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286 Conclusion: what is produced?

religious and spiritual lives, both formal and informal. There may also be a
way that the reflexively engaged media age has served to change and
perhaps “disenchant” these informants and the Western media audience as
a whole. In Religion and Media, Hent De Vries (2001) wonders whether
the removal of the capacity of “the magical” and “the miraculous” from
19
daily life is a fundamental function of the media age. He suggests that the
power of religion has always resided, in part, in the essentially technical
ability to manipulate experience in such a way as to establish authority. 20
In these interviews, neither “magic” nor “authority” loom large. Few
informants use media in such a way as to invoke this idea of “the miracu-
lous.” Those who do – Judy Cruz’s interest in science fiction and mystery
comes to mind – do so with unconventional programs and materials. The
relationship to “authority” is also an issue. For Judy, “authority,” even
over the implicit theodicy of science fiction, is beside the point. The issue
of religious authority in the media age may well be located beyond the
question of individual experience such as Judy’s. Instead (and De Vries’s
21
and others’ arguments on this point still may be well taken ) Judy’s rela-
tionship to authority may be evidence that the media age may have so
destabilized formal religious authority on a general level that it is no
longer on the social or cultural “radar screen” on particular levels.
There is, at the same time, an argument from the other direction – as
articulated by journalist Nicholas Kristof in Chapter 9 – that the media
age has seen the evolution of a “mystical turn” in the world of religion,
thus reversing the trend toward secular rationality in late modernity. The
evidence here is also mixed on this point. Clearly, the media context seems
to be one in which people can make a range of conceptual and moral and
spiritual connections, often in ways that, to the post-Enlightenment mind,
defy reason. And the notion that the times are defined by a decline in
general in the legitimacy of traditional cultural authority also has been
22
claimed to be connected to the influence of the media age. But, at the
same time, there is evidence in these interviews of a continuing, reflexively
engaged autonomy in meaning-making and action. It could be, of course,
that it is a function of the media age that people feel increasingly empow-
ered because of the instrumentality they feel through their private
“knowledge work” as media consumers, that this is a false sense of
empowerment and autonomy, and that this extends as well to the domain
of “religion” or “spirituality.” In the end, neither of these consequences of
the media for religion – too little mystery or too much – can be established
without historical scholarship. The “slice in time” we engaged in here is
not appropriate to the task.
The decline in authority and the rise in autonomy – if that is what we
are seeing – seem from these interviews also to be a cross-class and cross-
religious phenomenon. As we saw in Chapters 5 and 6, “born-agains”
were in many ways as much “autonomous seekers” as were the “main-