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Journal of Media and Religion

Interpretive Community: An Approach to Media and Religion

To cite this article: Thomas R. Lindlof (2002): Interpretive Community: An Approach to Media and Religion, Journal of Media and Religion, 1:1, 61-74 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/S15328415JMR0101_7

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JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND RELIGION, 1(1), 6174 Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Interpretive Community: An Approach to Media and Religion

Thomas R. Lindlof
School of Journalism and Telecommunications University of Kentucky, and Editor of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media

The last 20 years have been a time of enormous change in the religious scene. Americans religious affiliations are more diverse than ever, and their beliefs and values more varied (Eck, 2001; Gallup, Gallup, & Lindsay, 2000; Kosmin & Lachman, 1993). Religious institutions have become more responsive to peoples needs and lifestyles (Cimino & Lattin, 1998; Roof, 1999), turning to such strategies as the use of contemporary elements in worship and small group programs to treat the life-course issues of members. The last two decades also witnessed the national politicization of many church and para-church organizationsmost vividly seen in the culture war waged over abortion, art, and mediawhich, by the mid-1990s, had turned toward grassroots initiatives on the homefront (Diamond, 1998). These developments are signs of an emerging voluntaristic mode of spiritual involvement. According to sociologist Nancy T. Ammerman (1997), this orientationcharacterized by fluid and plural modes of commitment, diverse styles of worship, and portable religious practices that find their way into the wider society requires a new conceptual lens for social scientific study. Arguing that eitheror categories like sacredsecular, traditionmodernity, and membernonmember are no longer useful, Ammerman urges scholars to imagine ways of describing the much more complicated reality we encounter in a world where actors are constantly choosing their ways of being religious (p. 204). This objective in turn should lead to studies that ask how religious rhetorics and practices are enacted and how they are situated in various organizational contexts (p. 205). The new paradigm she outlines (see also Warner, 1993) involves the Janus-faced task of looking both at local religious communities and the globe-spanning discourses that influence peoples choices for action and belief.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Thomas R. Lindlof, 212 Grehan Journalism Building 0042, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506. E-mail: lindlof@pop.uky.edu

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Accompanying the recent changes in organized religion was the rapid growth of a commercial media sector. Religiously inflected cultural products valued in the billions of dollars are now produced and distributed by publishers, bookstores, recorded music divisions, video companies, television networks, and other media companies. Many of these products are targeted solely for the evangelical Christian market, but a growing number of themfor example, contemporary Christian music; novels such as the hugely successful Left Behind series; movies made by Christian film companies (Ferguson & Lee, 1997; Romanowski, 2001; Spencer, 2001) demonstrate crossover appeal to a broader consumer base. Even the mainstream entertainment industry is taking the faith market more seriously than before, with overtly religious characters and themes featured in movies and primetime television series. Ammermans (1997) call for fresh thinking in the study of congregational change applies with equal force to the complex relations of media and religion. That is, communication researchers should ask how media rhetorics and practices are enacted and how they are situated in various religious contexts. My purpose in this article is to examine a specific brand of this inquirythe interpretive community approach, which is one of several social-semiotic approaches to studying the media audience that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s (Hay, Grossberg, & Wartella, 1996; Lindlof & Meyer, 1998; White, 1994). The interpretive community approach has had a short, but provocative, life in media studies. Early on, the concept was the subject of intensive theorizing and debate, but without the benefit of much empirical work. In recent years, however, studies have been published that use the idea of interpretive community to advance claims about the signifying practices of media audiences. Many of these are found in the area of media and religion. Because the notion of community is key to the concerns, history, and doctrines of most religious cultures, it should not be surprising that it resonates among many of those who study the role played by media in the social construction of religion. This article begins with a focused survey of the interpretive community approach, including its kinship with traditional ideas of community and critical views that have been expressed about the approach. Next, I review the usage of the interpretive community in media studies, including applications in the area of media and religion. Many of these studies are highly suggestive of the interplay of media technology and content, human agency, and faith community in a postmodern age. In the final section, I propose future directions for interpretive community research generally and in the contexts of religion and spirituality.

