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Media and religion in transition 75

resources, the individual’s sense of the novelty and uniqueness of her own
narratives and constructions growing out of those resources, the role that
mediated “secular” contexts may play in making those resources available
to her, and the outcome, which will necessarily involve a narrative of self
that is a construction involving all of these dimensions.

What the media can do

We have painted a picture of the media context’s relationship to this
questing that sees the media acting as a kind of “symbolic inventory” of
resources available to the quest for the religious or spiritual self in late
modernity. As we’ve seen, there is reason to suspect that what we once
thought of as entirely “secular” media have the capacity to provide such
resources, and in fact increasingly do. There has been a good deal of
concern expressed about certain of these mediated texts and messages, and
their potential impact on the religious lives or interests of audiences young
and old. 107 In general, these criticisms assume a different role for media in
religious lives than we’ve been developing here. As I’ve said, such criti-
cisms tend to think of the media instrumentally, and their relationship to
religion/spirituality in terms of the effects of media on these things.
As we’ve seen, there is reason to begin to think of things differently.
Against the notion of instrumentalism, for example, there is the idea that
the media may well form part of the cultural surround within which we
negotiate our religious selves today, and that they may, further, provide
important symbolic resources to those negotiations. Critiques that attempt
to evaluate religiously or spiritually significant content by means of its
legitimacy according to received essentialist or archetypal categories over-
look the way that emerging religious questing contests the whole notion of
received authority. The idea that the media and their messages should be
looked at in terms of large or universal themes and categories is also
increasingly problematic, as the emerging religious sensibility tends to
focus on the vitality of individualized and localized experience. Dualistic
understandings of religion and media are also problematic for two reasons.
First, religiously motivated seekers or questers are unlikely to see such
categories as determinative of action, as they derive from the same sorts of
received authority that they increasingly question. Second, as we’ve seen,
there is much reason to expect that the content of what was once thought
of as “secular” media is now increasingly “religious.” The line is thus
more and more a blurry one.
The development of this new “religious/symbolic marketplace” in the
media and its relationship to emerging religious sensibilities has gone on
largely “under the radar” of religious and spiritual institutions and author-
ities. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the most intriguing
has to do with the nature and role of the religious establishment during the