Page 50 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

From medium to meaning 39

Meaning and identity
These sources, along with many from the field of culturalist media
studies, contend that a central object of meaning around the self is the
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formation and maintenance of identity. As an aspect of the self, the iden-
tity is the self’s description. As such, it is necessarily a presentation of a
kind, and necessarily articulated in such a way that it is accessible to
others in the same context or milieu, that is, culture. There is much anec-
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dotal evidence that the media play an important role in identity. Popular
music, film, and television all provide material that is relevant to identity.
Research – on young people and youth culture in particular – has estab-
lished that media culture is integral to providing resources, contexts, and
practices to youth identity. 57
Making identity the focus of inquiry is a refinement in direction that
serves a number of purposes. I have been arguing that much is to be gained
by a research project that looks at the where of the relationship between
media and religion. Identity is an important location, though not the only
location, where media and religion interact in human experience. But, as a
kind of heuristic device for guiding our inquiry, identity presents itself as
an important category.
This can be seen when we look at the nature of contemporary work on
contemporary religion. In his influential essay on new paradigms in the
study of religion, 58 Stephen Warner has suggested that, to account for
contemporary religion, we must shift our thinking away from religion “as
ascribed,” toward religion “as achieved.” By this he means that, in late
modernity, religion has not faded away, but its nature has changed. It can
no longer be defined only in terms of its historical, structural, or doctrinal
attributes. Religion-as-institution, as we will discuss in more detail in later
chapters, is in decline or at least under some stress. Instead, Warner posits,
we must see religion as something that is generated in the experience, prac-
tice, and aspirations of “lived lives.” The focus on identity that I am
advocating argues what adherents to this new form of religion “achieve”
is – in part, at least – a new sense of themselves as religious or spiritual
beings; thus their religious or spiritual identities.
In his comprehensive account of the late modern religiosity of the “baby
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boom” generation, Wade Clark Roof notes that this practice of identity-
construction (as we might call it) is an articulation between the context of
individual experience and broader contexts of social and cultural life,
including claims made by the culture about symbolic meanings. The rough
and tumble of twentieth-century religious change and evolution has
resulted in the formation of clear and distinct religious ideological claims, 60
and, as Roof notes, these “ideological labels” are increasingly encountered
reflexively. That is, people articulate for themselves a range of symbols,
claims, and ideas from a variety of contexts (personal as well as public)
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into an achieved (though always under construction) identity. As Roof