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INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY: THE SOCIAL NEXUS OF MEDIA USE In the view of Plant (1978), community is a term that plays a major legitimating role in our talk about institutions (p. 81). For example, bureaucracy is often re-

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ferred to as a community (e.g., calling the Central Intelligence Agency part of the intelligence community) to imbue it with connotations of humanity, cooperation, and cohesiveness. Although community is a desideratum in everyday speech, its descriptive meanings are more complicated. As Plant noted, community can mean
locality; interest group; a system of solidarity; a group with a sense of mutual significance; a group characterized by moral agreement, shared beliefs, shared authority, or ethnic integrity; a group marked by historical continuity and shared traditions; a group in which members meet in some kind of total fashion as opposed to meeting as members of certain roles, functions, or occupational groups; and finally, occupational, functional, or partial communities. (p. 82)

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Despite this profusion of meanings, community can be characterized by a set of elements across most cases. First, community is based on a unity of shared circumstances, interests, customs, and purposes (although scholars disagree about whether this is mostly a unity of sameness or unity in difference; Whitt & Slack, 1994). When we recognize a social unit as community, we usually see strong evidence of efforts toward solidarity (even if we see other evidence of dispute, self-interest, or ideological fragmentation). Therefore, a successful community should be capable of directing individual action towards the construction and maintenance of goods that could not be created by individuals acting in isolation (Smith, 1993, p. 10). A second characteristic is the moral obligations that the members share, manifested in social rules, etiquette, and ethical codes. Inside and outside the community, moral performances are subject to the commentary, critique, sanction, and approval of other agents (Calhoun, 1980). Third, if unity and moral obligations are to form, a community must achieve stability over time. This stability is usually aided by the establishment of sacred icons, canonical texts, rituals, and myths, whose symbolic potency for directing core values outlasts the coming and going of individual generations of community members. Stable communities also rely on an adequate material base and favorable political conditions. Fourth, the social networks of community furnish the communicative occasions and codes that enable social actors to coordinate their actions, and to know who is inside and who is outside the membership. In fact, it is only through the use of discursive resources that an intersubjective basis for doing community can be achieved. In addition, Benedict Andersons (1991) thesis of the imagined community tells us that there need not be dense, face-to-face relations for a felt sense of community to arise. With the spread of mass media and computer networks, ideas of national or diasporic community can become the basis for sensible identity performances. In the popular imagination of the 20th century, the mass media have posed considerable threat to the integrity of local community (J. Jensen, 1990). These

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threats are perceived as both structural (the medias privatization of family and politics) and moral (the medias production of content whose values are often at odds with local sources of moral authority). The interpretive community concept brings the trope of community to the microsocial level and provides a way to consider the social formation of audiences in a more organic sense. The term itself derives from recent literary theory, although other sources have been importantMikhail Bakhtins theory of dialogic, intertextual genres of communication (see Lindlof, 1988); Charles Pierces pragmatist theory of semiotics (see K. B. Jensen, 1991); and the conceptualization of tactical resistance to political and cultural hegemony (Fiske, 1988). Simply put, an interpretive community is a collectivity of people who share strategies for interpreting, using, and engaging in communication about a media text or technology. The strategies are devised with respect to norms and standards that evolve among the community members through innovation and the influence of argument. More important, these [strategies] proceed not from [the reader] but from the interpretive community of which he is a member; they are, in effect, community property, and insofar as they at once enable and limit the operations of his consciousness, he is too (Fish, 1980, p. 14). After more than 15 years, many aspects of the concept are still ambiguous and contested. Due to the fact that most research efforts have depended on qualitative methods to produce exemplars of individual interpretive communities, theory development has been slow and ad hoc. However, nearly all analysts agree on at least a few propositions:

At its core, an interpretive community is comprised of sets of discursive strategies (not people as such) that find their expression in tactical readings (or rewritings of text) by socially situated individuals or groups. The individual in any strategic situation is a local and partial representation of the interpretive community (J. A. Anderson, 1996, p. 87). Membership in the community means that a person performs media usage in ways that are recognizable and valued by others as this type of action (and not something else). Although media discourses are structured in ways that favor the activation of certain audience discourses, the individual text always has a polysemic potential. The text becomes a site of contested interpretations with different audience communities producing different sense-making achievements (J. A. Anderson & Meyer, 1988, p. 314). Further, the text can produce meanings in vivo only in relation to the audiences knowledge and valuation of other texts and social institutions. Communities vary in terms of how intentional and self-conscious they are. Some interpretive communities are public, self-consciously named (and promoted), and more or less stable (e.g., Kentucky Wildcat fans); whereas others are more elusive, less intentional, and less available to public inspection. On the whole, interpretive communities based in media competencies may be less stable over time than traditional communities.

