Page 291 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

280 Conclusion: what is produced?

“experience,” in particular. As we’ve noted, many of our interviewees have
also identified music as an important mode of experience for them religiously
and spiritually. There is a way in which we can see the list of “repressed
modes” as in some ways more potentially significant to “metaphysical
seekers” like Butch than to others (the most common modes mentioned in
our interviews were “the visual,” “music,” and “experience”). At the same
time, though, Glenn Donegal – who is very decidedly not into the “New
Age” – expresses a great interest in the “repressed mode” of “experience”
(in his discussion of rites-of-passage). As we’ve seen, the mode of
autonomous “seeking” seems to cut across many of the received categories
here, and to the extent that “seeking” and “questing” move outside legiti-
mated centers and sources (as we’ve seen that it does), we’d also expect to
see these “repressed modes” play a role. Instead of a “transformationist”
notion of media and religion, what we’ve seen is more of a “construc-
tivist” idea: that the media are significantly involved in providing contexts
and resources to the negotiation and construction of meanings that can be
seen to “make sense” in certain ways and certain places. The “action,” as
it were, is in the hands of the individuals making these meanings. That the
media make accessible modes of experience and expression that may have
been repressed in earlier times is significant, but not the center of the story.
If the “metaphysical seekers” seemed to be most oriented toward film,
the printed word, and “experience,” the only other category that seemed
also to have characteristic tastes in terms of media or modes of expression
was the “born-again Christians” who identified religiously themed audio
and videocassettes and CCM as important to them. It is this latter area –
we should mention – that is the only place we see an unequivocal role here
for specifically and self-consciously “religious” media.

What is achieved?
If our primary concern here has been to find that place (the “where” I
spoke of in Chapter 2) where significant interactions between media and
religion occur, a secondary – but perhaps equally important – question
concerns what happens there. What is the outcome? What is achieved?
The negotiations we’ve seen between the media sphere and the spheres of
daily life seem clearly to support certain kinds of outcomes.
One of the most significant achievements is in the way that media prac-
tice interacts with and enables the individuals here to be, in Roof’s words,
“fluid, yet grounded.” In a way, this seems to be the overall lesson of these
interviews. Contemporary meaning practice is rooted in the individual, in
individual experience, and in individual processes and practices of
meaning-making. They do not look to others – in media or in institutional
or clerical authority – for overarching answers and explanations. Instead,
they see the claims and propositions from such sources as input into their