Page 290 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Conclusion: what is produced? 279

describing the program as embodying all that is bad about television, and
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others enjoying it as regular viewers. In a way this program served to
define some of the differences and contrasts between our households.
Those who were the most interested in the “broader culture,” as well as
those who could think of the program in terms of its irony and metaphor
rather than seeing it as realistic, were understandably the most likely to
speak approvingly of The Simpsons.
Other programs also appeared in our interviews for their obvious and
self-conscious “religious” implications. These included Touched by an
Angel, and more intriguing examples such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Crossing over with John Edward. Combined with the range of “unex-
pected” sources of symbolic resources in the media (such as The
Terminator, Andy Griffith, To Kill a Mockingbird, X-Files, Star Trek, etc.),
there appeared to be a good deal of evidence that the notion that the
media do function as a kind of “symbolic inventory” is justified. Once
again, in keeping with the research approach taken here, things in this
inventory that are significant are those that are seen to be significant in the
context of interviewees’ expressed narratives. That something like Seventh
Heaven is taken to be religiously significant because of formal characteris-
tics of its plot is a judgment that is based on its being taken that way in
our interviews.
In the theory of religion and media I developed in Chapter 3, I
suggested that we might find the media a particularly fertile source of
symbolic resources expressed through modes of religious experience that
have been “repressed” by clerical authority over the course of the mid-to
late twentieth century. These modes include “the visual,” the body, objects,
ritual, music, and “experience” itself. I suggested there that, if the media
were moving to a place of centrality in contemporary religious experience
and expression, we might find evidence of these modes of experience
playing a role in binding individuals to that evolving process. As we’ve
seen, the picture at the household level is a bit more subtle and compli-
cated than that. Certainly, the media are integrated in important ways into
meaning-making at the household level, and the media do provide a range
of symbolic resources to contemporary “religious” and “spiritual”
questing. There isn’t a lot of evidence here, though, that the media per se
are interposing themselves in these processes. Thus a “transformationist”
idea of the role of media in late modernity, that mediated modes of experi-
ence might well be allowing media to take on some of the core roles and
functions of religion – to become “religion” – is not clearly supported
here.
There are a number of examples in our interviews of various of the
“repressed modes” playing important roles in religious and spiritual
meaning-making. In Chapter 5, for example, Butch Castello talks about a
number of media experiences, making reference to “the visual” and