Exploring the role of media in religious identity-construction among teens: A review of dissertation research and findings*
Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Fellow
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Colorado
Box 287
Boulder, CO 80309
Lynn.Clark@Colorado.EDU
One of the things I like best about conducting research among teens is that as they struggle to articulate abstract ideas, teens are usually less aware of social sanctions and therefore less inhibited than their parents might be in expressing themselves. This occasionally results in unintentional humor, such as in the case of the teen who, after waxing patriotically on why he likes being a U.S. citizen, finally exclaimed: "Its like, yeah, we got some problems, and yeah, society is not what it was whenever, but its like - you get free education, you know, most of the time you got plumbing. I mean, people - they take tv, the toilet, and like, vending machines for granted!"
I am not sure that television is usually grouped with convenience and human waste in quite this way, although perhaps some would say that it truly puts the cultural role of television in perspective! Yet what I find most interesting in this statement and in many of the other comments I heard from teens and parents of teens is the echo of what academics call the postmodern: themes of globalization, homogenization, multiculturalism and tolerance, in particular. After interviewing 70 members of families with teens, working with five teens individually over several months as case studies, and training three of these five to serve as leaders of what I called peer-led discussion groups (focus groups organized and led by teens for which I was not present), I have come to several observations about teen religious life today. I believe that what I observed represents a generational shift, with particular reference to the role and attention to symbols.
I should begin by saying what I did not attempt to do in my study of teens. When I began reading the plentiful literature on religion and teens, and the even more momentous research on teens and the media, I was struck by the fact that many researchers into teen life are fascinatedwith the frameworks of developmental psychology. Yet interestingly, recent writings in the field of psychology itself challenge these developmental perspectives. For example, Erickson is critiqued for his tendency to naturalize the white male experience of teen life. Teen girls, as several feminist researchers point out, are less likely to experience a crisis as theyre generally socialized to acquiesce and value interconnections rather than conflicts in relationships. Others point out that teens who are not members of the middle class have significantly more difficulty in finding their place in society as they have less opportunities. Thus developmental psychologys assumption that an individual must find this fit between individual and society assumes a neutral and benign social order and may ultimately encourage a blaming of the individual for social inequities (i.e., his or her failure to find a meaningful role in the larger society).
Recent writings in sociology, moreover, tend to emphasize the extent to which identity is not fixed once and for all during the adolescent years, but rather those years represent a beginning of a process of identity-construction that lasts throughout ones lifetime. Thus, I was particularly interested in how todays teens might express themselves in ways that differed from those of their parents, and I also wanted to explore the role of media in their lives more generally than the assumptions of developmental psychology might allow. I borrowed from cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall, approaching identity as a helpful analytical category through which to explore the interrelationship of the individual subject and his or her social and material environment. Identity is constructed in narrative as the individual subject articulates or claims certain publicly-available discourses as his/her own. With this definition in mind, then, I could turn to the public discourses of religion expressed in media texts (such as popular television program Touched by an Angel) and see how teens responded to them.
Exploring rather than assuming the developmental framework, then, I was able to refute some of Fowlers assertions concerning the relationship between teens in various stages of religious development and their approach to symbols. Rather than finding that most teens are reverential toward the symbols that represent what is most meaningful to them, as Fowler asserts in his stage three of faith development, I found that teens actually approach all religious symbols more like what Frederic Jameson called bricoleurs: they see themselves as autonomous authorities over their own religious beliefs and pick symbols from a variety of sources that may or may not be related to institutional religion. I call this a flattening of religious symbols, as these symbols are not necessarily seen by adolescents as any more authoritative or fixed than any other type of symbol. Like other commodified symbols of the postmodern condition of late capitalism, they can and must be made useful. Perhaps the most pointed example of this process occurs among teens with little or no experience with formal religious institutions but who still self-identify as religious. An example is Jodie. When asked what television show was most like her own beliefs, she responded: "It would have to be X-Files. Because, no matter what anybody says. My dads a real science fiction freak, he's the one that kind of got me into that, thinking about aliens. Well, I've seen everything that everyones compiled together about aliens. There's no doubt in my mind that we are not the only intelligent life...God was a higher being. How do we know he wasn't an alien? On X-Files, Mulder, he would say something like that, how do we know Gods not an alien?"
I have used Jodies comments to illustrate a television practice I observed among several teens which I call regeneration. I use this term to refer to the way in which Jodie reads into the text a meaning that was not intended (at least, I believe that there is no evidence within the program that the character of Mulder has directly equated God and alien life). Jodie draws upon what might be considered the dominant reading of Mulder as doubter of metanarratives/believer in alien forces for her projection of what he would say about God. This is not only a negotiation of meaning, as it moves beyond interpretation strategies related to the text. When she employs the example to explain to me her own views and thus constructs within our conversation an element of her own religious identity, she is noting that the negotiated meaning contributes something to her larger belief system - even if what it contributes is less than coherent.
Yet even among teens with what they considered to be a significant affiliation with a religious organization, there was a sense in which teens see themselves as the ultimate authority over which religious symbols are or can be made meaningful. Like their unaffiliated counterparts, they approached mediated symbols as those that could be made meaningful when given a religious context. This is why such seemingly contradictory mediated symbols as those emerging on science fiction programs like The X-Files may be just as useful in religious identity-construction as an overtly religious program such as Touched by an Angel. Distinctions may be made by teens, but both types of programs still seem to exist within, as one teen termed it, a broad realm of beliefs: both of these programs, as well as other popular teen programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, express some theme of divine (or at least supernatural) intervention into everyday life.
In fact, I found that those religious symbols that seem more closely tied to the historical institutions of Christianity - such as the clerical collar and the church building - seem to be less useful, even among self-identified Christians. If one aspect of the appeal of these supernatural images (such as angels, ghosts, aliens, or other supernatural beings) is that they may be considered open, then these symbols more directly tied to the institutions of Christianity are less useful. This, in large part, is because they seemingly contradict the emergent sensibility of tolerance which has reinforced for teens the idea that all religions (like all racial/ethnic groups) are equally worthy and that difference should be accepted and transcended whenever possible. Because such symbols are specifically Christian while others are less so, they are viewed as less tolerant than the teens themselves want to see themselves as being (although of course the extent to which the angels depicted popularly on television and in movies may be considered a generic religious symbol is highly debatable).
What will all of this mean for the future of religious identity and the role of the media in this process? Perhaps we will have to tune in to programs like The X-Files (and their audiences) to find out.
*NOTE: A revised version of this manuscript is to be published in the newsletter CONNECTIONS, a journal for the Association for Communication in Theological Education, Summer 1998. For more information, write to Jeffrey Mahan, Editor, CONNECTIONS, jmahan@ix.netcom.com.