One may be forgiven for expecting more from a book with the subtitle, “The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet.” While fundamentalism has received considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, the ways that fundamentalists — and, really, religious believers in general — have used new technology and social media for exegesis and evangelism are vastly understudied. Yet the author of Digital Jesus, Robert Glenn Howard, clearly did not set out to write a broad study of online fundamentalism. Instead, he traces the formation and development of a particular group of Internet sites and commentators that constitute only one small corner of online Christianity. Still, there are some significant findings in Howard's book, some that may point the way forward for future, more comprehensive studies.
Howard documents the rise of what he calls a “vernacular Christian fundamentalism” on the Internet, relying on content analysis of a few primary web sources and personal interviews with a small number of participants. The community he describes is vernacular in that authority is dispersed and separate from churches and religious organizations; it is fundamentalist in its adherence to biblical literalism, evangelism and, most importantly, “End Times” prophecy, or the belief that Christ's return is imminent. The author focuses on one key website, the Bible Prophecy Corner, which subscribes to these beliefs, although he touches on a handful more that help constitute what one of his respondents calls a “virtual ekklesia.”
Howard's study suffers from some limitations. His background is in literature and communications, and he may be dabbling a bit in the social science surrounding fundamentalism. He often refers to the small community of believers he chronicles as a “new religious movement,” without providing the kind of evidence and theoretical work necessary to defend the use of the term in this context. For example, he provides a neat interpretive account of how contributors to the Bible Prophecy Corner website on September 11 processed the day's events. Yet it's not clear how many readers this website actually had on that day; his “movement” could be no more than a small collective of a half-dozen bloggers and commentators. Similarly, he relies entirely on Charles B. Strozier's ideological definition of fundamentalism, with only a passing mention of the seminal work of Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby's Fundamentalism Project. Their insights about the ready use of technology existing side-by-side with resistance to modernity seem particularly germane here.
There are additional problems with the structure of the book. Three of the chapters offer a straightforward history of the community's use of technology, tracing its emergence from Usenet groups in the early 1990s to websites later that decade to, finally, today's variety of participatory media, particularly blogs. However, he isolates the September 11 attacks from this chronology; and in the same chapter, he shoehorns in a brief history of Christian fundamentalism in America for reasons that remain unclear.
Howard's key findings concern the way the virtual community he details dis-empowers members by banning dissent on central issues of theological doctrine, while at the same time empowering them by enabling, and even encouraging, vigorous debate on less foundational matters. A process of “ritual deliberation,” Howard argues, enables participants to construct a shared religiosity — within certain limits, of course, but with the possibility for a form of openness on certain issues.
This openness is Howard's great hope, and yet also demonstrates a final limitation in his study. To his credit, he acknowledges the dangers of new forms of technology for encouraging the development of fundamentalist enclaves. In effect, the virtual ekklesia can grow in almost complete isolation from other theological and intellectual currents. Howard devotes his sixth chapter to examples of prejudiced commentary from the fundamentalist websites under study, including disturbing incidences of anti-Semitism and prejudice against Native Americans. Still, Howard seems to want to resist the conclusion that such isolation and intolerance are inevitable, holding out hope for a more open form of online Christian community. But the sole “hopeful” example he provides, that of an End Times believer attempting to post on a more mainstream Christian site, ends with the message thread being closed by an administrator because of too many rancorous posts. In light of ongoing connections between some enclaves of religious fundamentalism and violence, Howard's optimism here may border on naiveté.
At another point Howard rather problematically uses a sarcastic blog post (“You feel like good Christians now?”) to spin out the possibility of a form of Augustinian charity taking hold in the online Christian community. I think Howard far overreaches his interpretive bounds here — sometimes a blog post is just a blog post — but the idea he presents is intriguing by itself. The suggestion that Augustinian charity may manifest itself in our modern media through communicative tolerance — an open discourse — is an intriguing one. Ironically, such a conception seems unlikely to develop in the kind of closed loop formed by the tiny community of End Times believers that Howard documents. Still, such a model may apply to the broader Christian online community, and an empirical study with greater scope than Howard's might help illuminate such a conception. Thus Howard's book, despite all its limitations, is ultimately an important early step, more suggestive than definitive, towards a social science that helps us understand the new forms of religiosity developing through new technologies.
