Clark, Lynn Schofield. New York:  Oxford University Press, 2003. 292 pp. $29.95 (USD). ISBN: 0-19-515609-9 (cloth).

[1]  As American society continues toward religious pluralism—and becomes less reliant on religious sources for ultimate truth—youths have more options to reach conclusions about spiritual matters. However, because the American experience is so grounded in the country’s Christian heritage, teens must make options fit the mold of tradition. How teens integrate spirituality and religion, particularly as it is portrayed in popular culture and television, is the subject of From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural.

[2]  The text seems geared toward graduate students interested in media effects, cultural research, and teen psychology.  Author Lynn Scholfield Clark sheds new light on a broad research topic: media effects. While research into media violence and behavioural studies have long been a topic of debate for researchers, Clark looks at the idea of media effects from a spiritual plane, a vein of research not mined as deeply. The final result is a groundbreaking and ambitious work on the subject of media effects. Yet Clark, an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, states several times that while her research is thought-provoking, it is only a beginning, and more research needs to be done to understand how teens integrate popular culture experiences with religious or spiritual experiences.

[3]  And what are the findings? Here’s the short version: the youth get it. Teens, overall, are media savvy.  Clark states that teens from all backgrounds know that stories of the supernatural–stories of angels and aliens and vampires–portrayed in the mass media are entertainment and should not be taken seriously, particularly when applying them to their belief systems. However, since popular culture feeds off of the stories of the larger, shared culture and the past, and since shared culture and the past are steeped within religious tradition, the distinction between entertainment and religion becomes blurred. Teens deal with this blurring by what Clark identifies as an “openness to possibility” theory. While teens bring to their media experiences certain beliefs about the spiritual world, and are not likely to have their minds changed about what they believe by what they see, they are influenced by a learned culture of tolerance and openness to religious and spiritual differences. When teens come across something in the media about spiritual matters that differ from their own, they do not immediately discount it, but leave it open to possibility. Clark leans heavily on the “culture as toolkit” model theorized by Ammerman, Swindler, and others, where people pick and choose how to react to certain cultural phenomena based on whatever fits their situation and what they have experienced in the past.

[4]  But within this overall “openness,” there lie varying shades of belief and interaction with spiritual elements. The bulk of the book is devoted to ethnographic stories that shed light on teens working through the belief systems they were taught, their current belief system, and the portrayals of the supernatural in the mass media. Using television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and Touched by an Angel as starting points for conversations, Clark found that teens can be classified into five different categories: teens who interchange stories of religion and fantasy in part as a form of rebellion against dominant culture (the Resistors); teens who saw a big difference between their beliefs and what they saw in popular culture (the Traditionalists); teens who dabble in the supernatural either to bring their religious beliefs into the context of activities (the Mystical Teens), or as a way to foster their interest in contacting the realm beyond (the Experimenters); and teens who found it difficult to understand the distinction between the mediated supernatural and their beliefs (the Intrigued).

[5]  Clark makes sure teens from every economic and racial category, and nearly every major religious movement, are represented in the ethnographic stories, which gives it a broad appeal and is the beauty of ethnographic research. However, the overall result can seem somewhat limited. The research is based on a relatively small sample (250 or so) and a relatively limited location (the southwestern United States) that Clark says is home to a lot of differing belief systems, from the mystical (Wiccan) to traditional Protestant denominations. Replicating the study in another area of the country would add validity to her findings. Also, the wide representation of different religious beliefs limits the scope of the results. Since no one type of belief is central, the teens represented in the ethnographic studies become archetypes for all teens who come from that background. Would the results be the same if the research focused solely on youth from the mainline Protestant or Reform Jewish denominations? Would the openness to possibility that Clark found still be as prevalent if the study were limited in this way? That is open to debate, but what this book does is offer a blueprint for future research. In that way, this study is a great success. The results, while admittedly limited, suggest rich areas for further research.

Tim Craig
Warner Southern College
craigt@warner.edu