Chapter 201

Christianity and Digital Media

Tim Hutchings

201.1 Introduction

Early research on religion and the Internet assumed an inherent theological and
sociological bias could be found within the medium, a tendency to favor certain
religious traditions, demographics and patterns of interaction. Early commentator
Jeff Zaleski suggested that “the Internet will favour those religions and spiritual
teachings that tend toward anarchy and lack a complex hierarchy” (1997: 111), a point
of view echoed more recently by Brenda Brasher (2001) and Christopher Helland
(2005). According to Helland, “hierarchies and networks are two very different sys-
tems and the Internet was only really designed for one of them” (2005: 13).
As these observers noted, however, both hierarchical and network-oriented forms
of Christianity have established a presence online. Conservative, moderate and lib-
eral groups are all thriving. Different religious groups are bringing different values,
goals, practices and resources to the Internet and finding different ways to engage
with digital media. Scholars continue to struggle to work out exactly how media
engagement is changing religion around the world, but academic attention has
shifted away from arguments about the transformation of religion toward studies of
the internet as an everyday part of religious culture (Campbell 2010a).
This chapter uses two theoretical approaches – the religious-social shaping of
technology (Campbell 2010b) and the mediatisation of religion (Hjarvard 2008) –
to explore some of the main areas of online Christian activity. By combining these
two approaches, we can analyze how religious groups create media while also
examining how groups are changed by their media practices. After introducing
these concepts, I will illustrate them through a case study of the Anglican Cathedral
of Second Life, an online church in a virtual world.

T. Hutchings (*)
Post Doc, St. John’s College, Durham University, Durham DH1 3RJ, UK
e-mail: t.r.b.hutchings@durham.ac.uk

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 3811

S.D. Brunn (ed.), The Changing World Religion Map,
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_201
3812 T. Hutchings

The remainder of this chapter is divided into three sections examining digital
forms of leadership, community and proselytism. These issues are particularly
important for the relationship between Christianity and digital media, although the
third has received minimal academic attention. Proselytism has been the motivation
for many of the most innovative Christian media projects, and I will focus here on
the ways in which Western missionaries are redesigning and repurposing media
devices to support their work in other regions of the world. Each section includes
examples from my own fieldwork, combined with references to the work of other
scholars covering as wide a range of Christian traditions and geographical regions
as possible.

201.2 Theoretical Approaches: Shaping Technology,

Shaping Faith

Religious groups actively evaluate technologies and decide which to adopt, negoti-
ating with developers in some cases to build more appropriate devices and applica-
tions. Heidi Campbell describes this process as the “religious-social shaping of
technology,” comprising four distinct stages: religious communities reflect on their
history of media use, consider their core values and practices, evaluate the technol-
ogy and negotiate its redesign, and finally frame the technology through a group
discourse that sets appropriate goals and boundaries for its use (2010b: 60–61).
Religious groups are constrained in their approach to media technologies by a
range of factors, as this model acknowledges. Groups may decide that their history
and values are incompatible with certain aspects of media culture or technology.
Specific media applications may suit some religious traditions more than others.
If religious communities decide to create new technologies to suit their needs, they
must secure resources, technical skills and in some cases commercial support in
order to do so effectively. Attempts to create a new discourse may be opposed by
co-religionists or external audiences.
Stig Hjarvard (2008) has used the concept of “mediatisation” to describe the
influence of media in contemporary society, and this approach can help to explore
the impact of these pressures and limitations on religious communication. Building
on David Altheide and Robert Snow’s classic study of media culture (1979),
Hjarvard proposes that media have their own “logic,” their “institutional and tech-
nological modus operandi,” including the “formal and informal rules” by which
they operate (2008: 113). Anyone wishing to use a medium to communicate must
adapt to its logic. Hjarvard sees mediatisation as a societal process akin to globalisa-
tion or secularisation, an argument that has been criticized (Lövheim 2011), but the
basic idea of “media logic” can help balance Campbell’s emphasis on the active
agency of religious groups in their interactions with technology.
Mediatisation and the religious-social shaping of technology are complemen-
tary concepts, working together to help illuminate different aspects of the relation-
ship between religion and media. Campbell’s emphasis on history and values
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3813

encourages us to expect a rich diversity of forms among Christian approaches to

the internet, reflecting the variety of Christian ideas and practices across religious
traditions and geographical regions. Hjarvard reminds us that every religious group
attempting to use a digital technology must adapt its communication to suit that
medium.

