Malaysian Christians Online: Faith, Experience, and Social Engagement on the Internet 9811528322, 9789811528323

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Meng Yoe Tan

Malaysian Christians Online Faith, Experience, and Social Engagement on the Internet

Malaysian Christians Online

Meng Yoe Tan

Malaysian Christians Online Faith, Experience, and Social Engagement on the Internet

Meng Yoe Tan Monash University Malaysia Bandar Sunway, Selangor, Malaysia

ISBN 978-981-15-2832-3 ISBN 978-981-15-2833-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This book is, among other things, a collection of interesting stories told by interesting people. I could not have made them up. The willingness of my research participants to share their personal stories is something I am incredibly grateful for. Their experiences with online religion are the heart of this book. I would also like to thank the following people for their guidance, support, and encouragement at different points of this journey: Yeoh Seng Guan, Gary Bouma, Sharon A. Bong, Helen Nesadurai, Gil-Soo Han, Joseph N. Goh, Koh Chien Aun, and friends from the School of Arts and Social Sciences in Monash University Malaysia. A special note of thanks to James Chin from the Asia Institute Tasmania, University of Tasmania. My short visit to the institute in 2018 was an important turning point in the writing of this book. Thanks also to Alexandra Campbell, Ameena Jaafar, and the team from Springer for the work done in getting this book ready for publication. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my family for their support, especially my wife, Sarah. This book is dedicated to my late father, Tan Boon Kim. He was a writer of many books. To God be the glory.

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Abstract

Many facets of social life are now intrinsically linked to the Internet through increasing dependence of user-centric platforms like blogs, social networking sites, online forums, and open source websites. The Malaysian church is not exempt from having to negotiate with an increasingly tech-savvy and networked community of believers. Based primarily on Internet ethnography of blogs and social media groups, as well as interviews with lay Christian bloggers and church pastors, this book looks at how the Internet is a component of everyday religion in the lives of Malaysian Christians at individual, institutional, and national levels. It examines the ways online Christian expressions are increasingly integrated into the everyday religious routines of Christians for the development of their personal identities. This book also shows how the spiritual authority of church pastors can be both challenged and reinforced through creative uses of online tools. Also discussed are some of the creative ways that Christians utilize the Internet to engage with national sociopolitical issues within the context of restrictive and controlled mainstream media. This book relooks critically at the online/offline dichotomy and argues that the binary of a blogger seen as being exclusively either “online” or “offline” is problematic. Instead, I suggest that both realms are lived and experienced simultaneously. Additionally, I also show that while the Internet may be “free”, the users of the Internet are not necessarily so. While the Internet has certainly provided Malaysian Christians with new tools to experience their faith in new ways, several aspects of “old” offline sociocultural habits persist online.

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Contents

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2

Locating the “Everyday” and the “Offline” in Online Christianity . . .

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The Personal Experience: Blogging as Development of Spiritual Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Church in Cyberspace: Authority, Transparency, and Pastors as Online Authors and Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 5

Digital “Surtsey”: Lessons from a New Online Christian Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

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Engaging Malaysia: A Grassroots Approach to Inter/Intra-Religious Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

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Reproducing Ideology: Christians, Facebook Groups, and the Bersih 4 Protests in Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

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Conclusion: Locating the Offline in the Online and Vice-Versa in Malaysian Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2

General demographics of informants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Survey of online activity of informants .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. .

Table 6.1

Socio-political content on the blogs/websites of research informants from April to December 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Table 7.1

Breakdown of Facebook posts on the subject of Bersih 4 in Friends in Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Breakdown of Facebook posts on the subject of Bersih 4 in the End-Time Watchmen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Table 7.2

46 47

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Chapter 1

Introduction

The beginning of the twenty first century has seen the landscape of communication change quite dramatically, particularly with the increased usage of internet technologies around the world. While the invention and subsequent commercialization of internet services are by no means the only reasons for the radical reconfiguration of communication processes, its contribution is significant. Online business transactions are on the increase; long distance relationships are less intimidating with instant messaging programs with audio and video functions; mainstream and alternative news are updated 24 h a day; political election campaigns are increasingly dependent on social media platforms to reach new audiences; distance learning for higher education is no longer as daunting as it used to be; networked computer gaming is no longer a privilege accessible by a few, but for anyone with a phone line and a computer; interest groups, such as school alumni, hobby groups, and more, are increasingly utilizing Web 2.0 networking platforms to gather members and organize activities. On one level, the internet is a space where copies of what we already do are established. For example, a lot of what we know about practical and physical communication is establishing a digital copy in cyberspace. Much of old media as we know it, namely television, radio, and the newspaper, has gradually converged into a single digital platform. Videos, news, music, publishing have already transitioned to a digital platforms and undergone several digital evolutionary cycles. There is an ongoing direct transfer of the familiar into cyberspace. Other aspects of human life have slowly established a presence on the internet, for better or for worse. The conventional forms of authority have also actively sought to establish their influence on cyber-audiences. It is no longer novel for political parties and campaigns to have personalized blogs and websites promoting their cause. In fact, the existence of some form of online social networking is expected in order for those with political aspirations to engage with the masses who congregate online. Beyond the transfer of data and social habits, the internet affords users with new experiences as well. One such feature is that the internet has collapsed most forms of informational barriers and boundaries and anything is open-source possibility. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_1

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1 Introduction

Encyclopedias, dictionaries, audio/video channels, and news sites, have all undergone changes. Conventional media narratives of communication no longer apply, as the receiver can now be the sender and manipulate messages independently and with little interference. The process of authorship and/or authority is no longer linear or singular. Another unique characteristic of the internet is that it allows users to redefine their identities relatively easily. The frequent use of nicknames, avatars, profiles, and other units of self-representation has made the internet a room full of anonymous individuals, whether intentional or not. To configure an avatar to speak, act, and perform as one does in real life might seem to be a natural thing. However, it is also very common for users to design characters that are vastly unlike what they are in the offline, either to express a facet of who they believe they are, or simply for the sheer fun of it. Religion, too, has found its way on to the internet. Religious organizations, such as churches, utilize the web to promote their services, activities, and upload sermons for downloads. Television evangelism, the Christian predecessor of long-distance evangelism that used media technology, required audiences to be at specific places (in front of the television) at a particular time (when the programme is broadcast) and with particular ways of responding (typically through the telephone). Now, livestreams and podcasts of sermons are freely available on church websites or Youtube channels for anyone to see and hear at their convenience. All that is required is some form of device that can connect to the internet, such as a computer or a smartphone. The field of study that this book is primarily situated in is online religion, and it is a field that is fast growing with insightful research conducted around the world. There are several recent case studies of online Christian activities that are studied largely from a textual point of view (Helland, 2005; Young, 2004). Other scholars, like Heidi Campbell and Tim Hutchings, to name just two, have conducted ethnography on online religious communities, and have discussed online and offline religious practices in relation to one another (Campbell, 2007; Hutchings, 2010). In recent times, in tandem with the increased adoption of virtual reality (VR) technologies, there has been increasing focus on virtual experiences of church services and its related rituals, and such practices have begun to further the discussion on materiality, space, and authenticity of religion. This book however, focuses on a slightly earlier period of time in the continuum of online technology and practices, during a time when blogs were a popular form of self-expression, and social media platforms are on the rise. While different technologies provide for different affordances, and therefore different types of experiences, the questions that digital media raises, whether it is a blog, a social network, or virtual 3D space, are similar.

