Conclusion

The use of adaptive techniques in Internet evangelism has been prefigured by two historical trends in evangelism. The first trend is that of evangelical engagement with innovative forms of popular media. Since the mid-eighteenth century, evangelicals have utilized the most wide-reaching forms of popular media available in an effort to spread their message. The result is a community of contemporary evangelicals who are fully aware of the benefits of communications technologies, and eager to proclaim their beliefs through any effective new media. There is a great sense among evangelical organizations that they have ‘missed’ the earlier communications revolutions of the twentieth century, by failing to establish a stable and highly visible presence on either television or radio that is capable of attracting large numbers of non-Christians to Christianity. Because of this, there have been repeated demands from within the world-wide community of evangelicals (Careaga 1999; Kellner 1999) that they not miss the opportunity to establish an effective evangelistic presence on the Internet. The second trend is that of adaptation to secular norms in the practice of evangelism, which is currently seen not only in Internet evangelism, but also in print, popular Christian music and film. This began with the transition to a market-driven mindset that takes inspiration from the business world, which was first vocalised in the 1970s when Jerry Falwell made the (then) innovative suggestion that an inclusive church model should be patterned after the marketing approach of shopping malls. This idea was elaborated on in the late 1970s and 1980s when the Christian community responded to dominant secular culture by ‘Christianising’ different forms of popular entertainment, creating an alternative source of entertainment for Christians. Drawing on both historical precedents allowed evangelicals to see the potential benefits of using the ‘alternative’ nature of Christianised discourse in the new media setting of the Internet, where alternative status has been deemed a popular virtue.

This study has shown how evangelistic websites are able to act as “aesthetic traps” in the sense used by Miller and Gell, combining language-based evangelistic techniques with the representational and linguistic styles of different kinds of secular sites. I have denoted the combination of language and representational style by the term representational register as a way of emphasizing how language is embedded in the visual (and sometimes audio) images and formats of these websites. Evangelistic language strategies combine in the representational registers with secular symbols and formatting, creating websites with a new sense of agency, that can behave as either integrative spaces or transformational gateways. Integrative websites combine an evangelical message with a compatible secular theme, and emerge as a new space wherein surfers can identify themselves simultaneously as members of both the secular and Christian communities. A transformational website becomes a gateway, taking members from the targeted secular community and recreating them as Christians. In transformational websites, dual membership of the Christian and secular communities is not an option.

In concentrating on the production and intent of adaptive evangelistic websites, I have tried to emphasize how websites may behave as tools for real-life evangelistic groups, as actors with performed identities, and as spaces or locations within online social networks. This was done to stress the fact that although websites may be analysed through material culture or linguistics strategies, they cannot be pigeonholed as art objects, identity performances, social actors or barometers of social change. Websites incorporate aspects of all of these categories, but because of the fluid and influential nature of the medium, they must be acknowledged to be multifaceted constructions capable of both ‘primary’ and ‘secondary agency’ as described by Gell (1998). As such, the role that websites play in real and virtual communities requires more detailed research, through fieldwork in the ‘real’ geographic communities that produce these websites, as well in the virtual communities where these identities are enacted and consumed.