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Interpretive communities are most easily identified as an audience for a genre. As discussed later in this article, genre is a site for negotiation between content producers and consumers. However, interpretive communities can also form as outgrowths of preexisting groupings, such as a religious community (e.g., Luthra, 2001) in which case content serves as a resource for identity grounded in spiritual worldview or ethos. The religious community may even develop interpretive strategies for avoiding or restricting media use (e.g., Lepter & Lindlof, 2001; Stout, Scott, & Martin, 1996). Interpretive communities are multiple, overlapping, and potentially contradictory (K. B. Jensen, 1991). The sort of unity seen in face-to-face community is often absent in the media-based communities. For example, one can simultaneously enter the worlds of parental community (adopting approved methods to regulate child viewing), peer community (going to the sports bar on weekends), and political community (reading peoples political persuasions from the bumper stickers on their cars).
The industrial production of media content sets boundaries on what can be said or thought about it (and this is true for even the most radically socialized of communities). At the same time, most such content is engineered for wide-ranging interpretations. For example, to the extent that a television program represents the cultural mainstream of a society, the more likely it is read similarly by all audience members. Each person inhabits different life worlds that call for competencies and reality scripts for coordinating meanings with others (Schoening & Anderson, 1995). As people shift their purposes from scene to scene, the meanings of content are read differently. It is the dynamic process of interpretation in specific situations that matters in the making of meanings (Machin & Carrithers, 1996; Schroder, 1994). Therefore, media texts are the products of the strategies that they participate in creating. The interpretive community approach to mediaparticularly in audience studieshas been criticized on several grounds. The most common criticism is the alleged lack of historical, cultural, and social context in both theory and research (Carragee, 1990). According to this critique, interpretivist theory posits social actors to be ahistorical and free floating, oblivious to the structures and power of the media industry, and able to read anything they wish from a media text. Another related criticism faults the theory for its excessive focus on the textreader (viewer) relation. Grouping it with other text-based audience approaches, J. Jensen and Pauly (1997) regarded the interpretive community as a sociologically thin portrait of social life. Other analysts have noted how shallow this kind of community seems to be, compared to real communities (Lichterman, 1992; Schroder, 1994). A third major criticism concerns its construct validity. For example, Evans (1990) perceived the interpretive community to be a postmodern epithet for more well-marked categories of social structure, such as ethnicity, economic class, and gender, that are empirically related to patterns of media-related behavior (p. 157). He concluded that the exis-

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tence of interpretive communities will remain in doubt until investigations have systematically controlled for the influence of these social-structural factors. For the most part, these critiques were written at a time when theoretical writing on the topic was outpacing the production of empirical work. In the conclusion to this article, the issues raised by these critics are revisited briefly. I argue that the work completed recently, including studies that involve a religious dimension, may have addressed, and even allayed to some degree, some of the concerns expressed by critics of the interpretive community approach.

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INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY STUDIES: MEDIA AND RELIGIOUS INTERSECTIONS One of the strongest tests of the value of a theory or concept is how widely it has spread in the research community. By this measure, the interpretive concept has been moderately successful, having been used in the conceptualization and design of dozens of studies. In this section, I present four categories that cover a great deal of this published output: genre communities, historical communities, institutional communities, and virtual communities. These categories are not described in a mutually exclusive fashion; indeed, many of the studies reviewed here could fit into two or more categories. However, each category is defined by a distinct research goal to which studies of religion and media community have contributed in recent years. Genre Communities Janice Radways (1984b) study of romance readers, based in part on her skilled appropriation of Stanley Fishs (1980) ideas about interpretive community, did more than any other study to bring the concept to the attention of the communication field. Many studies have also chosen the path of selecting a media genre to locate an audience community. Radway (1984a) herself was wary of this route:
While all may read romances, they may do so differently or for different purposes. They may indeed be category readers, but they may not constitute an interpretive community in the sense that they all select, use, and operate on printed texts in certain socially specific ways. (p. 55)

Nevertheless, genre has been a convenient starting point for conducting research of audience tastes, classifications, uses, and discourses. Genres are also of interest because they constitute a precise locus of struggle between identities felt [by the audience] and identifications offered [by media producers] (White, 1994, p. 26). To cite some examples of genre community, Lindlof, Coyle, and Grodin (1998) used Q-methodology to identify what science fiction meansin terms of aesthetics,

