As I read through some of my fellow panelists' comments on this question, I found myself nodding in agreement--perhaps especially with points made by Susan Jacoby, Mike Otterson, the Rev. Thomas Reese, and Bishop N.T. Wright--people I've spoken with at some point or whose works I've read and whom I respect. To say the obvious, each of them stands at a very different theological/philosophical location on the map of human experience, each site with its own history and heroes. I wouldn't try to fit those widely differing traditions into a single box. Somewhat similarly, I can't do that with the vast universe called the "mass media."
A bit like religion and spirituality in America, the media are highly diverse, and so continually changing that I've never found myself in a group of people who can quite agree on what the boundaries of "media" are.
I know what I think of when I hear the word--newspapers, and really only a few particular newspapers. Yes, that's the Old Media, a fragment of an ever-expanding universe that also takes in Hollywood, magazines, radio, network television, cable, Internet sites, the blogosphere (where we are now), maybe even instant messaging.
To circle back, such diversity puts me in mind of why William James refused to try to define religion itself when he delivered the Gifford lectures more than a century ago: "... let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally important to religion."
How is religion/spirituality/faith treated within this web of overlapping media systems? With everything from particular reverence (just turn on your radio when you're driving at night) to satire. Sure, there's disdain, too, but I'd argue that there's a lot less of that than some might imagine, especially here in the United States.
Bottom line, I think what many of us on this panel (and in the culture at large) would like in the public treatment of religion is an approach that's intelligent, informative, even provocative. Sometimes we actually do get that.
Some years back, a Roman Catholic priest with years of experience living in Hollywood and interacting with "the industry" told me that some of the best movies he ever saw might never mention God's name except in vain; what made them so "religious," he said, was that they treated the human condition with moral seriousness. I thought of him this past weekend, while listening to public radio report about a folksinger, a "religious skeptic," who had turned to writing a version of gospel music to try to understand the experiences of church-going America.
Here lies another challenge: what I may perceive as "religious" may seem resoundingly secular--even disrespectfully irreligious--to someone else. To which I say, see James, quoted above.
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