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Media and religion in transition 73

important to the quest than would have been the case in the past. And,
Warner suggests, significantly, that there is a fundamental level of satisfac-
tion or salience that accompanies this new model of religion.

What the new religious voluntarism amounts to is a centrifugal
process, sorting elemental qualities on the basis of which identities are
constructed . . . the breakdown of ascriptive ties to religion can
enhance, rather than reduce, the elemental nature that believers
attribute to their experiences. From this point of view, social ascription
that denies one’s true being is seen as arbitrary, while a new-found reli-
gion is self-affirming. 102

But what does this “new volunteerism,” what Roof and Wuthnow would
call the “seeking” sensibility, look like in actual practice? Both Warner and
Roof make the point that, while individual adherents may well see the
process as entirely self-generating and self-orienting, it in fact rests on a
structure of deep histories of received and socially understood categories of
religious experience. An individual’s socialization or enculturation to reli-
gious practice (remembering what we said in the last chapter about
interactionist theories) depends on a connection to culturally specific
symbols, resources, practices, and relationships. The difference is in how
he negotiates his relationships to these things. Does he see them to be
determinative of his beliefs and actions, or does he consider them to be
resources to his own construction of meaning and identity? In all of this,
Roof sees an interesting dialectic in play on the part of what he calls “the
protean self,” between the desire to be “fluid” and to be “grounded” at
the same time.

In a highly subjective religious culture, people move back and forth
psychologically across what many regard as porous, somewhat artifi-
cial, boundaries, wanting at times a stable anchor, and open at other
times to more expansive possibilities . . . reminding us of Robert Jay
Lifton’s comment about the protean self wanting to be both fluid and
grounded at the same time, however tenuous that possibility. 103

The practice that ensues is of particular interest to our considerations here
because it places the individual and her practices of cultural consumption at
the center of the making of her religious self. Without the firm categories
and boundaries of received religion, she feels freed to move beyond them
into a cultural/symbolic marketplace increasingly filled with resources rele-
vant to her quest. How she encounters that marketplace and the
negotiations through which she brings those resources into her sense of her
religious or spiritual “self” (but – as noted above – without being able to
fully move beyond received tradition) is the central question. As Roof sees it,