US Adolescent Religious Identity, the Media, and the “Funky”

Journal of Communication, December 2002 U.S. Adolescent Religious Identity, the Media, and the “Funky” Side of Religion by Lynn Schofield Clark Television, film, and other forms of narrative fiction have often been understood as direct competitors to the traditional beliefs and values of organized religion. Not all people experience the media in this way, however. This article analyzes several cases in which stories of the afterlife, supernatural, and paranormal in the entertainment media become an important context through which contemporary teens understand religious beliefs. The study employed research from a multiyear ethnographic study to examine narratives of young people with various backgrounds and levels of interest in religion. The article discusses five different ways in which stories from the entertainment media are either rejected or incorporated into what young people claim are their religious beliefs. Building upon cultural studies perspectives, the article demonstrates that entertainment media are one element of a culture that shapes and constrains religious identity construction for contemporary teens and an especially important one for those with few ties to formal religion. “I watch a lot of extraterrestrial stuff,” Jodie, a young, Anglo American woman from an impoverished economic background, told me as she puffed her cigarette. “They’re different. It’s a new outlook on what could be happening, rather than on what already is happening, or what in the past has happened.” Skeptical about the God she associated with organized religion, Jodie was fascinated instead by other forms of the supernatural such as the paranormal, ghosts, and aliens. When I asked her what television program she believed was most like her religious beliefs, she offered this intriguing answer: Lynn Schofield Clark (PhD, University of Colorado, 1998) is assistant research professor at the Center for Mass Media Research, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado. Her research interests include adolescents, the entertainment media, the Internet, sociology of religion, and ethnographic methodologies. This article is based on her dissertation, directed by Stewart M. Hoover, and is excerpted from her forthcoming book, From Angels to Aliens: Teens, the Media, and Beliefs in the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, in press). The author thanks her research team colleagues, Stewart M. Hoover, Diane Alters, Joseph Champ, and Leona Hood for their insightful comments and the use of their interview materials. She also thanks the Lilly Endowment and the Louisville Institute for their generous support of this research. Copyright © 2002 International Communication Association 794 Funky Religion It would have to be X-Files. Because, no matter what anybody says . I’ve seen everything that everyone’s 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 God’s not an alien? How, indeed? Some scholars in the studies of contemporary religion have questioned whether the entertainment media are to blame for what they might call the distorted beliefs of young people like Jodie (Fore, 1987; Schultze et al., 1991). In this era of irregular attendance at religious organizations, stories like Jodie’s suggest that, whereas the local synagogue, mosque, and church may be sources of information about the realm beyond, so are television programs like The X-Files. Although few young people might declare that they “believe” God to be an alien, Jodie’s statement raises intriguing questions about the role the media might play in the religious beliefs of U.S. teens who have few ties to formal religion. Jodie, for instance, never said she wasn’t a religious or spiritual person. She simply made it very clear that her religious beliefs were unconventional, to say the least. She was interested in the “funky” side of religion, as another teen termed the mediated depictions of the supernatural, the afterlife, and the paranormal. Based on my previous experiences as a mentor of young people in various civic, educational, and religious settings, I suspected that even as her particular statements of belief might be somewhat idiosyncratic, her interests in the realm beyond were not unique. I wondered how such beliefs might be related to self-presentation of a religious identity among contemporary young people, many of whom have limited contact with formal, organized religion. It is the goal of this article, therefore, to explore the ways in which popular television programs and films such as The X-Files, The Craft, or The Sixth Sense have served as a resource in how contemporary U.S. teens understand religion, the realm beyond this world, and their own relationship to these things. I focused on programs like these because teen audiences prefer them to more explicitly religious programs, and because they were identified by teens as programs that offer intriguing stories of the realm beyond this world—a realm of concern for monotheistic religions. Thus, my primary research question was this: What is the role of the media in religious identity construction, particularly when the media’s tales of the supernatural may seem to be compelling and—whether recognized by the young people as such or not—in direct contrast with stories from the historic institutions of religion?1 I found that for some teens, tales of the supernatural in 1 Religious traditions address some aspects of the supernatural, such as heaven, hell, angels, God, and miracles. Here I use the term supernatural to refer to the realm beyond the natural world, noting that in popular usage the word tends to be associated with delegitimized or folkloric legends including those of the afterlife, paranormal, and practices designed to draw upon power from a realm beyond. Whereas religion refers to a long-standing historical tradition and its associated practices, spirituality is a term used in association with the spirit and usually has some reference to both personal experience and some tradition of religion, however vaguely conceived. In brief, angels are the stuff of spirituality while ghosts, vampires, witches, and even aliens comprise the supernatural realm. See Clark (in press) for a more fulsome discussion. 795 Journal of Communication, December 2002 the entertainment media are an important context for how religious questions are approached and understood. Other teens, however, believe that the media and religion have little to do with one another and are in fact in conflict. In this article, I explore five different ways in which supernatural stories in teen media interact with traditional religion in the identity narratives of adolescents. Qualitative research is particularly helpful in constructing “thick descriptions” and multilayered analyses that address questions of identity construction and its relation to specific cultural contexts (Geertz, 1973). Thus, to address my question, I conducted and supervised focused interviews with young people and their parents, interviewing most in my sample more than once. My colleagues and I talked with teens who identified themselves with religious organizations as well as those who did not. We explored the supposed contrast between beliefs concerning the supernatural that are a part of orthodox religious systems and beliefs that seemed to relate instead to the media’s tales of the afterlife, supernatural, or paranormal. I do not make claims for generalizability across the population; however, I believe this research provides insight into the role of the media in relation to socially and historically situated discourses, such as those of religion. The purpose of this research, therefore, does not lie in describing a “typical” or “representative” U.S. teen and his or her religious experience, but in identifying the cultural constraints that inform and limit teen practices of identity construction—in this case, of religious identity construction. U.S. Teens and Religious Identity Much of contemporary research into the religious formation of young people is based on the assumption that teens learn of and form their beliefs about angels, God, and the devil, the more traditionally “religious” supernatural beings, in the context of church, the synagogue, or Mosque, and that their religious identity is thus formed in relation to these organizations (Beeck, 1985; Fowler, 1981; Gustafson, 1993; Lytch, 2000). Yet, although the majority of teens claim that they identify with the traditions of organized religion, mounting data suggest that actual participation is much less widespread (Hadaway & Marler, 1998; Roof & McKinney, 1987; Warner, 1993). The lack of attendance at religious services may be particularly pronounced among teens. As Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite (1995) demonstrated, family attendance declines once the child reaches the age of 10, and attendance for individual young persons does not rise again until they join the ranks of parenthood themselves. This suggests that a great number of young people in the U.S., despite their claim of a “religious” identity, might better be classified as “marginal members”: those persons who attend services several times a year or less and are neither deeply committed to nor hostile toward religion (Marler & Hadaway, 1993; see also Argue, Johnson, & White, 1999). Relatively little research has been conducted into the relationship of the

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