Page 289 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

278 Conclusion: what is produced?

argued that one of the things that these narratives would do would be to
enable us to position ourselves with these interviewees, “looking back”
with them toward the media, and get a sense of what they see and experi-
ence there. We’ve already established the logic of this as a way of
understanding what is in the inventory of symbols, ideas, and values
present in the media relevant to these questions. If we’d instead taken a
more inductive approach – a formal “content analysis” for example – we’d
have missed much of what we’ve been discussing here. For example, we’d
have missed the array of programs and other media materials that have
been identified as meaningful by informants here, but which we otherwise
would have missed because they seemed not to be “religious” in any
formal way. We also would have missed the playful and indirect and
nondeliberative way that they engage with the media they find significant
and salient.
One major category of material in the media sphere is, of course,
“media events” such as the 9/11, Oklahoma City, and Columbine inci-
dents. There is an array of ways and times that the media “break in” on
the flow of daily life and daily experience, bringing news and other events
that may be spiritually or religiously significant. There is evidence here
that people understand and respond to such interruptions, though their
level of orientation to them might be lower here than we would have
expected based on the scholarly literature that has been devoted to media
events, media ritual, and “enchantment” through the media.
At the same time, though, a very wide range of media are religiously
and spiritually meaningful to our interviewees. In addition to the some-
what idiosyncratic examples given by people like Judy Cruz, there are a
number of television programs that are widely viewed as important across
our interviews. The two series that stand out are the family drama Seventh
Heaven and the animated farce The Simpsons. While they were seen
broadly as important examples of religion in the media, there was clearly
no consensus among our interviewees about these programs. Most would
seem to agree that Seventh Heaven’s sentimentalism is an important
element of its importance, while noting the formal element that the
program is about the family of a minister, and thus – on some level – must
be taken as self-evidently “religious.” But, as many have noted, the reli-
giosity of the family is not a major dimension of the program; what seems
more important to the interviewees here who identified it positively is its
self-conscious “goodness” and “good-heartedness.”
The Simpsons, by contrast, is much more controversial. While only the
more conservative households (“born-agains” and “dogmatists”) here
seemed to refer to Seventh Heaven positively, both “conservative” and
“liberal” (that is, “mainstreamers,” “metaphysical seekers,” and “secular-
ists”) had seen – and had opinions about – The Simpsons. There is an
interesting range of views among the conservatives, though, with some