In an age of Matrix movies and Harry Potter books, it doesn’t take a sociologist to prove that spiritual themes and images appear frequently in popular movies, TV shows and music.

So how do teens deal with the spirituality in pop culture? Lynn Schofield Clark, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder decided to find out. Clark, the director of CU’s Teens and the New Media @ Home project, spent six years conducting 250 interviews with teens and their families.

Clark’s results are found in her recent book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford, $29.95). One of her main conclusions is that different teens have different ways of playing with, incorporating or dismissing what they see in the media. As for youth workers and parents, about the best thing they can do is talk to their teens and find out what pop culture means to them.

“I was giving a presentation at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Denver recently, and one of the women there asked me why her son liked punk rock full of lyrics about hating women,”says Clark.

“Hating women is bad, but my thought was that if you don’t get hung up about the lyrics, you can talk to your son about his broader interest in punk rock music itself. Punk rock has long been associated with rejection of mainstream values and middle-class hypocrisy. If you try to get to that level, you can talk to your young person about things you both hate. Maybe you both hate middle-class culture or consumerism, the superficiality of materialism or the never-ending quest to acquire more things.”

Clark is a smart lady, but she’s no egghead. She calls herself a “progressive mainline Christian” and is a member of Denver’s Faith Lutheran Church. Her academic research is balanced by hard work in the trenches with kids. She has worked with young people in various churches and juvenile detention centers, and she currently devotes much of her attention to her own two children, ages 2 and 4.

Her experience has helped her see teens as individuals instead of abstract monoliths. When it comes to how teens interact with popular culture overflowing with references to “the realm beyond,” she organizes them into five distinct groups:

1. Resisters have no interest in organized religion, but they readily identify with the anti-establishment themes in supernatural dramas such as “The X-Files.”

2. Mystics are impacted by shows such as “Touched by an Angel” but are unconcerned toward the organized church.

3. Experimenters are very interested in spirituality and are the most likely to go from seeing a TV show susch as “Charmed” to toying with Wicca.

4. Traditionalists, the category that includes most evangelical Christian teens, as well as conservative Mormons and Muslims, are primarily concerned with personal morality and how the consumption of pop culture will help or hurt them.

5. The Intrigued are committed to their faiths but seek to balance their received traditions with the new information they get from the mass media.

Because teens vary so widely in their spiritual commitments and their responses to pop culture, Clark believes that engaging them in dialogue about pop culture is a good way to see if they’re open to explore deeper spiritual concerns.

“It’s often easier to talk to kids about pop culture than it is to discuss what they think or believe concerning religion,” she says. “Talking about what they like or don’t like within pop culture is good because pop culture is really a vocabulary that is useful for young people in thinking about the many other things they grapple with.”

Clark has a fair amount of contact with youth workers, and she’s glad they no longer routinely dismiss pop culture.

“There’s been a positive change in religious leadership during the past 10 years,” says Clark, a former TV producer. “I’ve been doing workshops on media for a long time, and it used to be that everyone talked about how violent the mass media is.”

“That’s often the case, but young people experience pop culture as their language; so when kids hear religious leaders reject pop culture, they feel they are rejecting them. That closes down dialogue rather than opens it.”

“Today, when I meet with youth leaders, it seems they are very receptive to pop culture and realize it is the language of young people. You don’t have to sell them on that idea anymore. Youth leaders know they need to use whatever resources are available to make connections to young people.”

Not all youth workers find the proper balance between kids’ obvious and powerful interest in pop culture and their less obvious but equally important need for spiritual formation. Clark has two suggestions for balancing things.

“For one thing, we live in such a media-saturated society that I think it’s important to create opportunities to take young people out of their context at a high school setting and away from the buzz of the media and take them to a place where they can seek transformation and talk about the things that are important to them. Doing something that doesn’t have anything to do with the media or pop culture can help them get in touch with themselves and their spiritual traditions in ways that are different.”

“I also think it’s important for youth leaders to receive spiritual mentoring themselves so they are involved with other youth leaders and pastors. This way they constantly are held accountable for how they are mentoring their young people, which will help them move beyond just getting together and having fun all the time.”
Clark also has some interesting theories about what she calls “the dark side of evangelicalism.” Here’s the sound-bite summary: Evangelicals’ fascination with end times novels such as the Left Behind series and spooky attractions such as Halloween Hell Houses have fueled a widespread interest in spirituality that leads to fascination with shows such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” as often as it does to the kinds of frightened repentance Christians often hope to induce.

If you want to know more than that, you’ll have to read Clark’s book; but don’t even think about doing so if your efforts to stay on top of pop culture already have you feeling inadequate and depressed.

“It’s easy to feel overwhelmed,”she says. “Youth culture is nothing if not changeable. As soon as adults recognize something is cool it’s already passé.”

“But the goal of being a youth minister is not trying to be cool by knowing everything but trying to be open to learning about it and modeling how you adopt a lens of faith through which you see popular culture and everything else in your life. Your job isn’t to know everything but to help young people interpret what they see within the framework of their faith so they can make connections between their own experiences and their faith tradition.”