Digital Jesus

The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet

Robert Glenn Howard

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814773093
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Fondamentalismo e sette religiose

In the 1990s, Marilyn Agee developed one of the most well-known amateur evangelical websites focused on the “End Times”, The Bible Prophecy Corner.Around the same time, Lambert Dolphin, a retired Stanford physicist, started the website Lambert's Library to discuss with others online how to experience the divine. While Marilyn and Lambert did not initially correspond directly, they have shared several correspondents in common. Even as early as 1999 it was clear that they were members of the same online network of Christians, a virtual church built around those who embraced a common ideology.

Digital Jesus documents how such like-minded individuals created a large web of religious communication on the Internet, in essence developing a new type of new religious movement—one without a central leader or institution.Based on over a decade of interaction with figures both large and small within this community, Robert Glenn Howard offers the first sustained ethnographic account of the movement as well as a realistic and pragmatic view of how new communication technologies can both empower and disempower the individuals who use them.By tracing the group's origins back to the email lists and “Usenet” groups of the 1980s up to the online forums of today, Digital Jesus also serves as a succinct history of the development of online group communications.

1
Introduction
Vernacular Christian Fundamentalism on the Internet

Marilyn and Lambert

Late in the summer of 1999 at a fast food restaurant outside Riverside, California, a well-known Christian author and blogger, Marilyn Agee, told me about God’s call for her to publish interpretations of biblical prophecy:

So I’d been typing all day, and I grabbed my Bible by the back of it and I just bounced down across the bed. And I said: “What am I doing all this work for anyway?” The next thing I knew, I’m looking at my Bible—about an inch from my face and Jeremiah 50 verse 2 has a rectangle of light on it. Everything else looks gray. I could have read it if I [had] wanted to, it wasn’t that dark, but it looked gray—and this verse had light on it, saying: “Publish and conceal not.” (Agee and Edgar 1999)

Marilyn came to believe that God gave her access to divine knowledge.¹ Armed with this certainty, she first published books and then developed a well-known amateur evangelical Web site. At the time, it may have been the most well-known site focused on discussing what its users term the “End Times.”

Later that month, I interviewed the builder of another well-known amateur Web site. Lambert Dolphin is a retired Stanford physicist and a man called to Christianity by a different sort of direct experience with God. I had been in email contact with him since 1992, but we met face-to-face for the first time in September 1999. As we spoke about his intense conversion experience thirty-seven years before, Lambert said that it felt like “lights turning on where there’d been a dark house before.” He experienced an emotional, immediate, and permanent change. I asked him if this experience gave him special access to divine knowledge. He shook his head, saying no: “In fact, it’s probably perfectly acceptable to have equivalent models and use the one that you feel most comfortable with—or the one that fits best to your circumstances” (Dolphin 1999f).

Though both Marilyn and Lambert felt compelled to share their understanding of God with others, they expressed different conceptions of how and what God communicates. Marilyn experienced a clear and resolute call to “publish” biblical studies based on her access to divine truth. Lambert’s experience, however, was of an intimate, emotional, and intense sense of “peace,” “hope,” and “excitement about the future” (Dolphin 1999f). Seeking to share that experience, he began engaging people online by discussing the different “models” that might help them access the same sense of peace.

Even though these two individuals had direct experiences of the same God, their resulting understandings of the divine were fundamentally different. Marilyn locates a single truth in the Bible and then communicates that truth to others. Lambert sees the words of the Bible as malleable. They constitute a resource through which he can guide others toward the same personal sense of tranquility he has been granted. The two of them imagine the Christian god in strikingly different ways.

Given their similar backgrounds, one might expect that Marilyn and Lambert’s religious thinking would be largely the same. They have both lived most of their lives in California. They are about the same age. They are both retired. They both came to Christianity through Baptist churches in North America. They both believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible. They both use the Internet daily to engage in amateur Christian evangelism. By 1999, in fact, they were already very much part of the same growing web of online communication.

On hundreds of amateur Web pages, blogs, forums, and other Internet media, everyday members of a new kind of Christian religious movement make links to both their Web sites: Marilyn’s Bible Prophecy Corner and Lambert’s Lambert’s Library. While Lambert and Marilyn have not corresponded directly, they have shared several correspondents in common. Even as early as 1999, it was clear that Marilyn and Lambert were being connected by thousands of individuals who thought of them as part of the same online web of believers. These individuals made and followed Internet links that subsumed individual differences into something larger. What was the nature of this larger entity? How could it incorporate these two fundamentally different conceptions of the same God? The research resulting in this book began as an attempt to answer these questions. In this attempt, I discovered a new religious movement I have termed “vernacular Christian fundamentalism.”

