media, religion and culture > research > summary of lifecourse project

The Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse project was an interdisciplinary, academic study housed at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Colorado from 1996-2001. The work begun with this project continued in the Symbolism, Meaning, and the New Media @ Home Project and the Teens & the New Media @ Home Project, both of which took place from 2001-2006. The main publication resulting from the Symbolism, Media, and the Lifecourse project was the book, Media, Home, and Family, by Stewart M. Hoover, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Diane Alters, with Joseph Champ and Lee Hood (Routledge, 2004). Research conducted during this project also contributed to the book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural, by Lynn Schofield Clark (Oxford University Press, 2003), and to the book, Religion in the Media Age, by Stewart M. Hoover (Routledge, 2006).

The principal investigator of the Symbolism, Media and the Lifecourse project was Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D., an internationally recognized authority on religion and the media. Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D., served as associate investigator, and associate researchers on the project included Diane Alters, Joseph G. Champ, and Lee Hood, all of whom were doctoral students who have since earned their degrees. All of the project staff members are former professionals in journalism and electronic media. Alf Linderman, Ph.D., a Swedish scholar in the sociology of religion with expertise on television reception research, and Henrik Boes, who specializes in religion and multimedia, served as consultants to the project.

In this project, we were interested in how religion is changing as a result of two sociological trends:

1. the decline in the authority of religious institutions throughout western culture, a trend usually associated with secularization or neo-secularization, and
2. the emergence, since the Reformation, of a media culture that has more authority to define the frameworks and use of symbols than the formerly-regnant religious institutions.

The questions that emerge for us as researchers, then, were (and continue to be):

1. How do these changes work themselves out in the everyday lives and practices of the U.S. population - the country with the highest proportion of self-reporting religious people who also generally report a high of interaction with mediated sources? and
2. Can we then say that what we are seeing is not a religion *in* the media age, but a religion *of* the media age?

While we were interested in exploring media texts for themes of religion, our primary focus was on talking with people from all walks of life and with varying interests in or commitments to religion to learn how *they* were interpreting media, and how *they* were defining what is religious or meaningful in what they see.

The project was supported by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, a foundation interested in the trends in contemporary American religion.

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