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social practice, and textual identifiersto frequent readers. Schaefer and Avery (1993) interviewed fans of Late Night With David Letterman to understand the genre-breaking conventions they appreciated. Grodin (1991) and Lichterman (1992) studied readers of self-help books, and it is interesting to note that both expressed skepticism about the ability of the interpretive community concept to explain how readers use the ideas in these texts to understand and narrate their self-stories. Media fans who form themselves into subcultures are a special case of interpretive community, if not a different category altogether. Subcultural memberships appear to be a species of what J. A. Anderson (1996) called the engaged audience, for whom attendance to a text is directed as a sign of [genuine] membership (p. 88). Whereas media use for most people occurs in opportunistic fashion, the engaged audience is tightly coupled in contracts of mutual dependencies. There are solid interpersonal networks and personal histories. Engaged audiences appear much more likely to participate in the production process itself (pp. 8889). Fans sometimes stake ownership claims to the narrative, and even elaborate on the original texts in fan fiction or songs (Jenkins, 1988). Creating and maintaining a subculture requires continuous group processes of sustaining an identity through the coherence gained by a consistent point of view and a lifestyle that inscribes cultural difference in pointed reference to mainstream codes. The key difference, then, is between a text that is read within the routines of a relationship (interpretive community) and a text whose interpreted qualities form a basis for constructing group life (fan subculture). So far, research of religious communities uses of specific genres or texts has been scarce (although Harding, 2000, is an interesting case study of how to read the concatenated texts of a single figure, Jerry Falwell, from within the tenets of fundamentalist Christian culture). Hoovers (1988) study of 700 Club viewers perceptions in the context of their faith histories, is an example of one way to frame this sort of study. As part of an ethnography of television use among a South Asian community in London, Gillespie (1995) examined the family-situated uses of a sacred soap in video form, the Mahabharata. Certainly there is no shortage of fans and devoted audiences for popular religious texts, ranging from the Veggie Tales video series (Hess, 2001) to the burgeoning Christian pop music scene (Hendershot, 1995). As always with genre-based audience research, the challenge is to go beyond the moment of reception and explore audience understandings in deeper historical, sociocultural terms. Historical Communities Audience communities of the past may be recovered through the evaluation of archival records and other evidence of media uses and discourse (K. B. Jensen, 1993). To the extent that these materials are available (e.g., newspaper stories of audience activity, audience measurement data, letters to the editor), analysts can recon-

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struct critical moments and contours of historical reception. This research has been done mostly to study shifts in public sensibility or audience routines and responses after the introduction of a new or conflictive media resource. McCarthys (1995) study of tavern television viewing in the late 1940s and early 1950s is an exemplar of this line of work. She turned to newspaper accounts of televisions introduction in bars to reconstruct the early protocols for watching TV in public places. In another study of a transitional period, Nord (1995) analyzed the reader response to two Chicago newspapers during 1912 through 1917, when new methods of objective reporting were coming into being. The rhetoric of readers letters revealed that the newspapers were read according to the strategies of politically inspired interpretive communities then active in Chicago. Documentary methods have been used to track and explicate church views about media (e.g., Romanowski, 1995; Stout, 1996). Like the studies cited earlier, historical reception can reveal how a crisis in the experience of audience members unfolded. For example, in a study of response to the controversial film The Last Temptation of Christ, Lindlof (1996) analyzed all of the letters published in the letters-to-the-editor section of the citys newspaper during a 7-week period in 1988. The discourse of opponents, supporters, and others revealed community-wide fissures about such issues as Biblical authority, Hollywoods artistic license, the freedom of religious expression, and the value of protest. Despite the limitations of a textual analysis of letters, the study offered a partial glimpse of the cultural war debates occurring in homes, churches, and other places at the time. Institutional Communities The interpretive community concept has also been applied to media phenomena outside the textaudience circuit. One prominent arena for study has been the life worlds of media workers, including as well the relations between media workers and other social actors (Berkowitz & TerKeurst, 1999). Zelizer (1993), for example, argued that the interpretive community concept provides a framework, beyond professionalism, for understanding how journalists have ascribed to themselves the power of interpretation, how certain favored narratives of events are adopted across news organizations, and how narrative has helped reporters neutralize less powerful or coherent narratives of the same event (p. 222). Zelizers analysis of journalistic discourses in the wake of the Watergate and McCarthy investigations indicated that the earlier reportage was transformed over time into commonly referenced lessons about how to report and how not to report. These second chance[s] at interpretation (Zelizer, 1993, p. 232) seemed to produce a greater narrative authority for journalists. Indeed, it is partly through such events that journalists realize who they are as a community and how to negotiate their identity and power in the larger society. This community view of mass communicator practice has proven useful in studying the processes by which news of religious events moves into the public sphere (e.g., Clark & Hoover, 1997).