This study begins by exploring the definitive characteristics of the new movement. It is new because it focuses on a particular “End Times” interpretation of biblical prophecy that differentiates it from broader forms of evangelical Christianity. It also constitutes a new kind of religious movement because even as its beliefs have diverged from existing institutions, no new central leadership has emerged. Instead, it takes shape as its believers use the Internet to engage in a kind of ritualized deliberation that they believe generates a church that exists only on the Internet. While the dispersed nature of this network-based movement might suggest that it is free from social control, this is not the case. Instead, individual members use the Internet to create a dispersed vernacular authority that enforces a self-sealing ideology.

Chapter 2 documents individuals in the movement as they coped with the shock of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon building on September 11, 2001. Marilyn Agee publicly posted the rush of email exchanges she had over the course of the day on her Web site. These posts reveal a discursive process so powerful it almost immediately rendered the new facts sensible in terms of the movement’s complex prophetic narrative. Tracing the cluster of beliefs associated with the movement from their origins in the nineteenth century, a radical sense of certainty associated with direct experiences of the divine accounts for the powerful social processes that made this assimilation possible.

Chapter 3 goes back in time to document the movement as it first appeared online in a medium called “Usenet newsgroups.” When the mainstream Christians that dominated communication in this medium responded with ridicule and hostility to communications about the End Times, individuals in the movement used private email lists to deliberate about their beliefs without facing resistance from outsiders. On these email lists, the cohesive force of the movement relied on the formation of communication enclaves where individuals could most freely engage in their ritual deliberation.

Chapter 4 documents the growing diversity of the virtual ekklesia as it moved onto the Worldwide Web between 1996 and 2000. As the movement adapted, the new medium exacerbated an existing tension between the need to express individual authority and the need to engage others in deliberation. As a wide diversity of individuals experimented with different ways to mediate this tension, Marilyn Agee’s Bible Prophecy Corner Web site prefigured the most robust deployment of Internet media by individuals in the movement today.

Chapter 5 charts participatory media’s rise to dominance in online communication. While differences in the technologies encourage individuals to use them in different ways, today’s centrally moderated blogs and forums provide the best environment for individuals in the movement to engage in ritual deliberation. In these media, divergent views can be excluded while, at the same time, adherents can enact complex communication about their belief in the End Times.

Chapter 6 documents the expressions of prejudice that persist in the movement. While well suited for ritual deliberation, moderated participatory media mix with historical tendencies and radical certainty to encourage intolerance for individuals with beliefs or practices that are thought to contradict the movement’s basic beliefs. Despite the media’s role in facilitating such intolerance, the online deliberation of a new generation of Internet-savvy believers suggests that tolerance may be a trait that users of these media will increasingly demand from their online religious communities in the future.

The conclusion explores the implications of these findings for researchers of contemporary religion and new media technologies. The existence of this new sort of religious movement suggests that individual believers are more responsible for the nature of their religiosity when they are empowered to construct their worldviews from the vast possibilities afforded by Internet communication technologies. Recognizing the increased responsibility afforded by these media, researchers must continue to increase their understanding of the communication practices of everyday religious believers.

Vernacular Christian Fundamentalism

At least since the emergence of mass-produced vernacular Bibles, individual Christians have been confronted with more responsibility for interpreting the Christian message (Howard 2005b). With the rise of secular governments, individual choice has come to be a primary guide for religious expression in the United States, and with new communication and travel technologies, people have enjoyed growing exposure to a vast diversity of religious ideas. Meanwhile, the counterculture movements of the late 1960s and 1970s produced a whole generation of believers more oriented toward non-Western religious and spiritual ideas (Roof 1999).

At the same time, increased immigration into the United States further expanded the diversity of belief. With the widespread adoption of communication technologies during the information age, individuals have been granted even greater control over the ideas they access (Lindlof 2002, 71–72). These technological and cultural changes have cultivated a more voluntaristic attitude toward spiritual involvement. As a result, religious commitment in the United States has grown more individualized and fluid (Ammerman 1997; Clark 2003; Cowan 2005, 195).