Forms of Online Christianity Expressed

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Forms of Online Christianity Expressed In the past decade, the level and intensity of discussion regarding how the Internet can affect religion has steadily increased. The Internet has the potential to change the way religious institutions and individuals approach issues such as religious hierarchy, access to information, new platforms of spiritual experience and expression among others. This is largely due to the nature of the Internet, which among other things, provides a vast potential of knowledge and information sharing, unbridled and unchecked social interactivity, and most importantly, wider authorship responsibilities. In some ways, this is similar to the social impact brought about through invention of the printing press. Over time, publications such as the Bible and the newspaper were among the catalysts changing the dynamics of religious, social and political authority in the fifteenth century in some parts of the world. While I am not suggesting that the increased usage of the Internet for religious purposes will necessarily result in the overhaul of or revolt against organized religion, there is without doubt a change in how Christianity is being practiced and expressed. Modern Christianity is no stranger to the immaterial world of the Internet. The Vatican, for example, ventured into setting up an official website in 1995. The first version of the website included a function that allowed users to send emails to the Pope (then Pope John Paul II). Perhaps owing to an underestimation of the social dynamics of cyberspace, the website crashed shortly after its introduction owing to a large flood of emails. The website resumed its presence online soon afterwards with upgraded servers and systems but without the previous interactive function to email to the Pope (Dawson & Cowan, 2004, p. 54). Apart from being an early example of a church’s foray in cyberspace, the Vatican’s initial openness to interactivity and its reaction to the overwhelming response serve as one of the earliest examples for the advent of online religion. Since then, thousands of religious organizations have established an official online presence. Within Christianity, an increasing number of churches have websites that offer information and other Christian resources such as articles, sermons, videos, and testimonies. With the recent popularity of social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook, some churches have begun to re-explore ‘interactivity’ by setting up Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Using the media for religious purposes is not new with Christian radio and television programmes in existence (largely in American and some European societies) for decades. But with the Internet, more churches and individual Christians are able to participate as authors, writing and posting content for public consumption. However, this begs the question—has the Internet changed Christianity? Or is this question overly technologically deterministic? The increasing presence of Christianity in cyberspace, be it church websites or personal Christian blogs, is undeniable—but the intangible aspect of its exact nature and influence in Christianity itself is difficult to grasp fully. In Heidi Campbell’s edited volume, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (2012) the contributors provide theoretical discussion regarding online religion along with several case studies to shed light on some of these debates. In the first part of the

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1 Introduction

book, the key areas of debate identified as important to how one frames his/her views of online religion are “ritual”, “identity”, “community”, “authority”, “authenticity”, and “religion”. In Christopher Helland’s discussion of “ritual”, he considers the question of whether “online rituals are real religious rituals” (Helland, 2012, p. 25), and presents opposing perspectives on how an online pilgrimage might or not might not be considered a sacred journey. In Pauline Hope Cheong et al.’s chapter on how the Internet could potentially affect religious authority, she proposed ways in which the online could be seen as a threat to the church as well as how it could be used to complement and reinforce the authority of the church (Cheong, Fischer-Nielsen, Gelfgren, & Ess, 2012, p. 72). Similarly, Lövheim’s (2012) and Radde-Antweiller’s (2012) respective chapters, Identity and Authenticity respectively, brings to bear the complexity of online religious practices and how it can affect a person’s religious experience. Many of the themes discussed in Campbell’s book are also central points of discussion and debate in this book. It would be particularly useful to allow the Malaysian context and case studies of how online religion is expressed to contribute to the discussion of how personal spiritual identities are affected by online practices, whether blogging provides for spiritual experiences of any sort, and whether social-networking groups can significantly impact traditional religious hierarchy. In one of the early academic writings on online religion, Brenda Brasher states that “online religion represents an emergent expression of public values. Its rituals and communities, its theologies and images are the outgrowth of a widespread human effort of a rapidly computerized humanity to spiritualize a novel habitus” (Brasher, 2001, p. 142). Since then, research in the area of online religion has grown. Examples include Lövheim’s (2004) work on European youths using social media for religious purposes outside of the confines of church, and Campbell’s (2007) important discussion on how the internet can challenge how authority and power is negotiated in religious institutions. This would imaginably lead to some skepticism that online religion is a valid form of religious experience. Campbell states that, a “chief concern voiced by many traditional religious organizations, which are often characterised by firm institutional hierarchies, is that the Internet will lure people away from local churches and temples in favour of completely online religious experiences”(Campbell, 2010, p. 87). These concerns, according to Campbell, are the lack of authenticity, relationship, and the development of self-centered people as opposed to the communal environment of churches. Understandably, authenticity and reality are concepts that are hard to grasp in cyberspace, and in large part this is due to it being difficult to define and is largely determined by the perception of users (Tan, 2016). However, to shift away from the either/or question of whether online religion is valid or not, it is imperative we begin to see both these types of religious experience as complementary. Campbell shows through her work that online activity does not lead to social isolation, but in fact many are using internet platforms and resources to supplement their existing activities. Brasher asserts that “online religion is a form of new religious practice that possesses the capacity to transform the religious alternatives with which it now competes for human attention” (Brasher, 2001, p. 23), and makes a case that these

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new practices are not unlike post-temple synagogues that serve a religious/spiritual function for Jewish communities in the diaspora. That may seem like a leap in argument, but borrowing from Lee’s work on Won Buddhist monks and their use of the blog to achieve what he characterizes as “immanence” (Lee, 2009), the space alone should be the determining feature of authenticity or sacredness, but rather the connections, be it social or spiritual, that are developed through it. This is similar to the offline, where religious artifacts derive its meaning when individuals enter into a relationship with it (King, 2009, p. 149). I now turn to consider where to begin in the search for online Christian expressions. Because the Internet is so diverse with varying expressions in the form of websites, a useful place to begin is Christopher Helland’s categorisation of religious websites. Helland (2005) provides two broad categories: “online religion” and “religion online”. “Religion online” describes the provisions of information about and/or services related to various religious groups and traditions. This includes the sites made by institutions. “Online religion”, on the other hand, invites internet visitors to participate in religious practices. The distinction is not absolute (Helland, 2005). The critical point of these definitions is that the way we interact, or interactivity, is a crucial defining aspect of how we should study web-based religion. Helland’s scheme is useful in helping researchers draw broad categorizations and provide insights into the various forms of Christian expression online. Justin Farrell, in The Divine Online: Civic Organizing, Identity Building, and Internet Fluency Among Different Religious Groups (Farrell, 2011), provides an empirical breakdown of what American church websites are commonly made up of. By providing statistics on a website’s ability to mobilize its members to engage in civic action; visibility of denomination; the functionality of the website, Farrell examines and demonstrates how different organizations in the same sectors (in this case, Christianity) use their websites to build congregational identity and encourage activity (Farrell, 2011, p. 74). In this regard of describing the visual mechanics of church websites, he succeeds. In Helland’s categorisation, Farrell’s research would neatly fall into a study of religion online. However, two critical points regarding Helland and Farrell’s approach to religion online need to be raised to refine the online religion/religion online debate: Firstly, Farrell states that his empirical work is based on “particular congregational websites instead of user activity” and adds that “the congregation website is an accurate reflection of the values, purpose, and identity of the individual congregation” (Farrell, 2011, p. 87). This raises the question of why “user activity” was not considered an accurate reflection of whether the values, purpose and identity of the individual congregation resonate with its users? This information is understandably hard to obtain, but is nevertheless crucial in presenting a fuller picture of online religion. Secondly, the approach that denominational preferences as displayed on the website are wholly representative of the church identity favours a “religion online” approach. This could be further expanded to explore the phenomenon further. Consider the following scenarios: First, a church seeker visits a purely informational website of a Catholic church, clicks on the schedule for mass to obtain the information necessary for him to physically attend a mass; Secondly, an Evangelical

