Page 283 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

272 Conclusion: what is produced?

“new-paradigm” religion scholarship, we’d anticipated that a level of
autonomy would also be a factor.

Distinctions
Distinction seemed to be central to many of these accounts and negotia-
tions. Positionality vis-à-vis the media is naturally an issue of distinction,
and there is a good deal of literature in media studies focused on difference
and distinction, and their social value. A number of significant distinctions
were common among our interviewees.
Many of our interviewees, across a range of social and religious cate-
gories, agreed with the dominant “account of” media that the “screen
media” are of lesser, or more questionable, value than other media. 8
Priscilla Castello, as we’ll recall, made this explicit in Chapter 5. Television
in particular, but all the “visual” media as well, are somehow suspect in a
way that other media, such as books, are not. The one exception, of
course, is film, with “serious” film being among the media that many of
our interviewees found particularly meaningful spiritually and morally.
There was a tendency in our interviews for those we called “metaphysical
seekers,” “mainstreamers,” and “secularists” to hold this view of screen
media. At the same time, though, there was broad agreement on books
and the printed word being by far the preferred medium, particularly for
children, in the opinion of parents.
Another interesting distinction is that, at the same time, most of our
interviewees seemed to want to connect with what we might call
“authentic” religious or spiritual sentiments and experiences when we
raised the question of the media. We’ve observed how difficult it was for
interviewees to make easy and unproblematic connections between these
things. We used a variety of means to “get at” questions of spiritually
meaningful media. Often, it was only after extended conversations that
interviewees were able to describe such experiences. Most often, when they
did it was music that they referred to, though there were also examples of
films, books, and other resources. Examples from television were harder to
come by, but some of the ones where television did come up were particu-
larly interesting, such as the meaningfulness of Andy Griffith for at least
two of our male informants reported here. 9
Undoubtedly the distinction about “screen media” is, like other of these
distinctions, a received “account of media” that is widely shared in the
10
culture. As has been noted elsewhere, it is common in educational and
parenting discourse to derogate television and the visual media. It is not
surprising that such opprobrium would also be applied to spiritually or
religiously relevant media. The significance of film is a related “account
of.” Film has long since achieved a status in most elite circles as at least
potentially a kind of “art,” and is therefore assumed to be relevant to