Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet
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.
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Review in Contemporary Sociology by Courtney Bender
A recent boom in religion and media literature has highlighted the many ways religious actors adopt and adapt new communication technologies into their practices, rituals and identities. They use these technologies to reimagine their relations with the divine, with co-religionists, and with their own traditions’ authority. These activities are no less present in conservative religious groups than “liberal” ones. In fact, as this growing literature clearly demonstrates, conservative religious groups are frequently the first to adapt and eagerly develop new communications technologies. This is clearly proven in Digital Jesus, a new book by Robert Glenn Howard. Drawing on nearly two decades of online field research with conservative Christians who are deeply devoted to interpreting current events in relation to biblical “End Times” prophecy and publishing their views online, Howard argues that the internet and its various platforms have enabled the development of a new fundamentalist online community (or “virtual ekklesia”). This ekklesia is sustained over time yet has no clear lines of religious authority. Rather, website developers’ religious authority is developed and displayed through numerous online ritual performances. There is much to appreciate in this book, particularly its rich ethnographic material. Unfortunately, its most interesting observations are … http://csx.sagepub.com/content/41/1/90.short