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stream believers.” As we saw, no one wanted to leave it to anyone else to
make media decisions for them. And, as we saw, there was a tendency for
the media sphere to have a normative authority that religious institutions
do not. Glenn Donegal in Chapter 4 was a good example of this.
Committed to a faith that he feels has saved his life, he nonetheless sees
that as something within him, not something that is stored in “religion.”
And, the media sphere – both “secular” and “religious” – provides him
with the values and symbolic and discursive resources he needs to act out
his faith in his daily life.
In this way as well, the so-called “secular” media sphere may be the
normative and determinative sphere. For many of these interviewees, their
attraction to the “common culture” of the media sphere places them in a
dialectical relationship to what they see to be some of their fundamental
values. Yet they continue to participate and negotiate ways of making this
all make sense. All agree on there being some distance – some contradic-
tion – between the media sphere and the normative bases of their lives and
values. While this is once again beyond the scope of this study to establish,
it may well be that the “effect” is a kind of inexorable “secularization,” if
by that term we mean a shift away from religious authority as a basis of
knowledge and action.
Backing up a bit, it is also important to note again that what seems to
drive media practice is not in most cases a process of deliberation over
appropriate and normative values – including religious values – but the
salience of the media experiences themselves. Actual reasons for viewing
given television programs are hard to articulate, beyond a level best
expressed as “I like it.” For some, as we have seen, the reasons are even
less well-articulated than that.
This helps explain a major ongoing controversy in the American
“culture wars.” For decades there has been a seeming contradiction
between the expressed moralist attitudes of religious authorities and
parents on the one hand and actual media behaviors on the other. In spite
of widespread condemnation of the sex, violence, profanity, and irreligion
of the “secular media,” including opinion poll results establishing these
views as widely shared, the media have continued to enjoy large audiences
with this same fare. As an example, it was revealed in 2004 that the
controversial potboiler Desperate Housewives was achieving impressive
audience ratings in the Bible Belt. 23
As media executives have repeatedly pointed out, “if no one watched, we
wouldn’t show it.” So, many have wondered, how is it that people say one
thing and do another? These data provide some insight. It seems clear that
people actually occupy more than one “map” as regards their media lives.
Media are highly salient and attractive, and tend to be watched almost as a
matter of right. On another level, however, there is a whole array of
“accounts of media” rooted in broad social conceptions as well as more