201.3 Study: The Anglican Cathedral of Second Life Case

In 2006, an Anglican businessman from New Zealand entered the virtual world of
Second Life. Mark Brown quickly discovered that very few Christian organisations
were building virtual churches, and decided to intervene personally. Working with a
group of like-minded Anglican Second Life users, Brown commissioned a talented
Christian designer to create an elaborate, visually-striking virtual church building in
a traditional Gothic architectural style and set about generating publicity to attract a
congregation (Fig. 201.1). Brown decided to name his new church “the Anglican
Cathedral of Second Life,” a move intended to maximise attention:
I wanted to create buzz, and guess what, it has [laughs]. You know, when the media got hold
of it I’ve been on TV, radio, gosh, I don’t know how many, seriously, I don’t know how
many times, radio in the US, Australia, New Zealand, you know, newspapers, weblogs, a
huge number of blogs, and a big part of it is a) Anglican, b) Cathedral?, and c) high technology,
that creates a buzz. If I just build another, I don’t know, just an open space with some pillows
on the ground and a cross in the corner, I don’t think it would have got the same. (Hutchings
2010a: 75–76)

Fig. 201.1 The Anglican Cathedral of Second Life (Image created by Mark Brown 2008, used
with permission)
3814 T. Hutchings

The Cathedral’s traditional style served other purposes as well. For Brown, this
highly recognizable visual design is “a symbol of Christianity” (2010a: 75), a strate-
gic attempt to appeal to post-modern taste for tradition (2010a: 78), and a way to
help visitors “ground” the experience of online worship in a context they already
find comfortable and easy to understand (2010a: 79).
The Cathedral was created as an independent community with no authorisation
from the Anglican Communion, but quickly started seeking some kind of connec-
tion to its chosen denomination. At the time of my own research in 2009, Brown had
already been ordained by his local bishop in New Zealand and had organised the
first of a series of meetings with another Anglican bishop, a number of theologians
and church lawyers in the UK. Through these conversations, the Cathedral sought
to establish some form of official oversight for its activities and a theological basis
for its digital ministry. The Cathedral’s website now includes a Vision statement
which lists a desire to be “recognised as an integral part of the Anglican Communion”
among the church’s ambitions and states that the community is “currently working
under the authority” of both bishops (http://slangcath.wordpress.com/the-vision/).
The Cathedral is an interesting case study in religious technology. The Cathedral’s
development over time displays all four stages of Campbell’s “religious-social
shaping of technology:” reflection on tradition, identifying core values and prac-
tices, evaluation and design of media platforms, and attempts to shape Christian
discourse. The Cathedral’s builders have chosen to recreate traditional architecture,
including an altar, but they have not created any way to use this altar for an avatar-
based communion service, or to use the fountain outside for avatar baptisms. These
are theological decisions, based on careful evaluation of Anglican theology. Several
non-Anglican groups have reached different conclusions: online forms of commu-
nion and baptism have been offered since the 1990s (www.alphachurch.org) and are
readily available for avatars elsewhere in Second Life.
The Cathedral has also undergone a process of mediatisation, adapting to the
“media logic” of the virtual world. In order to create Epiphany Island, the Cathedral’s
leaders needed to raise money to rent virtual land from the company that owns
Second Life, and find a designer with the skills required to construct their buildings.
The creative negotiation and shaping of technology described by Campbell is pos-
sible only within the limits set by these basic media requirements.
“Media logic” includes a cultural dimension (Altheide and Snow 1979: 9).
Media creators generate paradigms, genres and rules that audiences learn and come
to expect. Audiences develop practices of media sharing, consumption and, par-
ticularly in digital spaces, participate in content creation and develop local norms
for doing so. Over time, the Cathedral has encountered and evaluated many of the
diverse cultures and subcultures of Second Life and chosen elements to embrace,
accommodate or reject. Services of worship regularly end with displays of avatar
dancing, but avatar weddings, another common Second Life practice, remain
strictly forbidden. It is not uncommon for male Second Life users to create female
avatars, and vice-versa, a practice that has been banned outright in many in-world
churches. The Cathedral community has accepted this practice and includes a num-
ber of cross-gendered avatars, but online-offline gender correspondence is still
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3815

required for church leaders. The Cathedral has been shaped by engagement with
two very different cultures, Anglican and virtual, and has developed its own unique
response.

201.4 Leadership in Digital Christianity

The Anglican Cathedral of Second Life demonstrates that communities and networks
forming online can establish supportive relationships with religious institutions
while also embracing new developments in practice and theology. The Cathedral is
a good example of a religious community that has attempted to shape the internet in
line with its core values, negotiating with the institutional, technological and cul-
tural logics of the medium and generating new discourses to validate its activity.
The willingness of two Anglican bishops to engage in conversation with the
Cathedral demonstrates a desire on their part to encourage, offer guidance to and
potentially help regulate innovative online projects, rather than leading those proj-
ects personally. This approach has much in common with the attitude of the Vatican,
which has hosted meetings of Catholic bloggers (Ivereigh 2011) and issued docu-
ments encouraging Catholics to use the internet appropriately (Pontifical Council
for Social Communications 2002) while remaining somewhat cautious in its own
online activity. The Pope has often called for Catholics to be active online in his
annual address for World Communications Day (see, for example, Benedict XVI
2011) but official Vatican media platforms like vatican.va and youtube.com/user/
vatican continue to block all public comments. Bishops of the Church have inter-
vened to block a number of media projects that misrepresent Catholic theology,
including attempts to offer confession by text message (Bell 2006). The much-
publicised “Confession: A Roman Catholic App” received official approval in 2011
as an aid for Catholics wishing to prepare themselves for the sacrament (BBC
2011), only for the Vatican to issue a caution shortly afterwards when media reports
began suggesting that the app could be used to receive absolution without talking to
a priest at all (Wagner 2012: 149).
Early assumptions that the internet would favour free association and disadvan-
tage established hierarchies continue to influence popular discourse in many areas,
including religion, business and politics. This perspective overlooks multiple fac-
tors that can operate to consolidate power through digital media. Established leaders
have the financial resources to hire talented designers and communicators. The digi-
tal technologies used by their opponents also empower their own grassroots sup-
porters. Digital conversations are easy to monitor, and leaders can use them to track
debate and identify opponents. Evgeny Morozov (2012) cites these strategies as just
some of the ways in which authoritarian regimes – including the governments of
China, Russia and Iran – are using digital media to retain power, but we can find
close parallels among the digital activities of religious organizations.
The Anglican Cathedral’s relationship with the Anglican Communion upholds
traditional Anglican understandings of the role of bishops and the importance of
authorized governance, but the Cathedral has also facilitated the emergence of a
3816 T. Hutchings