With this increased individualization, the authority for religious belief and expression has shifted further and further away from religious institutions. This shift has prompted researchers to consider religion more as it is “lived” and less at the levels of institutional history and theology (McGuire 2008). While the movement I document in this book should be considered “lived religion,” it is also specifically “vernacular” because it has grown and spread without forming institutions or relying on centralized leadership for authority.

The term “vernacular” refers to noninstitutional beliefs and practices that exist alongside but apart from institutions. This meaning evolved in reference to languages. All the way up through the Renaissance, “vernacular” referred to any language that was not Latin. This meaning came from its ancient associations first with non-Greek and non-Roman slaves and later with speakers of the varieties of “Vulgar” Latin. These informal and localized forms of Latin eventually evolved into the Romance languages of Western Europe and they were called, as a group, “vernacular” because they existed alongside but apart from the formal institutional language of Latin (Howard 2008a and 2008b).

Though “vernacular” still holds this meaning, its association with the non-institutional gave the term new currency as an analytic category in interpretive anthropology and folklore studies. The term appeared as early as 1960 in an American Anthropologist article where researcher Margaret Lantis used it to refer to “the commonplace” (Lantis 1960, 202). While sociologists like Karl Mannheim (1980), Harold Garfinkle (1967), or Peter L. Berger (1990) tend to approach religion by looking at its social structures and (in particular) its social orders, folklorists and anthropologists like Lantis tend to focus more on the expressive human behaviors that create a shared sense of culture. As a result, the expressive and linguistic orientation of the term “vernacular” seems to have given it more traction in anthropology and folklore studies. Applying it to the study of religion specifically, ethnographer Leonard Primiano has described “vernacular religion” as the manifestation of religious beliefs and practices in the everyday lives of individual believers (1995).

Sociologists of religion sometimes refer to this as “popular religion.” Historian David D. Hall has pointed out, however, that many researchers use the term “popular religion” to demarcate the difference between official Christianity and pagan elements surviving in popular practice (1997, viii). This suggests an opposition to the official that is not necessarily the case in vernacular Christian fundamentalism. Similarly, folklorists sometimes refer to informally shared beliefs as “folk religion” or “folk belief.” However, this terminology suggests a connection to tradition in the sense of an ongoing handing down of beliefs and practices from one generation to the next. This “traditional” characteristic may or may not be present in cases of new or idiosyncratic forms of everyday religion.

Avoiding these connotations, Hall offers the concept of “lived religion.” He argues that his “lived religion” perspective focuses on “charting the practices of the laity.” This conception does not set these practices in opposition to church leadership or necessarily associate them with any preexisting expressive traditions (1997, vii). Another proponent of the “lived religion” concept, Robert Orsi, notes how Hall’s formulation has the potential to overemphasize individual agency because it deemphasizes the power of religious institutions and documents that are not “lived” in the normal sense of the word. Orsi demonstrates the possible extreme of this tendency by referencing Primiano’s description of “vernacular religion.” As Orsi notes, Primiano seems to emphasize individual agency so completely that the “vernacular” leaves no way to account for the power of religious institutions at all (1997, 20).

Advocating his “vernacular” perspective on religion, Primiano argues that “there is no objective existence of practice which expresses ‘official religion.’ No one, no special religious elite or member of an institutional hierarchy, neither the Pope in Rome nor the Dalai Lama of Tibet … lives an ‘officially’ religious life” (1995, 46). In Primiano’s view, all religion is actually “lived” by individuals and thus even the institutions empowered through them are “vernacular” religious expressions. My redeployment of the term “vernacular” mitigates this difference of views by maintaining Primiano and Hall’s specific focus on lived religion but adding a specific theory of “vernacular authority.” This authority accounts for both vernacular and institutional power by emphasizing the dialectical definition central to the ancient meanings of the vernacular (Howard 2008b and 2010b).

The Roman Latin noun “verna” specifically referred to slaves who were born and raised in a Roman home. While the term is often associated with this “home-born” meaning, it also carried with it the connotation of a specific kind of power. The verna was a native to Roman culture but was also the offspring of a sublimated non-Roman ethnic or culture group. In Roman society, most slaves were seized during wars, during the suppression of colonial insurrections, or even through outright piracy (Westermann 1984, 101). The majority of these slaves did not read or write Classical Latin or Greek. Since any person born to a slave woman (without regard to the social position of the father) was automatically a slave, female slaves were encouraged to have children to increase the master’s slave stock (Bradley 1987, 42–44). These verna could become even more valuable than their mothers when they were trained as native users of the institutional languages and thus able to engage in more technical kinds of work.