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1 Introduction

website, with several potentially highly interactive functions such as online tithing, online group prayer, and others, is completely not utilized. Does this mean that the “religion online”-styled Catholic church website is more interactive than the “online religion”-styled Evangelical website? The above questions are raised because Helland’s online religion/religion online model may be more fluid than described. Robert Glenn Howard, for example, argues that no such distinction exists purely in a binary form, and a scale of what constitutes spiritual interactivity online would generate a more fruitful discussion (Howard, 2009, p. 730). In other words, there is no a precise boundary between online religion and religion online. Glenn Young, similarly, has critiqued Helland’s framework and suggested that all religious websites are in fact, online religion (Young, 2004). He gives examples of how even on information driven websites, a click of a button is technically engaging the information. This could mean searching for a church email to send a prayer request or searching for meeting times for church worship services are attempts to engage in some sort of spiritual activity—thus opening the possibility for a spiritual experience. In response to Young’s critical analysis of online religion/ religion online, Helland wrote an updated approach in which while he acknowledged the dated perspective of his original work. He argued that a church offering instructions for a ritual does not constitute as providing an environment for a ritual (Helland, 2007, p. 11). While he conceded that although it is a subjective categorization, it was also easy to distinguish between sites that are interactive and sites that are primarily informational. In short, it is difficult to know for sure whether a particular religious activity is actually taking place online if any case study is approached with a pre-conceived notion of online/offline. While the above debate will possibly continue to develop for some time, I suggest that the issue of whether a website is interactive or not is secondary to how the user interacts and experiences a website, and whether these experiences contribute to what we understand as the “offline” self. A position that I take is that cyberspace is not necessarily a bordered space from the offline. There are individuals in society that are entering a new phase of cyber-existence where they are always online, at least psychologically. For such individuals the two aspects of online and offline have converged into one: Cyberspace is possibly shifting its social position—less and less is it a separate territory but it has become a critical component (not even just an extension) of a person’s life. An application of the above theoretical perspective would render the distinction of online religion/religion online less consequential. An example of this can be found within Helland’s own case study in Online Religion as Lived Religion. To demonstrate that just because a church offers an “interactive” option to members it does not mean it is an online expression of religion, Helland uses the Church of Simple Faith’s “e-communion” as an example. This church, while giving the text and sequence of the ritual to the members who are reading it online, still required members to prepare and partake of bread and wine on their own in the physical. The members would then eat the bread and drink the wine in front of the computer screen as the ceremony ensues online. Helland uses this to argue the lack of authenticity of the online ritual suggesting that because a majority of the “e-communion” takes is

Types of Online Christian Content and Spheres of Influence

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dependent on offline actions it weakens the authenticity of online spiritual activity (Helland, 2007, p. 11). However, I wish to position this same case study differently. If we apply the notions of online/offline inclusivity and inter-relationships, there is in fact no possibility at present of complete disembodiment at the moment in cyberspace; the body remains a critical conduit to whatever is experienced. One must then approach Internet research with some balance. Although one can appreciate Brasher’s enthusiasm that “online religion represents an emergent expression of public values” and that there is a “widespread human effort of a rapidly computerized humanity to spiritualize a novel habitus” (Brasher, 2001, p. 142), one cannot assume that online religion is always novel and new. Old boundaries will resurface and re-establish itself in new platforms. Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas Cowan’s optimistic view that cyber activity is “being mediated electronically, and this mediation allows things to be done in ways that are somewhat new and sometimes entirely innovative” (Dawson & Cowan, 2004, p. 1) is followed by the caution that “cyberspace is not quite as unusual a place as sometimes predicted. Life in cyberspace is in continuity with so-called ‘real life’, and this holds true for religion as well. People are doing online pretty much what they do offline, but they are doing it differently”. Mia Lövheim, in Young People, Religious Identity, and the Internet, argues that analysis must consider “the construction of identity in relation to online interaction as a process situated in the structuring conditions of the offline as well as the online (Lövheim, 2004, p. 61). Thus, the study of the online must be complemented with the study of the offline. The examples that follow this section provides a description of how the offline and online practices of Christian bloggers in Malaysia has a direct influence and effect on each other, to the point that as one of my informants put it, “It is part and parcel of the daily life, the internet is not a separate thing, it is just part of the infrastructure”.

Types of Online Christian Content and Spheres of Influence To further aid the understanding of how online Christianity can be expressed online and how different interactions can potentially take place. Here are some types of websites that are relatively common on the Internet. They are not exhaustive, but they provide a reference of the kinds of Christian content that commonly surface.

Church Websites The most easily identifiable Christian presence online are websites of churches. Due to the ease of searching for and accessing huge amounts of information on the Internet it is not surprising that churches, both “mega-churches” (churches with large congregations, usually in the thousands) and smaller churches, establish their presence online. A survey conducted in the United States of America by Grey Matter

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1 Introduction

Research reported that 22% out of a demographically representative sample size of 1011 adults have visited a website of a local church (in the context of this survey, a church refers to a religious organization that is not necessarily Christian) at least once in the last 6 months (Grey Matter Research, 2012). A notable statistic is that roughly 10% of people unattached to any church have visited a local church website at least once in the past 6 months. This translates to an estimate of ten million visitors in the past 6 months. This is apart from people who are members of churches who do visit their own church websites. Although an estimate is merely just that—an estimate—and although the survey is demographically located in America alone and is not representative of the rest of the world, it suggests that there are foreseeable uses of official church websites. The survey does include statistics on the purpose of usage of these websites. Forty three percent of the people who visit these websites use it to find out more about service and meeting times. Other common reasons include searching out what a church offers in terms of activities and events, and to see what the beliefs of a particular church are. Fewer people, however, use these church websites to request for prayer (18%), send messages to the pastor (12%), or posted in forums (5%), although it is unclear if this last figure is due to many church websites not having a forum. These general results point to some credibility in what Helland says about “religion online” (following his definition) and how most informational websites provide little interactivity. However, as I have argued earlier, interactivity can be viewed in terms less narrow that what Helland prescribes—as other activities such as downloading a podcast, or checking out service times, are already forms of interaction. This basic survey does not provide information on what people did with the information they received after searching out these church websites out and if anything ever came out of it. The result of the preliminary interaction is not recorded but that does not mean there was no interaction with “religion online”. However, regardless of what one’s definition of interactivity lies, the church website remains a key player in the online representation of Christianity.

