Page 245 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

234 Public religious culture post-09/11/01

As I said there, this was a kind of postmodern argument, holding that it is
important to deconstruct some of those understandings in order to recon-
struct a view of religion and media from “inside” the experiences and
interactions of audiences. One implication of such an approach, of course,
is the notion that there are thus no systematic or overarching readings,
meanings, or responses possible. If the logic implicit in media texts and
messages does not define the nature or frameworks of knowledge and
value, then where would such frameworks be found? As we’ve seen in the
interviews in the last several chapters, there are, in fact, broad, consensual,
and systematic readings of media texts. There is a degree of commonality,
common experience, and consensus on the nature of media, on the kinds
of religious and spiritual messages and meanings encountered there, and
on the ways that those readings and meanings come into play in the lives
of viewers. Many of these emerge from common experiences, such as
shared demographies or points in the lifecourse. As we saw in Chapters 5,
6, and 7, there seemed to be a great deal of commonality among parents
based on their roles as parents in relation to media in their households.
Other such readings emerge from shared or common values or ideas.
In this chapter, we’ll consider a set of systematic readings and discourses
that have emerged from contemporary historical experience. The turn of the
twenty-first century brought media and religion to the fore in unprecedented
ways. I would like to argue that what we will look at in this chapter is a
kind of “bookend” to the discussions we undertook in Chapters 2 and 3
about “medium theory” and the positioning of religion, religious institu-
tions, and religious authority in terms of their positioning in the media. As
we saw there, the latter part of the last century witnessed the gradual
erosion of some of the settled relations in the religious public sphere.
Religious institutions in general began to lose their authority and legitimacy.
This was in part a function of the emergence of a media sphere that could
increasingly define the nature of religion, spirituality, and religious meaning
in late modernity. The place that religion finds and can find in media
discourse thus became problematic, and the century ended with these ques-
tions in a good deal of dispute. Our inquiries into how people, in their
homes and private lives, consume and make meaning with regard to religion
and spirituality served to describe the processes and grounds on which reli-
gion and spirituality are understood in relation to media culture. We also
could see there that the pervasiveness and ubiquity of media experience as
such a grounding gives the media sphere a particular role and significance in
these regards. What we may see here, then, is the beginnings of an analysis
that can help us again describe, in larger and more holistic terms, the place
and stature of religion in late modernity, this time in relation to the media
that have become articulated in fundamental ways into that modernity.
There are meaningful themes and values and symbols and tropes in
media texts and messages. Our interviewees seemed very much to want to