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Conclusion: what is produced? 277

tions of the kind of class tastes and practices that have been the focus of
other efforts, to establish some sense of how resources based in religious
and spiritual commitments and experience are brought into play.
Questions of class and other social categories clearly play a role. While a
thorough analysis of class issues is beyond the scope of this study, one area
where class may well play an important role has to do with the expressed
media tastes and choices we’ve seen. We’ve seen how interviewees’ media
choices in some cases defy a logical connection to their religious values.
But, in the case of Jay Milliken or the Muellers, for example, it could be
argued that their approach to media expresses rather well the tastes and
interests of their social class, perhaps better than it expresses their religious
commitments. We asked at one point, “What is essentially ‘religious’ about
their media choices?” We answered, “Nothing.” The same can be said,
conversely, for some of the taste preferences among our “metaphysical
seekers” and “secularists.” This of course relates to the issue of the media
as a “common culture.” As I said earlier, there is a sense in which the prac-
tices we see here are more “culturally” than “religiously” oriented. As
class tastes are embedded in that broader “culture,” they play a role in
connecting many of our interviewees to it.
In Chapter 7 we considered the utility of Roof’s taxonomy to our anal-
ysis here. While we found much of value in the comparisons we were able
to do there, we nonetheless observed that the commonalities between the
various categories in some ways were more interesting than the differences.
This has led, as we’ve seen, to the development of a sense of the media
being connected to notions of a “common culture” (as I’ve phrased it) to
which people across the categories of “religion” and “spirituality” are
oriented. There are some ways in which Roof’s ideas have been fully
supported in this analysis, though. Chief among these is in his notion of
“seeker” or “quest” culture. As we noted, Roof has suggested that the
mode of “seeking” is rooted in fundamental social realities of late moder-
nity. In particular, he points to Giddens’s ideas about the self and its
reflexivity and quest for perfection. In a way “seeker” religiosity is Giddens
applied to late-modern religion. What we’ve seen here supports these ideas.
Nearly all of our interviewees express some form or level of “seeking”
sensibility. This is even the case among those of Roof’s categories who
should presumably be the most oriented to institutional, doctrinal, or cler-
ical authority. “Born-agains” and even some “dogmatists” here describe
themselves as at the center of their religious meaning-making, and few if
any wish to surrender to anyone the authority to make decisions for them.

What’s in the “symbolic inventory”?
One of the important questions here is the nature of the religiously and
spiritually meaningful material present in the media. In an earlier chapter, I