Each of the websites discussed above are part of the same trend in Internet evangelism, although they all possess slightly different ways of enacting their own social claims and transfiguring the social membership of visiting web surfers. They share the trait of engaging in symbolic conflict with the secular sites with which they share an audience base, often appropriating full representational registers associated with secular site genres (Harrison 1995). The effect of this appropriation depends on the relationship that they are able to establish between Christianity and secular social networks through their website. The Michelle Akers Homepage, Hollywood Jesus and iamnext all bring together two essentially unrelated, but not antithetical, concepts in the confines of the website. By positioning themselves in the area of overlap between two social groups, the creators manage to establish their sites as a middle ground, and portray the adaptive representational register of their site as a valid representation of a blended community. Appropriation in these sites is an attempt to forge an atmosphere of inclusion between the two groups, to share the symbols, not to wrest them from the control of one community and give them into the control of another. Stonewall Revisited and the Ultimate Love Page engage in a more classic kind of proprietary contest. Both adopt the representational registers of a disassociated community, a community with values and practices that the site creators themselves seem to consider incompatible with their own. Rather than creating a place of overlap, both of these sites create a transformational gateway between two social networks. Surfers caught in the context of either page cannot hope to enjoy membership in both groups simultaneously. They are faced with a choice, in a site that becomes a virtual state of liminality.
In their acquisition of secular representational registers, adaptive evangelistic sites are able to enact dualistic identities that differentiate them from other websites of the same secular genre, and present themselves as an ‘alternative’ to the dominant cultural values of the Internet. This representation reflects both the current mindset of Bible-based Christianity and the reasoning behind the adaptive strategy undertaken by these sites. The once dominant discourse of Judeo-Christian values has indeed been somewhat marginalized in North America when compared to the days of the Moral Majority’s influential heights in the 1980s. The producers of these sites see themselves as genuine minorities in an online context, and they are right. Though the number of Christian websites is increasing at a furious pace, they are still vastly outnumbered by secular websites. This knowledge provides the impetus for evangelical revival, and a resurgent interest in innovative evangelistic techniques such as adaptive strategies. There is some irony in the fact that although Christianity is still a heavily influential force within Western society, very much still a part of the dominant social discourse, it is able to reap the ‘benefit’ of alternative status on the Internet frontier.