new religious leader. Mark Brown was ordained by his local bishop, as we have
seen, but quickly left the Cathedral to start a series of new online projects. To date,
he has created a Christian consultancy company, a Bible study video blog and
a number of popular Facebook pages. The most successful of these has been
“The Bible,” which attracted such intense activity that it ranked among the most
active pages on the whole site for much of 2011 (Ward 2011). Brown’s achieve-
ments clearly owe something to the connections he formed during his former career
as CEO of the Bible Society New Zealand, but digital media have made it possible
for him to make the resources he creates available to a significant global audience at
minimal financial cost.
Leaders of established Christian organizations have also been quick to recognize
the possibilities for global attention offered by communications media. An increas-
ing number of churches are using video recording and broadcast technologies to
enable one preacher to teach congregations at multiple locations, a form of “multi-site”
ministry developed by North Coast Church in California in the late 1990s (North
Coast, n.d.). Mediation here is integral to the church-going experience, which is
constructed for the audience through recording equipment, screens, and – more
recently – live satellite feeds.
Oklahoma-based megachurch LifeChurch.tv now invites visitors to attend one of
eighteen physical sites across five states, all screening the same sermon via satellite.
Each physical campus has its own worship band, local pastor and home study
groups, but the power to preach is now centralized in just one individual, Pastor
Craig Groeschel. In my interviews with church staff, the physical absence of the
pastor was dismissed as a triviality that few visitors even noticed, while the use of
screens was praised as an opportunity for immediate connection. Every congrega-
tion member can now see Groechel’s face in close-up and feel his eyes gazing into
theirs, an experience made possible only by mediation (Hutchings 2010b: 234).
Groeschel’s sermons are themselves highly mediated, sometimes incorporating
pre-recorded location shoots and testimonies. One highlight of the annual sermon
calendar, “At the Movies,” uses clips from popular films to explain the Christian
message and is particularly recommended for newcomers.
LifeChurch.tv uses the internet to share Groeschel’s sermons and other materials
with other churches worldwide through Open, a free resource site (open.lifechurch.
tv). Supporter churches from Australia, Costa Rica and Germany have now joined
the LifeChurch.tv Network (network.lifechurch.tv), showing a video sermon each
week while remaining independent. The most committed can apply to join United
and become a new LifeChurch.tv campus (united.lifechurch.tv).
LifeChurch.tv has also created an “online campus,” Church Online, where visitors
can watch the service on video, communicate in a volunteer-moderated chatroom
and click a “Live Prayer” button to speak privately to a trained church representative
(live.lifechurch.tv; Fig. 201.2). Visitors can join online study groups, and regular
viewers are encouraged to invite friends to join them in their homes for “Watch
Parties” (internet.lifechurch.tv/watchparty/). This online campus offers multiple
advantages over traditional televangelism: churches can incorporate opportunities
for moderated audience response into the broadcast to enhance engagement, avoid
the costs and restrictions of buying airtime and make their programming accessible
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3817

Fig. 201.2 Experience church online (Image from Live.LifeChurch.tv, used with permission)

Fig. 201.3 This real-time map displays the location of everyone participating in a specific Church
Online event. In this case, 113 countries are represented (Image from www.LifeChurch.tv, used
with permission)

worldwide. International appeal is boosted by a real-time translation tool created by

church staff to help viewers communicate in more than 50 languages. Church
Online now attracts more than 125,000 viewers each week, with up to 7,000 watch-
ing each event (staff member, private email communication, 2012), and more than
100 other online campuses have now been launched by large churches worldwide
(Drinnon 2009).
During events, Church Online displays a map of the world marking the location
of each viewer (Fig. 201.3). This simple visual bears silent witness to the international
3818 T. Hutchings

Fig. 201.4 An inspirational tweet from American pastor Rick Warren, July 2012 (Image from
Twitter.com/RickWarren)

appeal of LifeChurch.tv, validating the group narrative of divinely-powered growth.

