2. TRANSFORMATION OF REPRESENTATIONAL REGISTERS
IN FIVE WEBSITES
Evangelicals’ history of involvement with mass
media has established a dialectic relationship between evangelicalism and
secular popular culture. A century of marketplace competition in electronic
media combined with a sudden political and cultural ascendancy introduced a new
practicality to evangelistic approaches in the 1980s, creating what Susan
Harding describes as an atmosphere of deliberate “cultural hybridity” resulting
from the “fusion of dissonant cultural practices” (2000: 4) – combining
evangelistic messages with popular entertainment. These techniques of “cultural
alchemy” have remained in the repertoire of evangelicals even after the lapse
in social visibility that followed the televangelist scandals of the late
1980s, and have become a vital part of evangelical Protestant approaches toward
contemporary Western culture. The “cultural alchemy” to which Harding refers
was a development among evangelicals contingent upon a specific cultural
history and an established social position in North American public affairs,
yet it remains one of the most relied-upon strategies in evangelicals’ stock of
approaches, despite the loss of its defining context. The “fusion of dissonant
cultural practice” can be seen in the development of a certain style of
evangelistic website, that depends on an integration of disparate cultural
practices to attract non-Christians to Christianity. These sites, which I will
refer to as adaptive evangelistic websites, combine the material
features of secular websites with traditional conversion strategies and
modified evangelistic language.
The effect of hybridising religious and secular
strategies is the creation of a website that is capable of appealing to
multiple audiences, while sharing an evangelical worldview. In his article,
“The Fame of the Trinis” (2000), Daniel Miller applies Gell’s idea of the
“aesthetic trap” to the production of Trinidadian websites. He argues that
websites “strive to attract and trap certain surfers while escaping the
attention of surfers who are not its intended viewers”. This theory regarding
the aesthetic attractions of websites is particularly pertinent in the instance
of adaptive evangelical webpages, which display characteristics of both
evangelistic Christian and secular-interest sites in an effort to expand their
appeal to multiple distinct audiences. Harding equates the process of religious
conversion to the internalisation of evangelical language, or the “poetics of
faith” (2000: 98). Evangelistic websites combine the traditional linguistic
strategies of evangelicals with secular subject matter or approaches to create
a site that will ‘capture’ a broad yet specific audience, while teaching them
the language of belief.
Building ‘traps’ and identities
In order to understand the creative process,
goals and methods behind adaptive evangelistic sites, the site must be
understood first as an ‘aesthetic trap’ of a much more complex variety than
straightforward personal or business webpages meant to represent the
individual’s interests or a commercial endeavour. The websites that Miller
(2000) analyses are both personal and commercial Trinidadian sites, with
several sub-genres of each type of website given special attention. Miller
parallels the social exchange within these websites with the Kula ring,
describing websites as their creators’ attempts to expand themselves into a
larger world of exchange with distant places. These attempts are undertaken as
a collective construction, in which the fame of the individual is expanded by
association with the fame of “the entity that they most fully identify with…the
nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago” (2000: 6). One of the most reliable means
of determining the ‘fame’ of the page is through a hit counter – a software
attachment that tracks the number of visitors logging on to the site. Miller’s
analysis of the impetus behind the construction of websites – the desire to
connect with a larger world of exchange – is widely applicable. However, his
assessment of the desire to win personal fame through the construction of
websites requires some adjustment in the case of web evangelists using the
Internet: webpages are used first and foremost to win notoriety for the
“entity” with which their creators most fully identify, in this case mainstream
Protestant Christianity. From the perspective of evangelical page creators, any
fame that their websites draws is not intended to be attributed to them, but to
the their ideological founder, Jesus Christ, and the Christian faith. The
degree to which this ideal is expressed in the construction of the evangelical
website is related to the degree of ‘professionalism’ aspired to by the site’s
creator(s). The more professional sites, or sites that are
organizationally-produced, tend not to have a hit counter, whereas
privately-produced sites often do. In the instances where evangelistic sites
have hit counters, I would say that their primary purpose is to provide
additional validity to the site through its perceived popularity. A high number
of hits acts as an additional lure to surfers rather than as a marker to chart
the spread of the site creator’s fame.
