Page 88 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

Media and religion in transition 77

authenticity or truth therein. Further, where the older, received understand-
ings of religious enlightenment thought of it as a practice that would
always on some level separate itself from the culture, the seekers of the
new volunteerism seem to be always on a quest for enlightenment and will
simply get it where they can, in popular culture or not, according to the
logic of their own quest for self.
The seeming solipsism of this is troubling for many observers. In Habits
of the Heart, 111 Robert Bellah and his colleagues were among the first to
identify this seeking or questing at the center of religious/spiritual identity
for some. Yet, they expressed strong reservations about the phenomenon,
worrying that such individualized practice would fail to deliver a whole-
some religious worldview; that it would amount to a kind of narcissism.
Warner addressed this concern, noting,
The authors of Habits of the Heart . . . have most eloquently lamented
these individualistic trends. Although they recognize that Americans,
no matter how individualistic, seek out like-minded others, they fear
that the resulting associations are only “lifestyle enclaves,” a term they
intend to connote shallowness and mutual narcissism . . . “there is a
givenness about the community and the tradition. They are not
normally a matter of individual choice. I do not wish to dismiss the
concerns of Bellah and his colleagues, but there is considerable
evidence that religious switchers are morally serious.” 112

Instead of a situation where religious questing is to be feared for its poten-
tial to lead individual seekers toward isolation and irrelevance, Warner
suggests that there is much in the record of the new religion scholarship
that sees individuals engaging in practices which remake tradition, under-
standing, and ultimately identity. And, it is our task here to try to
understand how these practices take place in the context of media culture.

Seeking through the media
While there is good reason to believe that the emerging religious sensibility
we have been calling “seeking” will be more attuned to culture, and thus
to the media, than would have been the case in earlier eras, we probably
should at the same time not expect this to be a monolithic or monotonic
phenomenon. The argument I’ve been making is in part an argument that
all of contemporary religious practice could be expected to take on aspects
of a seeking sensibility, particularly as regards its relationship to cultural
materials available in the media. At the same time, though, we should
expect there to be differences between individuals and interpretive commu-
nities within the whole field, defined by social and religious demographics
as well as by different life trajectories and histories.