.” In a conversation about her use
of the Internet, she is asked if she ever seeks out anything related to reli-
gion or spirituality there.

Interviewer: Do you ever seek out anything related to religion or spiritu-
ality on the Net?
Megan: Yeah. Yeah. I look at different sites and stuff.
Interviewer: Can you give me any examples?
Megan: Ah, well the radio station that I like to listen to [mentions a
specific local Christian station], they have a website and so it gives you
news about, like there’s a missionary couple in – where is it? I wanna
say Madagascar, but that’s not right. Um, down, in – oh, geez, if I had
a map I could figure out what it is. But, ah, it’s like Thailand or some-
thing like that. They’ve been basically imprisoned for 14 months. . . .
And you don’t hear much on TV about them and yet they talk about