Vernacular power, then, came from a dialectical distinction: a verna was made powerful because she or he had native access to Roman institutional language and yet was explicitly defined as something which was separate from Roman institutions. In one of its earliest uses to describe expressive human behavior, the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero suggested that being vernacular was a means to persuasive power because of this unique position. In a work on rhetoric, Brutus, he wrote of an “indescribable flavor” that rendered a particular speaker persuasive. This power was “vernacular” because the speaker had learned it outside Roman institutions (1971, 147). Cicero understood the vernacular as alternate to what he and other Roman politicians saw as the institutional elements of persuasive communication available through the formal study of oratory, Roman history, literature, and philosophy (Howard 2008b). The “vernacular” might support or oppose institutional power, but it is specifically and consciously the power of not being institutional. In this sense, it is a dialectical term because it is defined by its opposite.

This dialectical sense of the vernacular maps particularly well onto vernacular Christian fundamentalism because one of the movement’s definitive traits is its lack of institutional leadership. In fact, its power to unify people into a church is based on the idea that there is no institutional component to the movement. It is not merely “lived religion,” it is a social entity made authoritative by everyday believers’ repeated choices to connect. With repetition over time, those choices accumulate to enact a larger shared volition. This aggregate volition is the vernacular authority that gives shape to the online church.

Though this movement is different from the historical movement of Christian fundamentalism in the 1920s, using the term “fundamentalism” helps locate the set of ideas unifying the group both in terms of their historical antecedents and also as a subject of much research (see Marty and Appleby 1995, 6–7; and Harris 1998, 1ff). The movement I have documented is typically not termed “fundamentalism” by its adherents. As I am using it, the term is strictly analytic. This analytic approach to fundamentalism goes at least as far back as the work of biblical scholar James Barr starting in the mid-1960s (Barr 1966 and 1978; Kellstedt and Smidt 1991; Perkin 2000).

For Barr, “fundamentalism” denoted a way of thinking. In historical and discursive terms, Barr’s “cognitive” fundamentalism is better understood as “ideological.” By ideology, I mean a set of interrelated ideas that function as the symbolic apparatus through which a social group understands its world (Althusser 1984; Eagleton 1991; Howard 2009c and 2009d). In this sense, ideology is a habit of thinking based on shared beliefs. From this perspective, a communication can be seen as participating in fundamentalism whenever specific definitive traits are observed—whether or not the person expressing them is self-identified with a specifically “fundamentalist” group.

Based on ethnographic data collected in the 1990s, researcher of religion Charles B. Strozier constructed the first systematic catalog of the four observable traits that indicate the existence of Christian fundamentalism (1994, 5). In online discourse, I have located a similar set of four core beliefs. They are: a belief in biblical literalism, a belief in the experience of spiritual rebirth, a belief in the need to evangelize, and a belief in the End Times interpretation of biblical prophecy. When these four beliefs are expressed in a noninstitutional communication, that communication participates in vernacular Christian fundamentalism.

The unifying force behind this set of beliefs is an emphasis on a literal interpretative approach to the Bible. This form of interpretation generally assumes that, even in translation, the Bible has a single, simple, and direct meaning. In cases like those presented by the complex symbolic language of the Book of Revelation, this literalism occurs at a secondary level. In the famous passage in Revelation 19:15, for example, where the returned messiah is described as “smiting the nations” with a “sharp sword” coming out of His mouth, a literal interpretation might accept the “sword” to refer to modern weapons of war such as guns, tanks, and so on. How a literal reading would understand the sword as coming out of the mouth instead of held in the hand, however, presents a greater range of possible literal meanings. As a result, the emphasis on a literal interpretation assumes that there is a single and correct meaning even if the language is itself figurative and obscure.

In some cases, a text is even assumed to be literal at a “typological” level. In these cases, texts that make clear and straightforward claims about a specific concrete historical entity are thought to refer not only to that specific case but also to other types, of which that entity is only representative (O’Leary 1994, 55). For example, some references to “the Israelites” are typologically reinterpreted to mean any of those who are chosen by God to be His people. For some evangelicals, this means that contemporary evangelical Christians (as “true” followers of Christ) are typologically referred to as Israelites in the Bible.

While coming to agreement on these sorts of interpretations can be the source of deliberation about many issues, the four distinctive beliefs are thought to be supported by the most obvious meaning of one or more biblical passages and are typically not the basis for deliberation. As a result, individuals deploying this sort of interpretative technique can often simply make an...