Page 274 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

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interaction with the program provides important resources for under-
standing and action. It is not yet a settled matter for her, obviously, but she
clearly wants to come to terms with an interpretation of things with which
she is comfortable, one that accounts for competing claims and experi-
ences.
Doreen’s experience illustrates an important way that concrete and
fundamental issues in the political sphere may enter lived experience
through the media. It also demonstrates how people in various social and
cultural locations and of certain values “types” can interact with these
interventions. The larger picture of religion and politics in the post-9/11
and post-2004 election worlds may seem firm, determined, and
predictable. We need to remember, though, that that picture is made up of
people like Doreen, and our other informants, who through their motiva-
tions and their actions may not behave in the predicted ways. In particular,
the easy assumptions that are often made about the relationship between
politics, religion, and media need to be thought through more carefully.
I started this chapter by suggesting that we needed to address some
questions in the larger social and political context. In a way, I could not
present a study of religion and media, at this point in history, without
looking into the events of 9/11 and the new and evolving relations between
religion and politics. The study did not, of course, intend to address these
issues; they occurred while the research interviews were underway, and
people’s reactions to 9/11 and to religious/political debates became part of
our conversations. The fact that they did occur enables us to see some
things about how the larger system of relations between media culture and
political culture works in the lives and experiences of audiences. I’ve
argued that we need to understand the relationship between religion and
media culture in the context of media practice and, consistent with impor-
tant theoretical resources in the media field, the ways that media practice
interacts with and relates to other aspects of people’s lives and experiences.
We’ve seen how the experience of 9/11 and the questions of religious poli-
tics entered these narratives of self and did so both through the media and
through non-media experiences and contexts. Further, we’ve seen that the
way these things were made sense of involved a negotiation on behalf of
the self of meanings and narratives directed at that task. Some of these are
more successful than others. Some make more sense to us, as observers,
than others. What is clear, though, is that we need to understand these
things as complex negotiations worked out in these lives as much as deter-
mined or fixed values or claims that determine belief or action. We’ll
consider these issues again, along with a more general assessment of the
prospects of religion and religious meaning-making in the media age in the
next chapter.