Martijn Oosterbaan has reported similar cartography on the websites of Brazilian
Pentecostal churches. These maps reflect “dreams of a wholly Christian planet,”
inviting viewers to imagine themselves in a global community of believers
(Oosterbaan 2011: 57).
Video preaching is only one of the ways in which Christian leaders are leveraging
digital media to increase their impact. Social networking sites like Facebook and
Twitter allow users to choose to follow individuals who produce content they appre-
ciate, and religious leaders have risen to considerable prominence within these
spheres. A recent New York Times article reports that certain Christian leaders were
now attracted such intense engagement from their followers that Twitter has
assigned staff members to analyse and replicate their success (O’Leary 2012).
These leaders may attract far fewer followers than the most popular secular celebri-
ties, but their followers retweet their messages – predominantly inspirational
thoughts and Bible verses – with remarkable regularity (Fig. 201.4).
In her work on Christian pastors in Singapore, Pauline Cheong has proposed that
religious authority is being reclaimed online through practices of “strategic
arbitration” (Cheong et al. 2011). According to Cheong, the internet “proletarian-
izes, deprofessionalizes, and potentially delegitimizes leadership” by broadening
access to knowledge, impacting the status of religious leaders as knowledge elites
(2011: 944). In response, some pastors begin trying to relegitimize their authority
by mastering online culture and training themselves in the skills of online commu-
nication. Tactics reported by Cheong include authoring online resources to mark
their authority and compete with new rivals, restating the importance of distinctive
skills such as biblical exposition, establishing principles of acceptable online behav-
ior and claiming the authority to identify reliable online sources. Ministry patterns
change to include online dialogue and preaching styles begin to incorporate digital
presentation tools, responding to changing expectations (2011: 952). Pastors hope
to use these adjustments to re-establish trust in their authority as sources of
knowledge.
LifeChurch.tv’s Craig Groeschel demonstrates one approach to contemporary
leadership, using digital media to gather multiple online and offline audiences
around one preacher and one church brand. We can understand this approach as an
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3819

example of “strategic arbitration.” LifeChurch.tv is creating deep libraries of online

resources, including Craig Groeschel’s sermons, to provide guidance on practical
concerns for followers worldwide. A number of projects target online pornography,
responding to an aspect of digital culture that evangelical Christians find particu-
larly troubling and thereby reassuring supporters that Groeschel remains a relevant
source of spiritual guidance (www.thepornevent.com). Media-rich sermons and
sophisticated online projects also help to secure relevance, enabling the church to
communicate effectively in contemporary culture and demonstrating technical skill.
LifeChurch.tv’s expertise in digital media enables the church to position itself as a
leader in Christian innovation, offering advice, resources and software to other min-
istries, and expands the influence of the church and its pastor around the world.

201.5 Digital Networks and Online Communities

Church Online offers a moderated chatroom and encourages visitors to pursue

deeper relationships elsewhere through LifeGroups, maintaining a tight focus while
giving away digital resources for other groups and churches to use without supervi-
sion. In my own fieldwork, interviewees spoke highly of what they referred to as the
“community” of Church Online, experienced through the chatroom, but many dis-
missed interpersonal friendships as unnecessary (Hutchings 2013). Their sense of
community was based instead on the perception that the audience watching online
was united in ideology and values. The chatroom was used during services primar-
ily to perform ideological unity, as a space for praising God, the band and the
preacher and affirming the work of the church. Any expressions of dissent, attempts
at conversation or requests for prayer were quickly moved to a private chatroom by
moderators. Persistent troublemakers are not expelled – they might, after all, benefit
from the sermon – but they are muted from communicating in the chatroom.
This approach to community is quite different from that encountered at the
Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. The Cathedral congregation is very much
smaller than Church Online’s audience, gathering ten to twenty individuals for each
scheduled event, and the Cathedral’s membership encompasses a considerably
broader range of theological views. The Cathedral is a persistent virtual interaction
space, available to anyone at any time of day, and during my period of fieldwork
I encountered individuals outside the church leadership who spent many hours each
week in conversation around the fountain in the church square. For some, regular
social interaction with the community is far more important than attending
services.
Much looser religious networks are also emerging online, marked not by shared
access to a bounded space but by acts of directed communication. Twitter users can
add hashtags to their messages, a series of letters beginning with a # sign, and other
users can then locate every message including that specific hashtag through Twitter’s
search function. This is a simple way to create a conversation that can be watched
and added to by any number of people, whether or not they have any pre-existing
3820 T. Hutchings

