From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural.(Book Review)

From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural. Lynn Schofield Clark. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Relative to its ideological importance, religion has been woefully underacknowledged in studies of popular culture. There are recent signs, however, that this is changing, and although Lynn Schofield Clark's From Angels to Aliens is not a landmark study, it provides an encouraging nudge to this fledgling subfield.

This book emerged from interviews compiled as part of a six-year project at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where Clark is a professor of journalism and mass communication. She documents teenagers' attitudes about religion and the supernatural, particularly how religious beliefs affect their consumption of TV shows such as The X-Files, Star Trek, and Touched By An Angel. Most of the book is given over to 269 interviews that Clark conducted with teens and their parents, which prompted her to classify their approaches according to a five-part typology. The group Clark calls "traditionalists," for instance, operates firmly within an established religious faith that they see as distinct from mass media. In contrast, the "resisters" have antipathy to organized religion and often include speculation about unexplained phenomena in their own idiosyncratic belief systems. The typology serves as an organizing principle for the book, as each group gets a chapter that profiles two or three representative teens. This book also includes two shorter sections: one, leading into the interviews, is Clark's own analysis of how religion and the supernatural operate on the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and the second, ...