Week 8: Religious Identity Online

This week we are focusing on how churches present their religious identities through their web site.  Religious identity describes how a person or group understands, experiences, shapes, and presents aspects of their religious belonging or affiliation. A church’s religious identity describe how they understanding thier devotion, spiritual beliefs, motivations and priorities.  Simply put a church’s religious identity communicates how they see their core beliefs and practices make them a unique group, and define who they are. 

Studying religious identity takes us back to the 4^th layer of the RSST framework.  Here we paid attention to what a group said about technology and how that point to a distinctive identity narrative, of how they see themselves inside their group, and how do they want others outside their group to see them.

Your task is to explore the website of the church you have been assigned to study and without looking at the “about” section of the site, try to identify the what religious identity these churches present and construct through their websites.

In the class discussion we came up with a number of important questions we would need to answer including:

1(1)    What do the visual aspects on the site (especially pictures) communicate about who is a member or part of their community/church?

2(2)    What do these churches seem to value based on the content/features/themes they highlight on their site?

3(3)    What story do the design and visual aspects of the websites communicate about what makes them a church, and what are their unique characteristics?

4(4)   What would you say are the top priorities of this church, based on the aspects of their services or ministries they highlight?

We identified the places on the website we would need to observe to in order to be able to answer these questions: These include paying attention to:

Pictures (i.e. who in them or what is featured)

Descriptions of programs (esp kids, youth)

What multi-media content is shared (church created content)

What images do they use to illustrate different ideas or topics

Website Design theme

Graphics or Logos used

Other media resources or platforms the church uses

Who or what sites or resources do they link to (internal or external links0

Overall how is the site organized

Using these questions and guides your job is to write a 300+ word description of what this Church’s religious identity is based on a critical reading of their web site. Where possible please use quotes, images and or symbols from the website to back up each of your claims.