Page 243 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

232 Representing outcomes

clear and straightforward resources to religious and spiritual practice.
What we found instead were examples in these categories of function and
effect, but that were at the same time far from straightforward or directly
evocative of traditional religious or spiritual forms.
We’ve seen evidence previously that helps explain this to a certain
extent. People are, as we’ve seen, unlikely to want to think of media as
religiously or spiritually valid. The received “accounts of media” in this
regard are clear and forceful. In a postmodern world shaped by enlighten-
ment principles, the idea that something like religion or spirituality could
be contained in something like “the media” is seen on some level as
preposterous. But, there is a more fundamental explanation as well. As
we’ve gradually begun to see through these interviews, media practice and
spiritual or religious practice reside in quite different places in the life-
world. There is a self-consciousness about each, and a reflexive
engagement with each that keeps each in its place. This is not to say that
they are not related, because they are, and in some fundamental ways.
There is a sense in these interviews that the claims and ideas of the broader
culture, as represented in media, are the larger and more encompassing
claims, at least as regards cultural meanings and representations. As much
as it might seem likely that individuals and families who identify them-
selves with focused religious or spiritual beliefs or claims would base their
interactions with the culture on those claims, this seems not to be the case.
Instead, they seem to want to describe their faith and spirituality in ways
that articulate with the mediated ideas and values of the larger culture. Or
they see them as separate and separable, as in the case of morally conser-
vative households that nonetheless consume media as “guilty pleasures.”
In any case, the idea at the root of this chapter – that the media sphere
provides material and experiences that either contest or replace traditional
religious or spiritual influences, practices or behaviors – was not convinc-
ingly supported. As we have seen, we clearly need to look elsewhere and in
different ways for evidence of the contribution of media to religion and
spirituality or vice versa. A more persuasive picture of these relations
emerged in Chapters 5, 6, and 7; something we will return to as we sum
up and conclude in Chapter 10.