Facebook Groups and Other Social Media Forums It is easy to assume a lack of interactivity on the part of a conventional church website. This is not unlike many non-religious corporations or businesses with a web presence online. For instance, I was a meeting some time ago with about marketing strategies and one of the topics of discussion was the usefulness of a website. One person in the meeting remarked that the only people who visit company websites are people who work within the company and the company’s competitors. Although that statement was made with little justification, it may not be entirely untrue. Increasingly, corporations are maintaining multiple web presences now to further connect with consumers and potential consumers. It is not uncommon for companies to now maintain an “official” corporate website for general information and also maintain a Facebook and Twitter page.

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Of course, such interactions can potentially create potentially tricky publicrelations circumstances because it is easier for consumers to publicly post negative feedback on their wall (and in some cases, the feedback goes viral). Not all negative feedback, however, results in negative publicity for corporations as that depends on how they respond and resolve the issues as well. But apart from the organizations’ ability to utilize social media to increase their visibility and interaction with their members, members are also able to utilize social media to interact with other likeminded people without being under the umbrella of any organization. Religion is similar in certain aspects. While churches might not be commercializing their efforts in the corporate sense, it is definitely within some churches’ interest to want to be known (increasing visibility), promote their activities, and draw in a larger membership. But, like non-religious interest groups, Christians have also set up their own Facebook groups that are unrelated to any particular formal Christian organizations. For example, Malaysian Christians is a generic group that provides information on any matters pertaining to Christianity in Malaysia, while Friends in Conversation is a loosely affiliated group of Malaysian Christians who discuss socio-political, doctrinal, and philosophical issues within and beyond Malaysia. A separate website, called Gracehope, is a social network for Christians around the world. It allows members to post “inspirations” (which function like a Facebook status update), “prayer requests” (which people can respond to you by clicking on “prayed for”), or write prayers in the response box, or their testimonies in “praise reports” for public viewing. The website allows for networking amongst Christians in similar fashion to Facebook, but tries its best to encourage only Christians to sign up as members. If an organization’s website caters to the purposes of the organization and a social networking platform caters to particular social networks, then the blog can be seen as a personal approach to online religion. A web log, or blog, is a form of online journaling that to different degrees has a public audience. Blogs are immensely popular because it gives people the opportunity to express their thoughts, views, talents, and others, in a public sphere without any organizational approvals, such as record labels, churches, and so forth. Certain blogs have been labelled as a form of “citizen journalism” where news and events from the perspective of ordinary citizens have become “instruments of democratization” (Tan & Zawawi, 2008, p. 49) and alternative perspectives are made available for public consumption. Blog featuring religious content has also increased tremendously, with personal religious views and experiences are now easily posted online. This means that church organizations, or the pulpit, no longer are the sole disseminator of spiritual and religious information. Pauline Hope Cheong et.al observes that “the blogosphere serves as an interesting social laboratory to examine the emerging mode of religious connections” (Cheong, Halavais, & Kwon, 2008, p. 111) and that religious blogging can include fulfilling the extreme needs to “confrontation and opposition” as well as personal needs. Cheong, in the same article, also provides qualitative findings as to why bloggers post religious content. Some of the top reasons for religious blogging is to “convey and perpetuate the values of religious bloggers”, to “give a defence of their faith”, and to reflect on their

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1 Introduction

“personal experiences and thoughts” (Cheong et al., 2008, p. 111). These reasons are both outward looking (propagating their beliefs), and inward looking (personal reflection). Cheong asserts that: Blogging provides for the transmission of values and culture, ranging from an explicitly evangelical mission to defend the faith, to goad readers to become seekers, to the subtle expressions of religious views ingrained in personal reflections. In these ways, blogs may serve as an extension of the priesthood of all believers, providing believers an avenue of expression past the precincts of institutionalized religion. (Cheong et al., 2008, p. 123)

There is a wide variety of Christian blogs, such as blogs about personal spiritual experiences, blogs about personal dissent toward church, blogs about Christian apologetics, and many others. This makes studying Christian expressions on blogs an exciting field. In my book, several of my informants are authors of their personal blogs, and it is not just their blogs that are interesting but also their experiences and inspirations that result in their expressions that are equally compelling.

Online News Portals Beyond the Christian bloggers and Christian organizations, secular news portals also serve as a platform for active religious expression. The difference between news media portals and blogs and Christian organizations is that they are not necessarily affiliated with any particular religious organization. Because issues regarding religion arise with great frequency in the socio political arena, both print newspapers and online news site provide news coverage for such issues. Online news sites, however, may provide a feedback mechanism where readers are able to post their views and comments relating to the news article. It is in the comments section where possibly some interactions might take place. However, it is worth noting that in this particular platform, the freedom to express has to some extent demonstrated that the tone of inter-religious dialogue (such as Muslims and Christians responding to a news story about the mistreatment of their faiths under the same news article) can be rather hostile and degenerate in content. The categories described above are broad categorisations. Increasingly what we see are overlaps and fusions of two or more of the above types of web expression. Many churches now combine elements of a conventional church “corporation” website with personal social networking elements. More importantly, however, is less about how a website is constructed but why it is constructed the way it is. Another way to distinguish these websites is by determining its potential or intended sphere of influence. For example, a personal blog could be written with only a small circle of friends in mind as the target audience. This means that the sphere of influence of the blog is relatively limited (though not insignificant). Other blogs or online groups, however, might be set up for the purpose of engaging the larger Christian community in a particular church or country. The BBC news report is likely to command the attention of a larger audience from around the world.

Types of Online Christian Content and Spheres of Influence

11

Regardless of the different spheres of influences a particular website attempts to position itself in, the principal argument that the online/offline Christianity are inseparable is equally pertinent. Although the means of expression, and the dynamics of interaction may vary (and the Internet certainly provides new ways in which Christian issues can be addressed), the potential is always grounded in the offline. It is clear that there is an increasingly robust and dynamic relationship between Christianity and cyberspace. Campbell states that “digital culture negotiates our understandings of religious practice in ways that can lead to new experiences, authenticity, and spiritual reflexivity”, and that the study of online religion can be approached as “bridge that connects and extends online religious practices and spaces into offline religious contexts, and vice versa” (Campbell, 2012, p. 4). Notable characteristics of Christian practice, belief, and behaviour has certainly permeated through to cyberspace. Similarly, Internet practices and behaviour has begun to embed itself within the norms of today’s Christian lifestyle. The overlapping point between everyday Christianity and everyday Internet practices are the individuals who expresses this integration on a daily (or at least, frequent) basis. For this reason, along with what Campbell describes as the need to consider online religion as “informed by the social structures and cultural practice of life in a technological and information-saturated society” (Campbell, 2012, p. 4), a strong emphasis is placed on the authors of online Christian content in this book, for it is within these active participants where one can potential derive the most unique perspective of how the blend between the online and offline virtues of Internet and Christianity is maintained and negotiated, particularly in the Malaysian context. Thus far, very little work has been done on Malaysian Christians’ online presence and activities. This book is an examination of how Christians in Malaysia define themselves in today’s digital age. More and more churches in Malaysia, particularly in the urban communities, have introduced websites, Facebook communities, Twitter networks, and other forms of social media usage into their everyday practices. Churches and members share event updates, testimonies, and other informational material online. There are also individuals who express their faith more prominently on blogs than in real life. There are Christians who claim the office and title of prophets and prophetesses, express political views in the Christian context, tell the world of their spiritual exploits, write their own Biblical commentaries without reference to church teachings, organize gatherings on their own, and much more. Combined with the existing formal and official (or institutional) church expressions, the Christian community online is increasingly one that cannot be ignored. All of the above contribute to the idea that “online religion” is a type of “everyday religion”, becoming part of the individual’s everyday religious practices and expressions. This recognition brings about new questions pertaining to everyday religion online. Various scholars have already begun to tackle the question of the authenticity of online religious rituals and practices (Helland, 2012), whether genuine religious communities can be formed onlined (Howard, 2011), and whether traditional notions of church power and authority are undermined or reinforced (Campbell, 2007). This book seeks to contribute to some of these evolving discussions, and chart the progress of the Malaysian church in cyberspace in particular. To begin, one can

