Page 293 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

282 Conclusion: what is produced?

such experiences responsible for “re-enchanting the world” for them.
Admittedly, it could be that what the media have done – and there is
potential evidence for this in our interviews – is undermine the capacity for
“enchantment” by bringing into question the bases of belief in such things.
There is enough evidence here of moments and locations where individuals
do place themselves in the position of being enchanted (through, for
example, “music” and “experience”) to suggest that people retain this
capacity in the media age.
Further, as we saw in Chapter 8, there is not a lot of evidence, either, of
media unequivocally serving more rudimentary functions such as inspiring
or providing moral or religious role models. Could such functions be
occurring on some more subtle, or even subliminal levels? Of course, and
our method might not be sensitive to those and might have missed them.
Still, we’d expect some kind of evidence here.
The few exceptions we have here are telling. Once again, let’s look at
Judy Cruz, for whom it could be said that a kind of media-centered reli-
gious meaning-making is significant. The intriguing feature of Judy’s case
is that her struggle over religious symbolism and religious authority in the
context of media concerns her sense that media-centered representations of
science and fantasy fiction should be more authentic than they are. She
sees mediated fantasy genres in the mystical/mystery tradition as overly
commodified and domesticated.
But Judy is nearly unique along this dimension. For the vast majority of
our interviewees, the issue is not the interposition of media into funda-
mental religious “functions.” Instead, media culture serves as a broad
context within which they can and do find ways of negotiating meanings
that relate to greater or lesser extents to their own “authentic” ideas and
meanings. In a fundamental way, what we’ve seen here are practices of
meaning-making that are authenticated much more on the level of the
“systemworld” than the level of the “lifeworld” (to refer back to a point
we made in Chapter 4). Due in great measure to the nature of the method
we have used – depending on our interviewees to engage with us in a
cognitive, and on some level rational, process of description – what we
have found is evidence of the way that media materials are integrated on a
more or less rational level into the warp and woof of daily life. At the
same time, these accounts detail ways that media materials can be and are
“deeply meaningful.” It is not all about rationality, even in these accounts.
Even if we had found convincing evidence that nonrational or
“mystical” meanings were accruing to media practice, we might still have
the overarching sense that the real “action” is with the broader “common”
culture, and not with specific or “enchanted” religious or spiritual
“cultures.”
What is achieved then? It seems that individuals use the range of
resources available to them, including media resources, to make sense of