Page 63 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

52 Media and religion in transition

have been rooted in overall changes in the nature of contemporary social
consciousness and social experience. Anthony Giddens, who we discussed
in the last chapter, has laid out the theory that, in late modernity, changes
in the structure of social relations and more specifically in the sorts of
structural supports that once supported individuals in making sense of
themselves and their social experience have led to a focus on the self and
on perfection of the self as the central social project of the time. We can
see evidence of this in – of all places – “the media.” The rise of what has
come to be called “the culture of therapy” – much of it based in or avail-
able through the media and commodity culture – has occurred in part to
address the increasing needs of individuals for new, more specific, and
particular ways of finding themselves.
Whereas we once might have looked to a network of social relations in
home, school, community, church, or family to provide the resources
necessary to the making of our “selves,” today we think of this as being
much more our own responsibility. More importantly, we also see it as an
essential task. We are much more reflexively self-conscious about it. It is
up to us. This means that in our individual practices of meaning-making,
we see ourselves as both at the center of the process, and autonomously
responsible for generating that process. The culture of therapy has arisen
in part to address this new reality. Therapy has come to be an important
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mode of social practice, a major center of social and cultural articulation,
and (not incidentally) a multi-million-dollar industry, with extensive media
resources including books, magazines, cassette tapes, television programs,
workshops, retreats, really a whole “culture industry” devoted to it.
The kind of religion that emerges in such a social context is also new
and different. As the self is the project, the spirituality of the self becomes
an important dimension of that project. Individuals today feel much more
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responsible for their spiritual and religious lives than was the case a gener-
ation ago. What Philip Hammond calls “personal autonomy” in matters of
faith places the responsibility on the individual to make her own deci-
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sions about faith and spirituality without what she is likely to see as
intermediaries such as congregational or clerical authority. These dimen-
sions of the process: that it is about the self; that it results from
self-conscious autonomous action on the part of individuals, and that it is
inherently distrustful of received clerical or institutional authority,
combine to support a new religious sensibility that has come to be called
“seeking.” Wade Clark Roof first identified this in a systematic way a
decade ago in his book, A Generation of Seekers. 31
In this work, Roof suggested that the so-called “Baby Boom” genera-
tion marked a sea change in the nature of religious experience. This
generation was the first to come of age in the late modern era identified by
Giddens with its large-scale reorganization of social experience due to
radical changes in institutions and culture. The “Boomers” were, in addi-