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1 Introduction

apply the two ideas noted above regarding online practices on cyber-Christianity. We can ask how Christians have adapted to doing things in a new way, and Christians are doing new things with the Christian faith in cyberspace, and why. From here, we can begin to derive many questions.

Malaysia as a Site for Online Christianity Malaysia serves as an interesting research site, both from the aspects of Christianity and the Internet. According to the last census, Christians form approximately 9.2% of the Malaysian population,1 the third largest religious group in Malaysia (Islam is the majority religion at 61.3%, followed by Buddhism at 19.8%). Religion in Malaysia is a socially and politically contested territory. These conflicts involve matters big and minute regarding the past, present, and even future. Malaysia’s religious past is still being debated. This can be seen by the ongoing debates about history textbooks and syllabus in national schools which several critics (particularly non-Muslims) have argued, depict Malaysian history to be principally a MalayIslamic narrative. Other than historical narratives, Malaysian society is also engaged in other current issues such as religious freedom for non-Muslims. Some examples include Lina Joy’s failed application to change her name on her national identification card (IC) due to her conversion from Islam to Christianity (Tan & Lee, 2008); the systematic demolishing of Hindu temples, including a 107 year old temple in the town of Shah Alam in 2006; the government’s attempt to ban Bibles that are printed in the Malay language, thus effectively cutting supply to existing Malay speaking Christians (Chong, 2011); to other widely debated issues such as certain conservative Islamic groups labelling Valentine’s day as haram (unclean) and equating sensual immoral activities as the culture of Christians (Habibu, 2011a). These events suggest that the future of the freedom of worship in Malaysia remains unclear. There are three factors that influence how Christian expressions take place in Malaysia. Firstly, there are external factors such as pro-Islamic government policies which have hindered conventional non-Muslim representation and expression in the mass media. Secondly, internal factors such as an individual’s relationship with the church, as a church member, or with the Malaysian Christian churches play an important role in influencing how online content is shaped. This relationship could be either a positive or negative one. For example, there are blogs that actively promote what is going on in their church, and what their leaders promote. On the other hand, there are church members, or non/former members, who use the blog as a platform of resistance, dissecting and questioning the church. Thirdly, personal factors in any individual’s life also can contribute to their online expressions.

1 Population distribution and basic demographic characteristic report 2010, Department of Statistics Malaysia.

Malaysia as a Site for Online Christianity

13

These personal factors could be issues such as relationships, moods, and others. All three factors are oftentimes inter-related. It is important at this juncture to give a background regarding the state of Malaysia’s Internet activity at the time where my research project took place. The Internet plays a big part of Malaysian social life, as compared to much of Asia. According to the 2013 report on worldwide Internet usage by Internet World Stats, Malaysia has 17.7 million Internet users out of a population of 29 million people.2 This may seem like a very small number of the total worldwide Internet user count of 1.6 billion people, but we need to contextualize these numbers. In the Asian continent, Malaysia has the 9th highest number of Internet users. With an estimated population of 27 million in 2012, Malaysia’s Internet penetration rate (the percentage of people with Internet access) is 64.6%, 7th highest in the Asian continent. In laymen’s terms, out of 3 people in Malaysia, 2 would have Internet access. This is a staggering number considering that 10 years ago, in the year 2000, the Internet penetration rate was only roughly 15% of the total population in the country. To further demonstrate Malaysia’s Internet prowess, the country has 1.3 million broadband users (as opposed to the basic “dial-up”), 4th highest in Asia. In short: Malaysia is one of the fast growing, connected, Internet savvy countries in the world, let alone Asia. Connectivity aside, Malaysia is also on the forefront of one of cyberspace’s most popular activity: social networking. Malaysia has the 5th highest number of Facebook accounts registered in Asia, with an estimated 13 million users. In a 2010 BBC news report, “Japanese Have Fewest Digital Friends on Social Networks”,3 it reported that from a sample of 50,000 respondents, Malaysian users of social networking sites have the highest average number of “friends”, higher than the average found in digitally high density countries like Brazil, Japan, the United States, and even China. While such statistics are questionable in their accuracy in that they do not measure a user’s level of sincerity, double accounts, and other social factors and is by no means a conclusive report, they can at least point to the idea that Malaysians are quite savvy in utilizing the Internet for social purposes. There are several examples of cyber-activity that have transcended self-indulgence (such as blogging about the latest food or last night’s alcoholic frenzy in some club with friends) and move on to larger scale community activities. An oft mentioned cyber-milestone in Malaysia is the 2008 General Elections, when the ruling coalition in the country at the time, Barisan Nasional (BN), lost two-thirds majority in parliament for the first time since 1969. Many, from academics to activists, apportion a huge slice of credit to the hundreds of independent bloggers for swelling up grassroots support for the opposition mainly through providing largely uncensored alternative perspectives from the traditional government regulated mainstream media outlets (Ooi, Saravanamuttu, & Lee, 2008; Tan & Zawawi, 2008). Some notable works include a famous blogger, Raja Petra

2 3

http://www.internetworldstats.com http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11501625

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1 Introduction

Kamaruddin, whose website Malaysia Today,4 regularly posted leaked classified documents fashion that implicate wrongdoing or corruption on the government’s part. This is similar to the well-publicized leaks published by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.5 Though on a smaller scale, Malaysia certainly is not new to online leaks. Many Malaysian churches have utilized the internet to establish networks, provide updates, and promote events and activities, but these are merely some of the usages and experiences of the Internet by both church leaders and lay people. Online Christian expressions can also be found on the public sphere where engagement and dialogue with other faiths and political institutions take place in varying degrees. As such, Christians in Malaysia are not exempt from using the Internet to engage in socio-political issues that directly affects them. One of the most high-profile issues in recent years is the Malaysian government’s attempt to ban the usage of the word “Allah” (which means “God” in Arabic and usually used in a monotheistic context). This has generated robust responses from Christian bloggers, with most falling in line with the Christian Federation of Malaysia’s (CFM) opposition to such a ban on the grounds of it restricting freedom of worship. Others have expressed a willingness to compromise by using a more generic term, “Tuhan” to avoid conflict over semantics. Christian websites, such as The Micah Mandate6 and The Agora,7 provide avenues for debate on this issue in the “comments” section of their postings. Similar to the “Allah” issue, Christian unity (and disarray) was on display in the attempts by the Malaysian Ministry of Home Affairs to confiscate Malay language Bibles, and subsequently release them with restrictive conditions. The conditions are to ensure that the Bibles are not used for proselytization among the Malay-speaking Muslims. This was also not well received, with many individuals rejecting conditions attached to what they considered a holy text and not accepting the released copies of the Bibles. These national-scale issues aside, there is also a vibrant community of Christians in Malaysia who express their personal journeys of faith through this public platform. Whether using their own name or a pseudonym, several actively chart their life stories, and their spiritual journey for others to see. For example, a blog that I have observed during fieldwork has chronicled the journey of her conversion to Christianity from conservative Taoist beliefs. She has also blogged extensively about her family relationships, career pathway, marriage, and other personal matters. Each of these aspects of her life was written in reflection of what she believed God has done in her life.8 These life stories are interjected with insights relating to her

