Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet by Robert Glenn Howard (review)

Folklorists have been talking about the potential for studying online communities and online folklore virtually since computers first became available to consumers. Since then, there have been a smattering of studies, with early studies focused on lore—forwarded e-mails, particularly of contemporary legends, comprising the bulk—and more recent studies considering the development of folk communities, proving that ontology recapitulates phylogeny when the history of the entire field is replicated in the history of the specific example. The bulk of these studies has been articles or edited volumes of these articles. With Robert Glenn Howard’s Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet, we gain a sustained analysis of one type of folk community: the religious community of vernacular Christian fundamentalists. Howard’s thorough discussion of the history and nature of online communication, coupled with case studies that provide a humanistic dimension to his study, ensures Digital Jesus will be an important contribution to folklore studies.

Howard’s work is built on almost two decades of work, some of which he has published in an impressive number of articles over the years. This book is not, however, a rough amalgamation of his previous work. Rather, it provides a clear and sustained argument: namely, that as early 1980, a new religious community has developed online, forming what he has termed “vernacular Christian fundamentalism.” This group has no single professed charter, but can be defined according to four core beliefs: “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” (p. 8). Howard tracks the development of this community through three historical stages, from its origins in Usenet newsgroups in the 1980s, through the fairly static websites of the late 1990s, to the current stage of participatory media such as social media, forums, and blogs. The book is indispensable for scholars of evangelical Christianity, prophecy, and the End Times in particular.

While the examination of this particular religious community is an important contribution to the study of vernacular religion generally, it is the structure of the community—how it is organized, how people engage in dialogue, how personal identities are negotiated—that will prove particularly useful to scholars who study online communities. In order to address these issues, Howard introduces the concept of “the virtual ekklesia,” or online congregation. Rather than a physical structure that unites a religious group, Howard shows how a series of interconnected websites provide the avenue for the construction of a meaningful, if dramatically fluid, online community. Their means of communication is an important element of the virtual ekklesia in which the ideal is the process of “ritual deliberation,” a heightened form of discourse with identifiable norms and repeated patterns that ironically provides little space for actual deliberation. Rather than a dialogic process of weighing multiple perspectives with an openness to creating, shaping, and revising religious interpretation, ritual deliberation in the virtual ekklesia is characterized far more by authoritative voices employing rhetorical strategies to create an impression of honest and open deliberation.

Howard’s findings reflect the fact that the bulk of his work was conducted with people who have created their own websites as places to espouse their particular religious exegesis and eisegesis. Missing from the book is analysis of the people who do not preach from the altar, as it were, but fill the pews. Although all online website owners can be considered part of the congregation as well as the church “leadership,” it is also true that there are members of the virtual ekklesia who post on other people’s websites and participate in ritual deliberation but do not host their own websites. The one time we hear from posters rather than site creators is in the...