Page 244 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Chapter 9

Media and public religious

culture post-09/11/01 and

post-11/2/04

We have now developed a sense of the ways that individuals and families
work in relation to media culture. We’ve also thought about similarities
and differences in media experience among various social and religious
locations. In all, we’ve seen a kind of stability in the practices of media
consumption at the household level in our interviews, and can now begin
to describe some of the outlines of that stability. In Chapter 3, we consid-
ered the range of media genres and institutions related to religion: news,
religious broadcasting, religious publishing, and entertainment. I argued
there that the significant modern phenomenon is the way that these
various contexts are intermingling, but, at the same time, that it seems
more likely that the “nonreligious” contexts of media would influence reli-
gion, than vice versa. In part as a confirmation of that notion, we’ve found
ourselves so far concentrating on entertainment media and the ways that
our interviewees can be seen to interact with entertainment programs. In
most cases it has seemed that the entertainment media are the common,
taken-for-granted context that they think and talk the most about. But,
I’ve made the point that the real question is not how people succeed or fail
in relation to predicted and presumed viewing and consumption of partic-
ular genres of media but instead how people move across genres,
programs, channels, and contexts in their reception of resources that are
meaningful to them.
Religion and media intersect on a number of social and cultural planes,
many of which I introduced in Chapter 2. Because much of this book has
concentrated on the everyday and lived experiences of people in their
homes, we’ve followed their experiences and interests. These conversations
have thus quite naturally moved in the direction of the popular or enter-
tainment media, and the commodified experiences of religion and
spirituality that are negotiated and made sense of there. But, I’ve also
argued for a view of media that is large and encompassing, claiming that
by so doing we can enter the media/religion landscape in a number of ways
and from a number of perspectives.
In Chapter 3, I argued for a redefinition of media and religion away
from a number of the received analytical categories we’ve used in the past.