connection. The hashtag has been appropriated by Christian groups to create

“synchronized prayer” networks (Cheong 2012: 198) like #VirtualAbbey and
#Tworship (Heim and Birdsong 2010) and regular events like #chsocm, a weekly
discussion for Christians interested in social media. Hashtags have also been used
to create “faith memes” like #TOF, “Twitter of Faith,” which challenges contribu-
tors to summarise their faith in a single tweet (Cheong 2012: 191).
LifeChurch.tv, the Cathedral and Christian Twitter hashtags have created quite
different forms of online interaction, but all of the examples cited here affirm estab-
lished religious authorities. Heidi Campbell (2010c) has found a similar tendency to
support authority in the Christian blogosphere, reporting that her quantitative analy-
sis of 100 randomly-selected Christian blogs recorded only one challenge for every
12 affirmations (2010c: 260). Campbell concludes that “Christian bloggers in this
study were primarily focused on affirming their own beliefs rather than challenging
other positions” (2010c: 270) and suggests that they might be attempting to build
consensus among like-minded writers.
Campbell’s research identified the exact types of authority each blog affirmed,
and this fine-grained analysis uncovers some interesting counter-tendencies within
her sample. References to God and the Bible were extremely common and almost
exclusively positive, but human religious leaders received relatively frequent cri-
tique. Contemporary pastors, priests, church leaders and teachers received one chal-
lenge for every two affirmations, and references to televangelists were overwhelmingly
negative. Relationships to religious authority, needless to say, can be complex and
multi-layered.
Online networks have proven particularly valuable for individuals who feel mar-
ginalized, excluded or unable to find the religious resources they need in their local
contexts. Campbell’s Exploring Religious Community Online (2005) includes a
case study of an email list called the Online Church, in which “the majority of mem-
bers are visually or otherwise physically impaired, giving them a common bond,
physically as well as spiritually” (2005: 89). “The freedom from their physical limi-
tations” offered by specially-designed hardware and software was “an important
factor for the growth of this community.” The group is “a place of social accep-
tance” for members, where they are not judged on the basis of disability (2005: 92).
Campbell reports that members frequently share personal stories of hardship, and
identifies “validating each other’s struggles and affirming each member’s worth” as
core group practices.
Experiences of personal revelation can also isolate an individual from their local
religious context and prompt them to look online for more receptive audiences
(Apolito 2005). Anna Rose Stewart (2011) reports that charismatic Christian women
are finding new opportunities online to teach and share prophetic insights in ways that
are denied to them as women offline. One of Stewart’s interviewees, Patricia, feels
that her attempts to communicate God’s messages have been met with hostility in local
churches, so she shares them in an online charismatic forum instead (2011: 1209).
Online networks may also serve individuals who feel ideologically marginalized
in their local context. Koinonia Church, a Second Life group, promises to be “a safe
place for those who have been hurt or rejected by their communities of faith”
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3821

Fig. 201.5 JenClothing, a leading LDS “modest dressing” company (Image from www.jenclothing.
com/about-jen.html, used with permission)

(Koinonia, n.d.) for their sexual orientation. This emphasis on affirming diversity is
built into Koinonia’s architecture, which rejects traditional church designs in favor
of an open central space without doors (Miczek 2008: 164; Fig. 201.5). Koinonia’s
website illustrates the faith position of the church by reposting a well-known pro-
gressive Christian document, the Phoenix Affirmations (Elnes 2006). Rev. Eric
Elnes, author and editor of the Affirmations, has developed his own online network
of progressive Christian supporters through a weekly web television program called
Darkwood Brew (www.onfaithonline.tv/darkwoodbrew/).
Conservative internet users have also formed online networks to connect with
like-minded others. Robert Howard (2011) has traced the emergence of an online
movement devoted to charting the end of the world through meticulous and literal
analysis of the Bible. Participants attempt to relate current world events to their
shared understanding of this “End Times” narrative in order to make predictions
about the future, a practice Howard refers to as “ritual deliberation.” In the early
1990s, practitioners realised that their approach to the Bible was unacceptable to the
majority of members of Christian Usenet groups, and they began using private email
lists to support discussion groups that were only open to those who accepted their
basic premises. These “tiny communities of the like-minded” (2011: 48) developed
over time into a sizeable ‘virtual ekklesia’ (2011: 11) that now includes many hun-
dreds of blogs and websites. One particularly valuable aspect of Howard’s two-
decade study is his focus on the relationship between technology and ideology,
demonstrating that different media types favour different kinds of religious authority
by placing more or less emphasis on the individual voice. Video blogs, he suggests,
are used more by fundamentalists who claim charismatic authority, while text blogs
and forums favour those who wish to provoke a greater degree of ritual
deliberation.
Online networks can go beyond these ideological enclaves to mobilise support
for local or societal transformations. In The Church and New Media, a recent edited
volume of essays by Catholic media figures, blogger Thomas Peters writes about
coordinating his readers to send emails in support of Catholic political and social
causes (Peters 2011). Digital media can also be used to construct global movements,
like Shawn Carney’s anti-abortion prayer campaign 40 Days For Life. According to
3822 T. Hutchings