4

http://www.malaysiatoday.com http://www.wikileaks.com 6 http://www.themicahmandate.org 7 http://theagora.blogspot.com 8 All research informants introduced and described in this book, their current location, churches associated with their narratives, and their exact blog names, are de-identified unless stated otherwise. Pseudonyms are used instead. Direct quotations from their personal blogs are paraphrased to further ensure anonymity. 5

Key Research Questions

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personal Bible study as well. Another example that I encountered was a blog by a couple, Jane and Jon, who professed that God’s calling in their lives were to be prophets, warning people of the impending end of the world and the moral failures of churches and pastors in these times. They explicitly stated that the blog is one of their primary vehicles of disseminating their messages.9 A survey of their blog (they share one blog) shows no evident affiliation on their part to any particular church institution. In summary, Malaysia is a country where independent online religious entrepreneurship is on the rise, where politics is increasingly fought on the virtual terrain, where communication between personal friends are increasingly taking place on online social networking platforms, and where spiritual matters are engaged.

Key Research Questions This book is mainly interested in the different ways and purposes in which the Internet has been utilized by Malaysian Christians to express their faith. The new affordances provided by cyberspace has led to new kinds of religious experiences for its users, especially if we follow Marshall McLuhan’s famous claim that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964). In that vein, some qualities may also be minimised or even lost because the Internet is vastly different from its predecessors. It is then pertinent to ask how Malaysian Christians make sense of the interactive, non-linear, fluid, deceptively immaterial and unpredictable authorship and narrative potential of the Internet. As it is not uncommon to transfer rituals, artefacts, religious symbols, and a sense of community into a digital platform, what aspects of their Christian faith are negotiated and interacted within cyberspace? There are a number of subsidiary questions that arise out of the primary research question. Firstly, can Christian spirituality be experienced, shared, and transmitted in cyberspace? I am interested in locating online Christian practices that are being incorporated as part of a believer’s everyday ritual practice. If group prayers, attending small group Bible study, worship services and doing charitable works are possible online, are these to be evaluated as valid Christian practices (comparable to conventional offline equivalents) that can affect a person’s personal faith? Furthermore, if the Internet apportions significantly more authorial power to the lay Christian, would online Christianity have any transformative impact on conventional power structures of the church, where communication is predominantly pulpitcentric? Currently, there exist efforts at both institutional and individual levels to publish Christian material online. Some churches encourage their members to link up under the umbrella of a church website, while Christians also write on blogs and moderate forums independently. Some of these websites contain alternative interpretations of

9

Taken from an interview with Jane and Jon on 11 August, 2011.

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1 Introduction

Christianity and the Bible, which are not necessarily the official church position. There are also personal blogs that tell of people’s experiences (both good and bad) with certain churches and pastors. What are the consequences of these new freedoms to share content? Are there changing dynamics of church hierarchies and authority due to the emergence of the Internet? Is this the case in Malaysia, and if it is, how are these challenges expressed and negotiated by lay-Christian bloggers and pastors alike? All of the above questions are dependent on how one views the Internet. While there is much scholarly discussion about the nature of cyberspace and how virtual reality and tangible reality are inter-connected and influence each other, there are not enough empirical details of how this “inter-relationship” works. In many of these works the examples usually used to demonstrate inter-spatial influences are confined to obvious visual signifiers and commonly observed practices. There is a need to further explore the “in-betweens” of these exchanges—such as context, motives, cultural background, politics, moods, and other factors which would in one way or another, determine the way cyberspace and “real life” mutually affects one another.

An Overview of This Book This book is structured in a way that makes it easier to see how online tools are utilized by various Christian individuals and groups to affect different spheres of influence. Broadly speaking, the focus begins with individual narratives, such as the blogger and how spiritual experiences and development are experienced through online activities; moves on to the institutional perspective, with a particular focus on church pastors’ perspectives on online Christianity, before venturing into the subject of larger online communities on social networks and their ways of engaging issues affecting Malaysian society. In the next chapter, Locating the “Everyday” and the “Offline” in Online Christianity, some of the main theoretical threads that this book is anchored on will be discussed in this chapter. The first is in the area of Internet studies, where I aim to build upon the notion that it is impossible to study the online and offline realms separately. The second area involves theories relating to Christianity and religion at large. The concept of “everyday religion”, which emphasizes religion as a lived experience involving habits and rituals will be critically examined in the context of both institutional and personal Christianity. The third thread are theories relating to “online religion” itself. By merging ideas from the first two threads, we can begin to consider “online Christianity” as a form of “everyday religion”. Actornetwork theory is also introduced at this stage as the methodological approach used to trace the subtle networks of interactions between the online and offline lived experiences of the informants. Chapter 3, The Personal Experience: Blogging as Development of Spiritual Identity will mainly consider online Christianity on a personal level and how different individuals in Malaysia incorporate the Internet into their everyday

An Overview of This Book

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repertoires of Christian expression. The descriptions in this chapter (and in all subsequent chapters) serve to demonstrate how Christian online activities are linked and networked to various offline factors of the Christian individual. This chapter in particular will elucidate a number of ways in which blogs and other online activities are blended into the personal Christian experience of some of my research informants. It will also show how the Internet can play an active role in the on-going formation of Christian identities. The argument this chapter makes is that while the Internet is free, people are not, and that regardless of how individuals and groups attempt to harness the possibilities for new discussions and alternative expressions, there will always be an innate tendency to re-create some of the existing boundaries online, be it social, psychological, or spiritual. These contentions are made apparent in Malaysia’s multi-religious context. The primary case study in this chapter is about a lady, Stark, who was raised in a staunch Taoist family and converted to Christianity at the age of 18 against her family’s wishes. The subsequent balancing act of using the Internet to express her beliefs and keeping her beliefs a taboo in the “offline” serves as the focal point of theoretical analyses. Also discussed is the long running and complicated Islamic-Christian conversion controversy in Malaysia, where proselytization of Muslims are prohibited—yet in the context of cyberspace it is difficult to define what constitutes “proselytization” and how it could possibly be legislated. Chapter 4, Church in Cyberspace: Authority, Transparency, and Pastors as Online Authors and Citizens shifts the focus of the discussion to the institution of the church. This chapter is presented in two parts. The first part features a case study of how a group of church members attempted to subvert the authority a major church in Malaysia by openly exposing what they consider to be wrongful administration of the church. This is followed by a discussion on the ethical considerations of blogging dissent, and the need for internet literacy education in churches. The second part re-casts the pastors as participants of everyday religion online, and they provide their views on a variety of issues relating to church relationships, the authenticity of online spirituality, the appropriateness of the Internet as a public tool for intra-church dialogue, and others. By comparison, this chapter focuses on the personal online activities that these pastors themselves engage in on a regular basis. I argue that the everyday lives of pastors need to be studied as well to provide a more complete picture of what “everyday” Christianity represents as they are still major stakeholders in Christianity. In Chaps. 5 and 6, social media, particularly Facebook is featured as the main avenues where Christian groups gather online. The two chapters are linked, but clearly serve different purposes. Chapter 5, Lessons from a New Online Christian Community, is an observation of the first days of a Facebook group for Christians. It comprises a large proportion of Malaysian users, and focuses on the theological discussion of the end-times in Christendom. In the broader academic scope of internet studies, one of the early and still ongoing debates of how people interacted online is whether an online communicative platform, such as a forum, Facebook group, or gaming server, can be considered a community. While theoretically there are sound arguments on both sides of the aisle, The End-Time Watchmen served as an ethnographic site that could further our understanding on how people came