There is another factor which must be
considered when discussing representations of identity in an adaptive
evangelistic site: it not only must attract notice for the entity of the Church
with which it most closely identifies itself, it must authenticate the identity
of its creator(s) as a member of the relevant social networks. The site, as
representative of its creator, must act as a sort of ‘double agent’, believably
performing its dual identity in two social networks. If the creator of a site
that is intended to appeal to the gay community (as is Stonewall Revisited)
cannot be established as a gay man or lesbian, the site loses validity in the
online social network with which it is intended to establish links. At the same
time, to be an effective evangelistic effort, the website must enact the
evangelistic agenda of its creator despite its trappings of secularity. As
Clifford notes, “authenticity is staged in opposition to external, dominating alternatives”
(1988:12). On the Internet, these alternatives are usually intertwined with the
subject through internal links or external searches, making it easy for the
surfer to verify the relative authenticity of a website’s (or creator’s)
credentials. An adaptive evangelistic site holds its audience by enacting two
identities at once, well enough to convince the audience that the site’s
producer is genuinely an authoritative member of two communities
simultaneously. The website becomes a passport between two social networks, a
badge of dual identity for its designers, so that it may function effectively
as an aesthetic trap capable of attracting its creator’s target audience.
Though not all adaptive websites succeed in establishing legitimate dual identities,
or even truly intend to do so, it is the defining aspect of an adaptive site
that it should appear to try to do so by adopting the online visual and
linguistic trappings of the group(s) with which it is meant to engage.
Establishing identity through language
registers
Once established, dualistic identity allows the
evangelistic website to become a transformational gateway between two
social groups, or an integrative space in which two groups might merge
into one. This process is enacted through both visual and linguistic processes
of appropriation, fusion or transformation. Visual cues are the most malleable
and prone to manipulation by evangelistic websites; site creators tend to
retain their evangelical identity most clearly in the narrative strategies that
are woven through the texts of the sites. This is unsurprising as “collective
Protestant ritual is based on words and the Word [of God]…church services and
revivals are stripped of sensuous, non-linguistic communication” (Harding 2000:
37). No matter the ostensible subject of the text, site creators with a
background in evangelism are likely to use a series of strategies derived from
their experiences in church-based evangelism, or to draw on the same strategies
because of their historical association with the movement. This holds true even
if they follow Whittaker’s warning to avoid “Christian jargon”; vestiges of the
narrative style remain. Two traditional and often used styles of evangelistic
language are witnessing and sermons. Sermons are formal speech acts, witnessing
is considered an informal act (Harding 2000: 36). Witnessing is the primary
mode of evangelistic speech used in adaptive websites, particularly suited to
the medium because of its malleability – it acts explicitly as a monologue that
constitutes the speaker as a culturally specific person (proving identity), and
as a dialogue that reconstitutes its listeners (challenging the surfer’s
identity) (ibid: 35). Witnessing often takes the form of a personal
testimony, though it may simply consist of discussing or quoting from the
Bible. When presented as a testimonial, even monologic witnessing can establish
the response pattern of a dialogue because it requires an emotional response
from the listener, if not a verbal one. The listener determines the meaning
behind the testimonial, by either denying or supporting the actions described (ibid:
57). The dynamic that testimonials establish is ideal for a medium that enables
response better than any format outside of conversation. However, in certain
instances, where a site is intended to be didactic, the formality of the sermon
can be the more effective means of communicating an evangelistic message with
the same intent of eliciting response.
Both sermons and witnessing may draw on certain
established grammatical and narrative styles. Fluid use of pronouns like “we”
and “you” include the listener as part of witnessing dialogue (ibid:
42). Witnessing uses literary devices from Hebrew scripture: “now” and “and”
may be used to begin sentences and establish the cadence of Biblical speech (ibid:
54). Biblical prefiguring, or using biblical stories to draw parallels to
present conditions and characters, is a common device found particularly in
sermons. “Redemptive analogy” as described by Whittaker, is similar to biblical
prefiguring, connecting contemporary
events, stories or beliefs to biblical passages through explicit analogy.
Harding also calls attention to the “storied gaps” that are often used in evangelical
and fundamentalist Christian narratives: “the excesses and silences, the
unnecessary details and spareness” (2000: 98). Minimal detail is used to
establish time, place, character, relationships. Dialogue is privileged over
narration to reveal character; there is repetition of key dialogue (ibid:
54). Evangelists are naturally aware that they rely heavily on certain
linguistic strategies, and are equally aware that the distinctiveness of these
strategies may prove to be an obstacle when attempting to forge a bond with
non-Christians. Miller notes that some websites are designed specifically to
avoid the notice of some web surfers; the same holds true for some of the
linguistic strategies used by Christian believers, which can exclude the
unschooled listener as effectively as they include believers (ibid:
156). It is for this reason, the rising leaders in the field of Internet
evangelism have been attentive to the role that language plays in attracting or
alienating potential Christians. Andrew Careaga, author of E-vangelism:
sharing the Gospel in cyberspace (1999), cautions novice web evangelists
about the need to take care of the language that they will use on the Internet.
