Page 93 - Religion in the Media Age Media, Religion & Culture

82 Media and religion in transition

imagine them going anywhere outside their traditions or institutions for
insights, inspiration, or resources related to religion or spirituality (a term
they are unlikely to use). They’d be unlikely to connect their media lives to
their religious lives, and unlikely to attend to media related to “secular” or
“mainstream” culture.
Secularists. This group would be likely to describe themselves as being
neither “religious” nor “spiritual.” Most likely to have been raised in
Mainline Protestant contexts, this group is also likely to be higher in
socioeconomic status and education, and to be members of the so-called
“knowledge class.” Like the Mainstream group, their narratives are most
likely to be stated in negative terms. It is easier for them to describe them-
selves in terms of what they are not as what they are. Tradition is distant
and of little importance to them. Roof describes them as being a-religious
or ir-religious rather than anti-religious. But, along with most of the other
groups, they share a self-consciousness and reflexivity regarding religion,
expressed by their defining themselves in terms distinct from other cate-
gories of religious meaning practice.
What would the secularists’ media-cultural diets be? Most likely, given
their educational level, they would eschew most popular media, likely
favoring public broadcasting to commercial broadcasting. Because of their
relationship to religion and spirituality, they’d be unlikely to seek out or
consume material in the media sphere related to religion.
It is important to reaffirm here that these categories result from a
specific set of studies, and are presented as applying most precisely there
and more generally to the Baby Boom generation at that point in history.
Their relationship to succeeding generations deserves some reflection. Roof
would argue (as would I) that his studies describe a transitional moment in
the evolution of religious culture, and that post-Boomer religiosity can be
expected to bear some important resemblances to what we see here. We
might as well expect a different classification to emerge in our study, as the
questions are different. We are interested, more than Roof was, in the way
that religious identity is created in relation to cultural resources such as the
commodities of the media sphere. As we will discuss in later chapters, we
will also be looking at these matters in the context of the domestic spaces
of private life, which introduces other questions and considerations into
interviews and observations. A value of Roof’s approach to “data gath-
ering” is that it is possible for us to unpack important dimensions of his
analysis, to deconstruct them and reconstruct them in relation to our own
project as it is itself deconstructed and reconstructed. The test of the
success of this will be in the doing, of course.
Of all the categories, as we noted earlier, the metaphysical believers and
seekers might well be the group most likely to seek out and consume reli-
gious or spiritual material in the media sphere. Their interest in religious
and spiritual matters beyond the received categories, as well as their