Carney, “new media builds the movement:” “email is the way we communicate,
invite, and train people to participate,” bloggers help publicise the cause, and web-
casts allow the leadership to communicate their vision to large national audiences
(Carney 2011: 182). Other examples discussed include CatholicVote.org, a website
that evaluates U.S. political candidates according to “the principles of Catholic
social teaching” (Peters 2011: 167). The “true masculinity” website Fathers for
Good uses podcasts, blogs and forums to help men “become selfless, devoted dads
and spouses” and focuses particularly on the destructiveness of pornography
(Carney 2011: 181), while the Ruth Institute uses new media to “reorient the views
young people have toward marriage” (Carney 2011: 184). In each case, digital
media are being used to advertise a message, engage audiences in discussion and
promote personal, societal or political change through specific recommended
actions.
The “modest dressing” movement is a particularly intriguing example of the use
of digital media to connect like-minded individuals. Like many of the networks
discussed above, “modest dressing” crosses regional boundaries without engaging
with established religious leaders, but this movement also connects supporters
across religious traditions. According to fashion researcher Reina Lewis, an increas-
ing number of Christian, Muslim and Jewish women are seeking to dress in a way
that meets their standards of modesty while still relating to global fashion trends
(Lewis 2012). Fashion blogs provide valuable opportunities for these women to
discuss their clothing ideas and encourage others to adopt their standards of dress.
Companies dedicated to modest fashion are able to access this market niche by
using websites to advertise and sell their creations (see Fig. 201.5). Most interest-
ingly, Lewis and her research team report that many of these companies were
founded with an explicit and distinctive religious ethos, but are now trying to
rebrand themselves to reach out to new markets in different faith communities. This
particular approach to modest dress has not yet been noticed by established reli-
gious authorities, Lewis argues, providing space for women to renegotiate their
relationship to religious values and contemporary culture without official supervi-
sion or censure.
Modesty is not the only framework within which this renegotiation is taking
place. As Karen Tice has shown (2010), some evangelical Christian women in the
United States are also re-evaluating the beauty industry, using secular beauty pag-
eants as opportunities to proselytise (McMichael 2009), establishing independent
Christian beauty pageant contests (www.christianpageants.com) and setting up
make-over consultancies (Griffith 2010), all aided by blogs and websites.
This section has covered a diverse range of groups, including loose networks,
close-knit communities, like-minded enclaves and interfaith movements. Digital
media are also increasingly important to our experiences of dying and mourning,
playing a crucial role in maintaining the community of the living and the dead.
News and information are shared online, blogs and forums provide opportunities to
find support in suffering and grief, online communities arrange online funerals and
memorial sites collect photographs and stories to commemorate the deceased
(Hutchings 2012a).
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3823

Elizabeth Drescher has described one community of support and, eventually,

mourning that emerged on a Christian Facebook user’s wall at the end of her life.
Friends ‘prayed’ on Facebook, “continuing to speak directly to Kirstin as she
moved – their prayers expressing a shared theology – from this life to the next”
(Drescher 2012: 215). These online communication practices were inspired by and
framed within the theological worldview of participants, an excellent example of
Campbell’s religious-social shaping of technology.
Drescher’s case study is full of Christian themes, but this kind of direct address
to the dead has also been reported among non-religious online mourners. Researchers
have repeatedly noticed the persistence of digital bonds between the living and the
dead (Carroll and Landry 2010). Grieving friends continue to talk to the dead
through the media they used in life, posting messages on their MySpace or Facebook
wall, including expressions of loss, updates about everyday life activities, birthday
greetings and requests for assistance. Funerals with no religious aspect have been
organised in game environments, including World of Warcraft (Nagata 2010).
Online mourning encourages the public performance of practices that were for-
merly conducted in private, particularly the expression of intense emotion and the
art of speaking to the dead. Participants renegotiate who can grieve in public, what
they can say and who acts as gatekeeper and curator for the mourning process.
There is an opportunity here for religious studies scholars to analyse cultural atti-
tudes to death, prayer and the afterlife, an approach that has not yet been fully
explored.

201.6 E-vangelism

The Anglican Cathedral and LifeChurch.tv’s Church Online do share one common
theme. Founders of both churches have cited proselytism as their key motivation,
and at least in Church Online structures and policies have been put in place to
attract non-Christian attention. Google Adwords link Church Online to pornogra-
phy search terms, attempting to target individuals at a moment of moral decision
(Hutchings 2010b: 240). “Online Missions” have been organized, gathering Church
Online participants for short-term proselytising in MySpace and Facebook
(Hutchings 2010b: 264). All Church Online events include a call to commit to
Jesus, and participants are invited to respond by clicking a button. A free “What’s
Next Kit” including a Bible and a DVD of sermons is sent out anywhere in the
world on request.
Online churches offer a number of advantages to would-be proselytisers. If an
online missionary encounters a potential convert, they can invite them into an online
community to attend online worship and listen to online preaching, continuing their
relationship and avoiding the difficult task of finding an appropriate local church.
Some individuals may be more willing to venture into a church online, where they can
retain their anonymity and disconnect at any moment. Online church advocates have
suggested that Christians in environments hostile to conversion might particularly
3824 T. Hutchings

Fig. 201.6 “I Am Second” home page (Image from www.iamsecond.com, used with permission)

benefit from the privacy of digital communications. Others perceive a symbolic

value to church-based evangelism: for Christian writer Douglas Estes, the virtual
world is “by far the largest unreached people group on planet Earth” (Estes 2009:
29) and unless virtual churches are built there, “the cause of Christ is lost in that
world” (2009: 38).
There are also disadvantages to the church-building approach. Only a minority of
internet users participate in online communities, and individuals not yet interested
in Christianity are unlikely to visit a site branded as an “online church.” Online
churches have tended to attract large numbers of already-committed Christians who
generate a Christian-focused culture with a style of worship that closely reflects
their offline tradition, and this can deter individuals whose experiences of offline
churches have been less positive (Hutchings 2010a: 74).
One alternative model, the Bridge Strategy (Internet Evangelism Day, n.d.),
focuses on creating spaces that engage with issues of non-religious interest in order
to attract non-Christian attention. The site designer then includes their personal faith
story or other spiritual content to encourage visitors to start engaging with Christian
ideas. This is a well-known approach to proselytism offline as well as online, of
course, and many evangelistic projects combine local and digital resources to maxi-
mize their impact. Texas-based I am Second (IaS) uses TV and radio adverts, physical
merchandise and high-profile concerts to attract attention to its online video archive
(www.iamsecond.com; Fig. 201.6). Each video is beautifully shot and edited and
features a celebrity who speaks of overcoming struggles in their life by putting God
first (Hutchings 2012b). Visitors are invited to contact an IaS volunteer in a private
chatroom, by email or by telephone, and can then request an introduction to an IaS
housegroup or associated church in their local area. Details of Christian doctrine are
barely mentioned. IaS attracts attention through glossy design, celebrity glamour,
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3825