They will need to “speak the language”, that is, familiarize themselves with
the abbreviations and ‘emoticons’ (punctuation used to express emotion in
shorthand icons) analogous to spoken speech in chat rooms, and “recognize and
deal with” the freedom of expression that they will find there (Careaga 1999:
47). Tony Whittaker, in his Guide to Web evangelism (2000), is even more
explicit about the hazards of using evangelistic speech:
It is vital to explain everything in
non-religious terminology. If you must use religious words, define them. We
would suggest that the following words are virtually meaningless to the average
non-Christian, (and it is non-Christians you want to read your evangelistic
pages!) unless they happen to have some sort of Christian background: born
again, salvation, sinner, new birth, Savior, justification, Holy Spirit,
testimony, evangelical, assurance, redeemed, converted, led to Christ,
redemption, saved, mission, outreach, repentance ... and about 1000 others.[1]
The evangelistic pages in the sample
described below adhere to this directive in different degrees, resulting in
varying levels of accessibility for the non-Christian. Those sites that attempt
to avoid the terminology traditionally associated with evangelism tend to
incorporate the previously described narrative techniques in a new way, fusing
these narratives with a genre-specific vocabulary or ‘speech register’ - a
variety of language used in connection with a particular activity or body of
knowledge (Macaulay 1994: 217). Regardless of their use of “Christian jargon”,
all of the evangelistic sites described here, and most evangelistic sites in
general, persist in using the Bible and extracts from biblical texts as the
final legitimating authority to support the viewpoints that they express.
Language is a core element of the evangelistic
identity, so it receives the greatest care and consideration in the design of
evangelistic websites and in this analysis. But it is difficult to separate
language out from the materiality that surrounds it in the context of a
website. The webpage is a format that blurs the division between different
forms of representational material culture and the written word more
effectively than any of its media predecessors, as writing becomes iconographic
through the design and arrangement of text. In this instance, text can be
expressive in a pictorial as well as a linguistic sense, and is inextricably
intertwined with the site’s formatting, iconography and graphic displays. To
understand how evangelists are manipulating this format, we must look at the
interplay between language, symbol and structure as each informs the site’s
ability to establish belonging in an online social network. I refer to this
interplay between linguistic, visual (and sometimes audio and video) symbols as
a representational register, a variation on Macaulay’s ‘speech
register’. The representational register’s constituent elements will be
analysed in a effort to unravel how the evangelistic sites have been able to
appropriate facets of secular website genres to form new adaptive creations
while maintaining their essential evangelical identities.
Five adaptive evangelistic websites are
described below. The Michelle Akers Homepage is produced by Campus
Crusade for Christ (CCC), and incorporates the styles of both an official
athlete’s site and a personal webpage. Stonewall Revisited is produced
by Leadership University and uses the symbols and language of the gay community
to try to spread its message of Christian belief and ‘gay recovery’. Iamnext.com
is a “virtual community” for teenagers, arranged in a magazine-style format by
CCC Canada. Hollywood Jesus is a personally-produced site that presents
films and popular culture as Christian life lessons through its movie reviews
and related essays. The Ultimate Love Page, also privately produced,
discusses the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus in terms of body piercing, using
the suggestive vocabulary of a fetishist’s site. Each of these sites can be
compared with a secular site from the mainstream genre that it most resembles.
The five sites are all evaluated as expressions of individual or group identity,
as those identities aid in the constitution of the site as an ‘aesthetic trap’.
The “authenticity” or perceived legitimacy of these identities will be assessed
by the degree to which the sites are able to establish links within the online
social network of their targeted audience, either through web rings, search
engines or reccomendations from another site. The way in which each site has
appropriated or transformed a secular genre’s representational register will be
examined, as will the degree to which each site has incorporated traditional
evangelical linguistic registers into its strategy.
[1] Whittaker’s web page is written primarily for a US audience, and his writing style reflects this.