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Conclusion: what is produced? 285

among them the claims and values of their religious or spiritual commit-
ments.
The dynamics of the relationship between religion, media, and
Evangelical identity might be well illustrated by Ted Olsen in the last
chapter. In the case of televangelists and their relationship to Evangelical
culture, it appears that the primary implication of their being in the media
is in establishing a kind of credibility in media culture as being part of that
media culture. Thus, some kinds of leadership may well come from media
presence and prominence. As Olsen points out, though, that prominence
can be ephemeral. For secular journalism, being a prominent Evangelical
media figure may lend credibility. It does not necessarily do so for
Evangelicals “in the pew,” as it were.
This suggests one of the things we’ve been noting all along, but that is
very significant to our interests in relations between religion and media:
the issue of reflexivity, and the sense that most of our interviewees on
some level understand their place in these relations. Most of our inter-
viewees readily talked about these things in terms of “accounts of media”
through which they positioned themselves on the media landscape. As we
noted above, it worked for a number of our more “liberal” interviewees to
make explicit reference to ideas such as the commonplace that conserva-
tives are more concerned about “sex” than they are about “violence.”
Across the board, most interviewees saw themselves as engaging in a set of
audience and discursive practices that were self-conscious and aware of the
histories, motivations, meanings, and commitments represented by the
various media.
As I said above, it would not be quite correct to talk about practices
here as deliberative with reference to viewing choices. At the same time
they are cognitive, even rational, in their approach to meaning-making
once they get to the media and reflexive about the whole process later on.
Once again, this tends to undermine the idea that it is an important impli-
cation of the media age that media are – through their mechanical or
formal characteristics – able to insert themselves into the process of reli-
gious practice or religious consciousness, and therefore to fundamentally
transform the nature of religious experience. The connections seem more
subtle and complex than that. Most of our interviewees and interview
households have established patterns of evolved religious and spiritual
meaning and practice. They regard their media lives with reference to
those domains and regard those domains with reference to their media
lives. What results is a negotiated conditional settlement, one that is open
to revision as they continue to seek that feeling of being “fluid, yet
grounded.”
Certainly, their relationship to the “common culture” of the media as a
shared set of ideas and experiences will guide and condition their interac-
tions and sense-making in other contexts of their lives, including their