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1 Introduction

together, interacted, and potentially became part of a religious “community” on the internet. Apart from its contribution to the “community” debate, this chapter contributes significantly to the understanding of Malaysian Christianity—that a Malaysian group does not need to talk about Malaysian things to make it identifiable as Malaysian. Rather, this is a group that discusses theological things (in that theology in itself does not belong to any culture group). This chapter serves an important transition into the final parts of the book, which deals with Christian online communities in Malaysia in their various engagements in the Malaysian socio-political arena. Chapter 6, Engaging Malaysia: A Grassroots Approach to Inter/Intra-Religious Communication, continues from the previous chapter’s foundational work of defining an online community, and maps the recent socio-political discourse that involves Christianity in Malaysia, and how these issues (including the highly publicized issue of banning “Allah”, the Arabic word for God, from use in a Christian publication) have been represented, or misrepresented, by traditional media as well as online media. It also examines the foray of the church into cyberspace for the purpose of engaging national socio-political issues. Despite the Internet’s potential, there is little representation of the grassroots Christian voice in the Malaysian mainstream media due to media ownership by the Malaysian government at the time. Grassroots movements, however, do exist outside of the mainstream media, and this chapter looks at ways in which some Christian individuals and groups have attempted to fill the aforementioned lack of national discourse by using their blogs and social networking platforms such as Facebook to engage with socio-political narratives in Malaysia to varying degrees of success. Much of the focus of this chapter is on a private Facebook group consisting of Christian intellectuals called Friends in Conversation. The specific interest of this group is how the online discourses is utilized for various forms of political mobilization, even if it is on a small scale. For instance, a long series of Facebook discussions subsequently led to the publication of a book informing Christians and their role in Malaysian democracy. The group was also highly active in the period leading up to Bersih 2.0, a major demonstration held in Kuala Lumpur in 2011 demanding clean and fair elections in Malaysia. While Friends in Conversation played no part in the official organizing of the event, the broader grassroots-natured style of mobilization was also significantly evident in the group’s activity, dominating the Facebook discussion wall with various calls to participate in the political protest. The final substantive chapter in the book brings the two main Facebook groups into a direct comparison about how they approached a major political event in Malaysia, Bersih 4, in 2015. This chapter, Re-producing Ideology: A Case Study on Facebook Christian Groups and the Bersih 4 Rally is an opportunity to more fully demonstrate theoretical ideas that arise out of observing group communication dynamics in an online Malaysian Christian context. All communities have structures and core ideological identities, including those that are online. In Facebook groups, for example, there may be formal rules that govern the technical aspects of how communication takes place, and informal rules that inform the cultural dynamic of any community. These informal preferences are not always evident and surface only

An Overview of This Book

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at critical moments as a means to assert the core ideological identity of group. Two closed Facebook groups consisting primarily of Malaysian Christians serve as case studies in the discussion of how online religious communities communicate preferred Christian ideologies to its members. Formally, these groups encourage an open exchange of ideas on any issues pertaining to Christianity in the Malaysian context, and due to this, a variety of doctrinal, social, and political issues are debated in the group. However, preferred perspectives eventually emerge in these discussions. This paper specifically point to how both groups engaged its members in the run-up to the "Bersih 4" protests in Malaysia. The two-day street rally to demand for electoral reform in Malaysia drew a mixed response from the Christian community, as evidenced by the two groups taking opposite stances on whether Christians should participate in socio-political activism. The presented narrative of the street protests, the ensuing discussion, and the subsequent silencing of dissent is demonstrative of a systematic management of a group's ideological identity. These findings raise questions on theoretical ideas on the dynamics of online religious communities and the democratization of religious authority online. The concluding part to book will cover a few topics. Firstly, it is a summary of key theoretical ideas that arise out of the case studies, and where to go next in the ever-evolving field of online religion. Notably, much of these exceptions are rooted not in the technological, but in the socio-cultural aspect. Finally, I also provide a summary of the key arguments made in the book and raise new questions about online religion that can serve to inform further research. Secondly, this chapter will also serve as a post-script that addresses the media and religion landscape in Malaysia after the shock electoral results on May 9, 2018, where the ruling coalition lost power for the first time since independence. The entire narrative in the book is situated prior to this change, and therefore the socio-political context is tied to the policies and culture of the past administration. This chapter then provides an opportunity to consider how things may be different in the future and poses several questions that readers can consider in this “New Malaysia”.

Chapter 2

Locating the “Everyday” and the “Offline” in Online Christianity

The subject of this book is contextualized in the intersection of the internet, everyday religion, and Malaysia. While the previous chapter has already provided an introduction to the Malaysian context, this chapter will be focusing on the relationship between the internet and religion. This discussion will be presented in three parts. The first section explores the nature of the online/offline boundary, and how they are inseparable factors in research and analysis. The second area involves an in-depth discussion of the notion of “everyday religion”, or specifically, “everyday Christianity”. The key idea here is that everyday religion, which emphasizes a lived experience involving habits, rituals etc. should not necessarily be studied apart from “organized religion”, such as the institutional church. Rather, the church can be included as a part of everyday religion. The third and final theoretical thread follows the established proposition that the online/offline and personal/organized religion must be studied simultaneously. Thus, we will look at theories of online religion and consider the ways in which online expressions of religiosity and spirituality are framed and influenced by, as well as, influencing human society. To conclude this chapter, I propose the use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a means to methodologically bind the key theoretical ideas that underpin this book.