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Another emerging area of study involves the media-interpretive practices of churches, denominations, and sects, and their extension into spheres of social action and identity performance. As one example of this approach, Luthras (2001) study of satsanghis (Hindu fellowship groups) shows how members draw on certain core principles to reconcile the teachings of their faith with the leisure world of media. Communication analysts also focus on the role of religious authority in decisions about media within, across, and through organizational boundaries. To illustrate, Taylor (1999) used the interpretive community as a theoretic device to study how organizational identities are evoked by the textual resources that a host culture circulates. His ethnography focused on Deseret Book, a publishing and retail company owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which arguably plays a role in the reproduction of Mormon cultural norms. Among the themes developed in the study, Taylor found that Deseret Books management of textual controversy tapped tensions faced by a conservative religion when it encourages individual members to make their own decisions about appropriate cultural materials at the same time that it promotes unofficial, generic criteria. Quite clearly, there are a great many sites in society, such as child care centers (Seiter, 1999), in which religious community codes disperse and inform decisions about television and other media. Virtual Communities The rapid rise of computer networks has provided unique resources for people to work, play, and converse. The World Wide Web, browsers, and search engines all combine to give the most technically unsophisticated of users the ability to find information on almost any subject. Software tools have also progressed to the point that Web sites can be designed and produced by almost anyone, regardless of training or experience. Other communication utilities of the Internetfor example, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), news groups, electronic mail, and instant messaging servicesenable people to exchange messages and forge relationships with others across the globe with similar interests. When these nodes of communication become dense and relatively long lasting, they are called virtual communities (Smith & Kollock, 1999). What is meant by virtual is that networked interactions are communities in effect, a surrogate (Smith, 1993, p. 5). That is, disembodied relationships are carried out as if they were a community in the usual sense. The growth of this parallel world means that nearly all communication research problems now have their cyberspace versionsas well as a set of research questions inflected by qualities of the virtual. For example, if people make their own significance of media commodities (as the interpretive community theory allows), then what happens when those practices occur in computer networks? What is the nature of popular culture community on the Internet? How does media content on the Web become a semiotic platform for the audiences own texts (discourse about the content)? What complicates these questions is that we still have only a rudimentary understanding of how the Internet influences human communication. For example, we

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know that Internet news group interactions are typically asynchronous (responses are staggered in time), acorporal (absence of bodily presence), and anonymous as to the participants physical and socially or culturally marked attributes. However, as studies of news group communities indicate (Lindlof & Shatzer, 1998), we are only starting to learn how these features affect such aspects as the coming and going of members, how they know the identity of the other members (and whether this always matters), and how a virtual community conducts itself in such vital areas as resolving conflicts and deciding the things that are of importance to its membership. Naturally, these and other questions about the transformation of experience in virtual spaceand the excitement that goes with pursuing the answersapply as well to the study of religious culture. Churches promote and extend their services on Web pages; list serves and news groups conduct discussions of theological issues; individuals post their thoughts, prayers, and reactions, and consult the reactions of others in archived message threads; and sect community building goes on below the public radar in e-mails and restricted IRCs. However, religious interlocutors may also find the Internet amenable to purposes that are uniquely theirs. Miraculous events can be reproduced on Web sites, detached from their local scenes of appearance, and become symbols of the supernatural to audiences worldwide (Vasquez & Marquardt, 2000). In contrast to historical precedent, a virtual pilgrimage (pp. 128129) overcomes legal and physical barriers to allow believers to approach and commune with the miracle. Computer networks may also foster modes of use around metaphysical topics that actually encourage an inauthentic or uncommitted involvement. OLeary (1996) began exploring CompuServe conference rooms dedicated to religion discussion. He became attracted to a neopagan group that not only transacted discussions among group leaders, members, and visitors, but also performed rituals online. OLearys analysis of the performative language from the groups archived transcripts led him to conclude:
Rooted in textuality, ritual action in cyberspace is constantly faced with evidence of its own quality as constructed, as arbitrary, and as artificial, a game played with no material stakes or consequences; but the efficacy of ritual is affirmed, time and time again, even in the face of a full, self-conscious awareness of its artificiality. (p. 804)

