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Conclusion: what is produced? 273

deeper levels of meaning. Music is not similarly situated, but it may be that
music may actually be a mode that is simply particularly meaningful reli-
giously and spiritually. Clearly one of the “repressed modes” of expression
I noted earlier, music has long had a formal role in religious ritual and
practice, but is also negotiable into nonformal and “implicit” settings. At
least, that is the way it looks from the perspective of our interviews. An
additional significant element, of course, is the fact that a political
economy of popular religious music has arisen in recent years in the form
of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). As we saw, CCM was a very
important source for many of our interviewees, particularly for young
people in “born-again” households. The significance of music was not
limited to them by any means, however.
Another important set of distinctions made by our interviewees was
between themselves and “others out there.” Not unlike the classic “third-
person effect” in media studies, many were able to identify themselves in
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regard to these questions by virtue of who they were not. Most parents, for
example, saw themselves as distinct from other parents who did not exercise
the right kind of influence over their children’s media lives. More significant
to our project here, though, were distinctions made with reference to reli-
gious values and attitudes regarding media. The most common of these were
those among our “mainstream,” “metaphysical seeker,” and “secularist”
cohorts who saw attitudes about media as an important marker of religious
identification. Clearly referring to the commonly understood tendency for
religious conservatives to be moralistic in their approach to media, and to be
more concerned about “sex” than about “violence” in the media, a number
took great pride in distinguishing themselves in this way. “We’re not moral-
ists,” they seemed to be saying with pride, “and that is a way that we differ
from religious conservatives.” Some of our interviewees were particularly
keen to make it clear that they cared more about “violence” on television
than they did about “sex,” again a way of clarifying where they reside on
the religious-cultural turf. Interestingly, and consistent with what I said
earlier about the “common culture” of the media, it did seem that both the
“born-again Christians” or the “dogmatists” (the two categories that would
presumably be the most conservative in this regard) were perhaps more
concerned with “sex” than “violence,” though not markedly so. One of the
commonalities among the interviews in Chapters 6 and 7 was the seemingly
shared parental concern with both sex and violence. But the interesting
issue, in any case, is that the inferred attitude about media serves as a
commonly understood marker of religious difference.
One of the most unexpected and fascinating of the distinctions we’ve seen
is the almost universal derogation of “religious broadcasting” in these inter-
views. It was very common, in the first instance, that when interviewees
found that we were interested in the relationship between media and religion,
they’d assume that televangelism was the point. As the interviews progressed,