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64 Media and religion in transition

supporters were comfortable. As my study of the 700 Club audience
pointed out, the value of that program for its viewers was largely
symbolic – representing the presence or even ascendancy of the Evangelical
worldview in the important context of the media. 66
More recent audience research dealing with changing conceptions of
home and family in the media era found that a key element or framework
of meaning-making in that context is a kind of mapping the self into the
cultural context of the media by means of received public scripts that
define various programs and media practices in terms of their assumed
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cultural and social value and significance. In our consideration of televan-
gelism and its aspirations to the “mainstream,” we saw exactly this kind of
consideration, one that also underlies such cultural-definitional projects as
the distinctions between “Christian” and “mainstream” music. The ques-
tion of which is which is not a simple, straightforward, or tacit one.
Instead, a good deal of negotiation and construction takes place around
these questions. While it might seem to make sense for producers of reli-
gious material to wish to enter the mainstream, it is clear that a set of
concessions make it difficult for them to do so, and very few, if any, exam-
ples of successful “crossing over” exist. 68 Instead, there is a kind of
reflexive project that intends to achieve such outcomes, and that does so
by highlighting the religious origins of religious material. This self-
conscious intention becomes ultimately self-defeating, however. As
Heather Hendershot has shown in her history of Evangelical cinema in
Shaking the World for Jesus, cinema or Christian music that intend to
cross over face skepticism from believers and secular audiences alike. All
media audiences understand the basics of media production well enough to
know religious media when they see it. While the believers might support
it for the sake of it being there – part of the media mix – they at the same
time understand very well that it can probably not compete. For nonbe-
lievers, the signals and signs that mark it as “different” also will likely turn
them off. 69
If we can draw a fairly bright line between the media produced out of
religious motivations and that which is more purely “secular,” then we
might describe some of the media that are responding to new trends in reli-
gious and spiritual interest as “crossing over” from the secular side,
something that may well be more successful than going the other direction.
The success of Touched, and other similar shows dealing with spirituality,
including Angel and Promised Land, had much of the television produc-
tion community looking for similar properties to produce by the 1997
television season. Also that year, an entirely new network of stations was
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announced that had already secured the rerun rights for Touched. Dubbed
the PAX network, it was based on a network of seventy-three television
stations owned by its founder, Bud Paxon. The idea, according to Paxon,
was to found a network based on “wholesome, feel good programming.” 71