real-life confessions and the promise of help in overcoming personal hardships, and
visitors must start conversations with volunteers to find out what “being second”
might actually involve.
We can understand the growing sector of Christian computer games as a form of
“bridge” evangelism. Christian game designers are attempting to appropriate suc-
cessful game styles and combine them with Christian messages and educational
content to create a product that audiences will consider culturally acceptable, enjoy
playing and find spiritually beneficial. Examples to date have met with mixed
approval. Left Behind: Eternal Forces attempted to turn a successful series of books
about the End Times into a strategy game and met strong criticism both for the awk-
wardness of its gameplay and for the supposed violence of its theology (Good
2011). Educational games are less ambitious, but less controversial. BIG Bible
Town, for example, combines Bible stories with fairly conventional minigames
designed to emphasise key themes (www.bigbibletown.com). In-game rewards can
be used to develop the player’s town or presented as gifts to the player’s friends.
Each town is focused on a church, and players are encouraged to donate a portion of
their earnings to help their church grow. BIG Bible Town is designed to encourage
young players to learn Bible stories, but also aims to socialize players into a certain
understanding of Christian life: “kids… learn about missions and tithing and that
when people work together as a church, they can do great things for their commu-
nity” (BIG Bible Town, n.d.).
The rise of social networking sites presents new opportunities and challenges
for evangelists. To attract friends and followers, the would-be evangelist must con-
sistently produce content that those followers consider worth receiving, but once a
network has been established material that promotes Christian faith can be easily
distributed through it. IaS has developed an interesting, multi-layered presence on
Facebook and Twitter, publishing quotes from videos and news about the move-
ment every day (Hutchings 2012c). The IaS Facebook wall is a very active space
where movement supporters share stories of their evangelistic activities, function-
ing as a semi-private zone for mutual support and encouragement, but IaS also
publishes inspirational messages and advertises its videos and these updates can be
shared thousands of times. The social media presence of IaS appears to have
attracted an overwhelmingly Christian cohort of followers, but each follower has
the opportunity to share IaS content with their own social networks as part of their
everyday activity.
The emerging landscape of Bible technologies has also claimed a role in online
proselytism. LifeChurch.tv’s free mobile app, YouVersion, has now been installed
more than 125 million times and used for almost 78 billion minutes of reading
(http://now.youversion.com/). Users can access the Bible at any time in 471 lan-
guages worldwide, including many translated for YouVersion by teams of volun-
teers. Users can highlight and underline passages, access reading plans and
commentaries, add private notes and share their comments with other users.
YouVersion claims to be part of “a global shift where more and more people are
engaging with God’s Word,” arguing that making the Bible constantly accessible is
a way to make it relevant in people’s lives and to increase the time they spend reading
(YouVersion 2012).
3826 T. Hutchings

The app also supports a more direct form of proselytism, encouraging users
to share favorite verses through Facebook and Twitter as inspirational quotations.
This public performance of devotion to the Bible serves multiple functions, encour-
aging fellow believers, allowing others to oversee the progress of the user’s reading,
and exposing non-Christian audiences to biblical texts.
Digital Bible technologies are also being used in international missionary work,
helping Western organizations import and distribute Christian texts without attract-
ing hostile attention. BibleLeague’s Akses Digital Bible Library “securely provides
digital Bibles to believers under the threat of persecution,” packed into a MicroSD
card that can be transferred and copied between devices, quickly concealed and
“easily destroyed or erased if danger arises” (Bible League 2012). The Digital Bible
Society has been distributing Christian texts in China on CD for 10 years, and is
now designing SD cards to store libraries of biblical texts and interpretive resources
in Arabic and Farsi. These cards will include Bible-reading software that does not
require any installation or internet connection, a design decision intended to maxi-
mise security (Dyer 2012).
Other Christian missionary organisations are using digital technology to com-
municate the Bible through audio recordings. MegaVoice, based in Australia, has
created a series of solar-powered MP3 players designed for missionary work in oral
cultures (www.megavoice.com). The smallest model, the Envoy Micro (MegaVoice
2012), is advertised as simple to use, resistant to damage and “inconspicuous, mak-
ing it safer to distribute to those living in places opposed to the Gospel.” The Envoy
Micro holds up to 400 h of content, uploaded by missionaries ‘in the field’ or pre-
loaded to order by MegaVoice staff, and can be attached to external speakers for
large-group listening. Recordings can only be uploaded with a special cable, ensur-
ing that the message “cannot be erased or tampered with by the end user.”
Mobile technologies have also been appropriated by missionaries. Organizations
like Mobile Ministry Magazine (www.mobileministrymagazine.com) are trying to
encourage Christian developers to move beyond Bible apps to create new ways to
use cellphones in evangelism, focusing particularly on the opportunity to share
short videos. According to Keith Williams, founder of Mobile Advance, “we now
start out by sharing individual Scripture stories on our phone during a visit, and
then transfer it by Bluetooth to those who are interested. If a person shows enough
interest or has come to faith, we can then provide a mobile memory card” of addi-
tional Bible stories – all for a fraction of the cost of a MegaVoice player (Williams
and Gray 2010: 141). Through his phone, Williams reminds his readers, “I have
numerous spiritual poems and musical Psalms ready and waiting in my pocket,
should the right opportunity arise” – and the nomads Williams works with are so
comfortable with mobile technology that sharing video and music with them “feels
completely natural.”
Missionary projects like Akses, MegaVoice and MobileAdvance demonstrate a
creative approach to digital media rooted in a specific religious context, tradition
and set of values. Technology is being shaped in innovative and unusual ways,
diverging from the standard paradigms of secular media design by focusing on
security and reliability at the expense of connectivity and user-generated content.
201 Christianity and Digital Media 3827

