Page 295 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

284 Conclusion: what is produced?

important impediments to such action. But, these are explorations for
another day and another study.

The relationship of “media” to “religion”
There is much evidence here that the media have come to define the terms
through which religious and spiritual interests and ideas are formed,
shaped, and conveyed. Dayan and Katz described this, with reference to
the way that the media can transcend the social spaces and contexts once
17
controlled by clerical authority, as “disintermediation.” By this they also
mean that, in the media age, audiences reflexively transcend traditional
boundaries, and are now brought nearer “the action” in the public sphere.
On a more pervasive level, though, the “common culture” represented by
the media has today become determinative of the contexts, extents, limits,
languages, and symbols available to religious and spiritual discourse. For
religious institutions, to exist today is to exist in the media, and they have
continued to struggle with that reality. 18
In the relations between “religion” and “the media,” the latter are, in
many ways, in the driver’s seat. We see that, as I said, with reference to the
whole sense of “common culture” accessible through, and experienced in,
the media. That culture, and those ideas and discourses, are the themes
and topics of everyday social discourse. To the extent that religious and
spiritual ideas and motivations enter in, they must do so within the limits
and constraints established there. Even for the households we’d expect to
be the most resistant to this, media culture and its ideas and values set the
terms of debate in great measure.
Further, as we noted in Chapter 3, few examples exist of media rooted
in religious culture actually “crossing over” to prominence in secular
culture. It is much more common for things to go the other way. There, we
had looked at the specific cases of Evangelically rooted film, television,
and music, and noted that little historical evidence existed for those media
moving outside the boundaries of that culture (in spite of being widely
expected to do so by people within that culture). The evidence from our
interviews deepens this analysis by saying that it is not just the case that
there are few non-Evangelicals in the audience for Evangelical media, but
that it seems there may be a great number of Evangelicals in the audience
for non-Evangelical media. The dualism of that statement, though, is
misleading. It is more accurate to say that all of our informant households
shared a common interest in “secular” media. For the Evangelical house-
holds, there were, in addition, materials from Evangelical sources in the
form of television, film, and (most importantly) music. For all of our
households, people could be said to be in the process of negotiating
between the claims and values of the mainstream or “common” culture
they encountered in the media and more particular claims and values,