Page 299 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

288 Conclusion: what is produced?

focused religious and spiritual ones. People seem, as we’ve seen, to be able
to occupy both of these self-understandings with some ease. And, there are
socially-acceptable ways to do so. In private and interpersonal life there is
wide social acceptance of watching, and talking about, a range of salient
media experiences. And the media themselves, including the “news” media,
support those discourses with increasing coverage of entertainment and
show business news. At school, at church, synagogue, or mosque, in formal
settings, and – perhaps most importantly – when answering questions on
opinion polls, “accounts of media” come easily into play.
Some residual questions still nag. Primary among these is something we
have not noted until now – the question of whether the model of religious
evolution we’ve been relying on here is one that will pertain into the
future. Roof’s work on “Baby-Boom religiosity” is provocative and
compelling, and fits well with evolving “new-paradigm” religion scholar-
ship. In fact, the “Boom” may turn out to be a generational “tipping
point” of some kind in the evolution of American religion. Certainly,
dimensions of Boom religiosity that have been most important – the
dimension of “fluidity vs groundedness,” the centrality of the self, and,
most importantly, “seeking” or “questing” – seem to be important and
indicative of the times. It of course remains to be seen whether succeeding
generations will follow the same path. And, as has been widely noted, the
tendency for younger people to be even more media-involved than their
parents means that some of the phenomena we’ve seen here may well
become more characteristic as time goes on. Among our interviews, the
children of the household do seem to share with their parents ideas and
beliefs such as the centrality of the self, suspicion of external authority,
and the importance of being open to new experiences and insights. As they
become more and more integrated with their media, things could change
further. Youth culture has always been, in important ways, media culture
as well. It is hard to separate these two, and that should also continue to
be the case as we move into the future.
A final thought about the relation of this inquiry to debates and ques-
tions in the broader field of media studies takes us back to some of the
discussions at the beginning of this book. As I noted there, there has been
a tendency for media studies to eschew a focus on formal or even informal
religion. A range of scholars in media studies (we’ve considered James
Carey, John Fiske, Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz, and Nick Couldry here,
among others) have sought to undertake studies of media and things
related to religion (ritual in the cases of Dayan, Katz, and Couldry). In
most cases, they have sought to “denature” the implicit or explicit religion
in the domains under study. Other culturalist scholars have simply not
looked at religious or religion-like domains very closely. We can now see
through the lives and reflections of our interviewees a kind of synthesis of
work on religion or spirituality per se and these broader literatures.