Page 66 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Media and religion in transition 55

communication technologies continues to expand, and at the expense
of traditional institutions of socialization – the family, the school, and
the church. 37

Beyond the notion of foregrounding media in relation to contemporary
religion or spirituality, Roof also notes here an essential dimension of late
modern consciousness identified by Giddens, the role that mediated experi-
ence plays in establishing a modern self-reflexivity. According to Giddens,
we know who we are in part by understanding our place in the increas-
ingly complex web of social relations that define modern life. 38 This
reflexive self-understanding in part defines the particular challenges of late
modernity in that we know much more about the way the social world
works than would have been typical of our forebears. As I noted in the
previous chapter, this may not be an unparalleled good, with critics such as
Kenneth Gergen seeing this type of social consciousness as likely to be
disempowering as empowering. Giddens would argue, though, that it is a
fact of contemporary life, and as such we must understand it as observers
at the same time that we must live it as social actors.
Roof’s own view of this tends to coincide with the interactionist posi-
tion discussed in the last chapter. Interactionism would look to the social
practices whereby we make sense of our world (in religious or spiritual or
social terms) and would suggest that it is always up to us as social actors
to make meaning of the conditions within which we find ourselves. Roof,
in fact, contributes to this theoretically by identifying his project as that of
looking at and for “lived religion.”

“Lived religion,” that is, religion as experienced in everyday life, offers
a model for integrating the official, the popular, and the therapeutic
modes of religious identity. Lived religion might be thought of as
involving three crucial aspects: scripts, or sets of symbols that imagi-
natively explain what the world and life are about; practices, or the
means whereby individuals relate to, and locate themselves within, a
symbolic frame of reference; and human agency, or the ability of
people to actively engage the religious worlds they help to create. 39

This provides a rather straightforward model for an exploration of rela-
tions between religion and media, locating this exploration radically in the
experience of lived religious or spiritual lives as they encounter their social
and cultural worlds, of which the media play an ever more important part.
Looking at things in this “lived” way gives us a perspective that at the
same time reflects emerging trends in religion and media, and enables us to
get past some of the problematic ways the interaction between media and
religion has been looked at in the past. It radically centers the question on
three related parts. First is the question of what symbols or scripts are