The two cases just citedone, a premodern charismatic experience joined to a globalization project; the other, rites of a new-age religious sect offered to members and casual visitors alikeillustrate that the production of virtual religious community may not be so different from its secular counterparts. The issues are familiar ones of localityglobalization, authenticityartificiality, and trustdisbelief. Even in less exotic cases, online religious action may have as much potential to alienate and inflame (Kester, 1995) as to inspire, inform, and find common ground among people. Perhaps the most consequential future studies will be those that interrelate the texts of online spiritual action with offline social institutions, and thus attempt to achieve a holistic understanding of how religious communities communicate.

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FUTURE DIRECTIONS The launch of a journal is always an optimistic event. Obviously, a new journal gives authors another venue in which to publish, particularly for those whose work aligns with the journals mission. However, even more than that, a well-conceived journal can be a significant interventionwelcoming new voices; broadening the terrain of ideas; forging exciting connections between disciplines, and between the academy and the practice community. Hopefully, the Journal of Media and Religion will stand at the forefront of new directions in theory, research, and method in media and religion. Interpretive community research is only one among many approaches represented in the Journal of Media and Religion; but if past is prologue, it should be a vibrant field of activity. Several issues of research focus and practice with respect to interpretive community study need to be addressed in the future. First, with respect to methodology, qualitative designs and techniques have been used frequently in studies of interpretive communities. These choices are justified in most cases, given the epistemological premises. Interviews of many types (structured, unstructured, focus groups) are employed in most of these studies, producing valuable data when an analysis of discourse (stories, accounts, life histories) is called for. On the other hand, interviews are not well-suited for learning about how communities are constituted or changed, how people actually behave in community, and how they perform their audience or media-worker selves. There is a compelling need for studies of interpretive community action that are grounded in long-term participant observation. The effort of doing ethnography is always large, and entry into these communities can test the ability of ethnographers (especially those who do not personally accept the beliefs of the host group) to create an effective role in the research scene, and to do so in an authentic, ethical relation with the membership (Ammerman, 1987). However, the results would undoubtedly reduce, if not resolve, many of the theoretic ambiguities of audience interpretation. They would also deepen our understandings of specific faith communities and their interactions with media texts and technology. Finally, communication researchers should not ignore recent advances in quantitative techniques, such as semantic network analysis, for analyzing religious meanings and social practices and developing theory (Grant, 2001). On the conceptual horizon, in addition to the ideas already mentioned in this article, the field would benefit from a stronger focus on the processes by which strategic influence spreads within, and flows out of, an interpretive community. The members of these communities, J. A. Anderson (1996) remarked, are not equivalent units as the normal political processes of membership are presumed. Some members are clearly more important than others directing the others to both what to read and how to read it (p. 87). The study of member relationships would help us understand the occurrence of contradictory or conflictive modes of interpretation, which often arise when new or discordant media move into or among religious cultures. Because these strategies of interpretive community travel along complex

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routes and unfold in social scenes dispersed in time and space, researchers will need to become more sensitive to the multiple vernaculars employed in and out of church settings (Primiano, 1995) and be prepared to deploy several levels of data capture (Marcus, 1995). Many of the issues raised previously by critics now appear less damaging to the case of interpretive community research. We now have studiesGillespie (1995) is an outstanding examplethat document the embedding of media-use routines in historical, social, and cultural contexts. Few, if any, researchers claim that readers are not influenced by the ways in which content is organized or distributed. Few, also, would dispute that the media industry is powerfully engaged in shaping perceptions of their products. However, this shaping effect is neither given nor inevitable. We now know that media use does not lie thinly at the surface of everyday life, but penetrates in subtle ways to the very constitution of social lives. We now have evidence that media use does not always coincide predictably with social categories of class, gender, or race, or even religious affiliation (e.g., Mears & Ellison, 2000)although further research would help to delineate the relations. Now more than ever, the study of the social audience is a key ingredient in any theory of media. The interpretive community approach is a promising route to explaining this audience in its religious dimensions.

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