Each organization relies on Western donors, however, and frames its activity for
that audience through an evangelical Christian missionary discourse that dates
back at least to the nineteenth century (Beidelman 1982). Non-Western peoples are
starving in spiritual ignorance; only direct personal access to the Bible can save
them; Western missionaries must use their advanced technologies to bring light
into their darkness; converts are grateful for this work, even though they face per-
secution. Williams’ report challenges this discourse in one interesting respect: the
nomads he approaches are his equals in communication technology, with smart-
phones of their own.

201.7 Conclusions

A key theme throughout this chapter has been the renegotiation of boundaries. The
internet connects global communication networks, overcoming restrictions once
imposed by distance. Using digital media, Christian leaders can make their mes-
sages available worldwide, potentially multiplying their influence many times over.
Believers can connect to networks of the like-minded, even if they are intellectually
or physically isolated in their local contexts, and can sustain niche markets for
books, clothing and other resources. Missionaries can find new ways to proselytize
even in the most hostile environments. Access is restricted instead by quality of
equipment, speed of connection, and in some cases by local blocks, filters and mon-
itoring technologies.
Boundaries between leaders and followers are also renegotiated. The most effec-
tive online communicators are not necessarily those individuals who currently hold
positions of authority within established religious organisations, and independent
media producers can win considerable attention. To compete in this new media
landscape, organisations are learning new skills, hiring new talent, encouraging
supporters to engage online on their behalf and expending considerable capital to
create high-quality online resources.
The boundaries between “church” and “life,” public and private religiosity, and
religious and non-religious activity are all blurred when religious leaders, organisa-
tions and individuals begin communicating with and monitoring one another
through popular social network sites like Facebook. Church pastors can now direct
daily messages to their congregation and invite continual engagement with their
church community, all in the same spaces congregants use to keep in touch with
friends and family. When Christians blog and tweet their prayers or use social net-
working sites to mourn, once-private acts become a public performance exposed to
multiple audiences. This opportunity may be interpreted as a form of “witnessing”
to outsiders, or as a way to encourage “accountability” among believers through
mutual surveillance.
This chapter began by introducing two complementary approaches to religious
media: the religious-social shaping of technology and the concept of mediatisation.
The former highlights the active role of religious groups as evaluators and designers
3828 T. Hutchings

of technology, and emphasizes the importance of group history, culture and values
in informing this process. The latter reminds us that every medium has its own logic,
a constellation of institutional, technological and cultural norms that shape what can
be communicated through that medium. Religious individuals and groups may
shape their media, but they can only do so in negotiation with pre-existing media
logics. In some cases, the communication that results from these negotiations may
be quite different from anything those religious groups have created before, a cause
for debate and concern among observers. In other cases, Christian communication
genres have proven so well-suited to the logics of digital communication that their
authors are significantly out-performing better-known secular rivals.
Much work remains to be done. The geographical focus of this edited volume
draws attention to the scarcity of studies of digital religion in South America, Africa
and Asia, compared to the relative wealth of studies focused on the English-speaking
West. Minimal attention has been paid to mobile technologies so far, an issue that is
becoming more and more pressing as smartphone devices and applications grow in
sophistication and popularity. Proselytism is another understudied area, despite its
significance as a motivator for the development of religious technologies. Further
study is also needed to establish the ways in which religious communication is
being shaped by new media logics. How, for example, does the use of digital video
in evangelism projects like I am Second and MobileAdvance lead to changes in the
message shared? How does storing the Bible on a digital device change the owner’s
relationship to sacred text?
The two theoretical approaches combined in this chapter provide useful orienta-
tions for scholars of religion and media. Each new digital technology or application
raises new opportunities for religious groups and shapes their communication in
new ways, and we must attend to both directions of influence in order to make sense
of the changing geographies of contemporary religion.

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