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72 Media and religion in transition

Thus, what we are seeing in this changing religious landscape is a sensi-
bility that radically contests the received notion that the action in religion
is at the level of the whole society or the whole culture. Beginning with the
assumption that it is, various versions of secularization theory have looked
at religion’s retreat to the margins and to the particulars, and have seen its
overall decline. Warner’s analysis, and the work of most of the “new
paradigm,” holds that religion instead remains vibrant, though in a radi-
cally changed form. It remains “vital,” at the same time that its form,
location, and practices of meaning-making no longer occupy the tradi-
tional spaces. Along with other observers, Warner notes that this type of
religion has deep roots in the American context. He notes that “With
appropriate complications and qualifications, religion in the United States
is and has long been (a) disestablished, (b) culturally pluralistic, (c) struc-
turally adaptable, and (d) empowering.” These characteristics define the
99
new religion we have been talking about.
Its connection to the project of the self, which we have seen to be
fundamental to contemporary social experience and fundamentally linked
to media culture, is seen by Wade Clark Roof, another proponent of the
new paradigm, to be one of the most basic logics of this new religious
sensibility. The implication for religious or spiritual questing is profound
in that focusing on the self necessarily de-emphasizes the role of institu-
tional or clerical authority and at the same time sees the project as one that
is open to more or less constant revision.

A psychological culture encourages definition of the self as open-ended
and revisable, and hence a self capable of transcending organizational
boundaries and inherited identities. In this respect, even if the
psychology within many small groups is overly expansive and poten-
tially misleading in its extreme, such groups will serve an important
function for their participants, assisting them in reorganizing their
lives and assuring them that they can start over. It is a pattern as old as
the United States itself, and one Americans still cherish. 100

This clearly has the effect of disconnecting the individual from her roots in
religion in a rather profound and far-reaching way. In Warner’s terms, the
shift is from thinking of religion as something that is “ascribed” to
thinking of it as something that one “achieves.” 101 And, more importantly
for our considerations here, it suggests that the self’s religious or spiritual
project is or can be a more or less constant quest for new insights and
resources, and new ways of conceiving of the self in religious or spiritual
ways. Consistent with Roof, we can conceive of religious identity as that
particular way the self chooses to think of itself in religious or spiritual
terms. The other “side” of this sensibility, of course, is its necessary rela-
tionship to received symbols, ideas, and authorities. They are simply less