The Dynamics of the Internet’s Material Existence Much debate and discussion has surfaced since the founding of the World Wide Web and its subsequent evolution. It is important to participate in this discussion because how one defines cyberspace, together with its perceived dimensions and characteristics, determines how we interpret any datum that are related to it. As an example, an on-going debate about cyberspace is whether cyber-social networks are actually “communities”. If one accepts the premise that “communities” can exist online, then we might see a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) platform as a community of people with working relationships with common © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_2

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2 Locating the “Everyday” and the “Offline” in Online

goals. Another example is to consider a Facebook group of like-minded Christians who actively contribute and engage each other on various topics affecting Christianity a “community” of people who engage in conversation, something which is considered essential in any social relationship. However, if one accepts that no “communities” can exist online, then an MMORPG experience would be considered as isolated experiences with non-relational meaning. Similarly, the said Facebook group would be disregarded as merely text exchanges with little emotional investment or genuine relationships formed. Both views are very different, and are equally important. The third way of approaching this is that the online/offline divide is irrelevant to the relationships that are formed because the basis of a community is the human. A common framework for thinking about the internet is that it is a place of being. Instead, I posit that it is more a state of being. It is possible for one to be online and offline at the same time because of the various interactions that simultaneously takes place in a person’s offline and online representations. It is not difficult to see how cyberspace can be conveniently perceived as a bordered location. It is after all perceived as a place where people can cross in and out of, given and denied entry and accessing different regulations and lifestyles upon entry; This line of thinking opens up space-centric questions: If the internet is a place, is this space a viable platform for human experience, expression, and relationships? However, isolating the online from the offline potentially limits the exploration of the above questions. Instead, one can consider that cyberspace encompasses the physical user, and that its boundaries are not quite what we have always understood it to be. Catherine Vasseleu’s description of cyberspace and virtual reality serves as an apt introduction to what will be discussed in this chapter: Virtual realities are computer generated systems which use cyberspace to simulate various aspects of interactive space (that is, they are inhabitable computer systems of space). Cyberspace is the space in the software, which in turn exists in hardware, which exists in so-called real space, as do the human participants in virtual realities. So we can say that cyberspace is also a medium of participatory orientation between bodies and objects in different spaces. . . Cyberspace is often characterized as a transparent electronic medium, or informational interface. However, equally, a participants’ body is the medium in this interface (Vasseleu, 1998, p. 46).

Vasseleu’s excerpt above suggests that the virtual-ness of cyberspace exists in the reality of both hardware and humanity. Being online or offline is not as divided as how it is commonly being associated. Perhaps from a spatial perspective it is obvious when one is online or offline, but if we are looking at the state of being online/offline, particularly in the context of a user’s psychology, it is harder to determine if someone is connected to the Internet or not. This relational perspective suggests that for a more meaningful theoretical discussion regarding the Internet, it is necessary to consider cyberspace in terms “that extend past the imaginary and exceed the virtual” (Breslow, 2012, p. 17). The following sections detail some of the unique features of the “virtual” perceptions of cyberspace and how it is inherently dependent on reality, and vice versa.

The Dynamics of the Internet’s Material Existence

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Cyberspace as “Space” We begin with the obvious. Since the term “cyberspace” has “space” in it, one must consider the material population of such a space. Steven Jones argues that the Internet is not necessarily an abstract term, but rather a “narrative space” (albeit a discontinuous one) where countless stories are told (Jones, 1997, p. 15). Jones goes on to further comment that the Internet is an “imagined and imaginary space”, using a description of how cyberspace is a “silent world” where all conversation is typed. This, of course, needs to be put in context as it was written before the advent of web softwares such as Skype, Youtube, and other audio-visual adaptations that subsequently surfaced. So, in principle, to enter cyberspace, one needs to detach the material forms (Rushkoff, 2002, p. 35). This disembodiment, however, has foreseeable limitations in actual practice. Jones says that primarily, the Internet is “a ‘piggy backed’ medium, one that follows the path we already know” (Jones, 2002, p. 8), indicating that cyber-practices are dependent on offline practices to continue to exist. On the other hand, Jan Fernback contends that cyberspace is in fact, like physical space (Fernback, 1997, p. 37). He asserts that any space guarantees us the freedom to move and has “dimensionality, continuity, curvature, density, and limits” (ibid), Fernback makes the argument that online space is like real space, which is “socially constructed and re-constructed space”. This view is also taken by Antonio Garcia Jimenez et al, who argue that cyberspace is as real as the material geographic space that we inhabit (Jiménez, Orenes, & Puente, 2010, p. 214), and is governed by different layers of boundaries and dimensions as the “real world”. In a similar vein, Stone prods on fundamental beliefs regarding techno-human relationships, saying that “nature is becoming increasingly technologized. . . technology is nature—in which the boundaries between subject and environment have collapsed” (Stone, 1992, p. 188). Stone thus suggests a useful way in helping us see cyberspace from a different perspective, that it is not so much what is bodily real and technologically virtual, but rather even the virtual is technologically and bodily real, and that these are also in fact, socially constructed identifications. Whatever the natural state is, Fernback summarizes one important aspect of cyberspace: Cyberspace is a repository for collective cultural memory – it is popular culture, it is narratives created by its inhabitants that remind us who we are, it is life as lived and reproduced in pixels and virtual texts. It is sacred and profane, it is workspace and leisure space, it is a battleground and a nirvana, it is real and it is virtual, it is ontological and phenomenological. Cyberspace is an arena of power (Fernback, 1997, p. 37).

The above statement carries a few important points that I will expand further. Firstly, cyberspace is inhabited by human and products of humans. Secondly, the activities of the “people” in this space result in a new digital collection (or recollection) of cultural memory. Thirdly, there are power politics that exist in cyberspace. Despite the narrative discontinuities that were mentioned earlier, these three characteristics of cyberspace indicate that at least ideologically, the Internet is home to individual entities that are capable of interacting with one another.

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This brings us back to Vasseleu, who states that “cyberspace is also a medium of participatory orientation between bodies and objects in different spaces” (Vasseleu, 1998, p. 97). Much has been made out of the inter-relationship between the online and offline, but perhaps more consideration needs to be given to how our bodies interact with objects from cyberspace. These objects could be familiar objects which are replicas of what is already in existence, such as email and long-distance phone calls. Do these replicas generate a different response and participatory activity from the user then?

The New Limits of Cyberspace By now, one would realize that the term “boundary” is critical to the study of cyberspace. Above, I looked at the boundary between reality and virtual concepts. There are, however, a few other boundaries that are commonly associated with the study of cyberspace. Most notably, these are the boundaries of space and time, and the boundaries of social interactive politics. The shrinking barriers of time and space are one of the better publicized “benefits” of the Internet, with its ability to make long distance communication very cheap, help buy imported goods from the far ends of the Earth, hold video conferences from one’s own bedroom, send letters that take only seconds to reach the desired inbox, and many more. The buzz that has been floating around for a decade now that the Internet is causing national boundaries to blur, and that it is probably one of the main vehicles of making the world a “smaller place”. However, that is not necessarily the only perspective to the fast expansion of the empire of cyberspace. “Distance” itself is subjective, as noted by Steven Jones. He toys with the idea that cyber-nearness is in fact, a form of physical distance. Once we are “all connected in cyberspace we are then infinitely distant from one another when we are not communicating” (Jones, 1997, p. 12). This suggests that there is a certain extremity involved in our crossing the boundaries of cyberspace. If a person from Malaysia wants to connect with a friend in Iceland, which is at the other side of the planet, a few clicks of the mouse would establish the connection. While they are engaged in conversation they inhabit the same space on the Internet. However, the moment either one of them signs off, the distance between both users snap back to the physical thousands of miles prior to their online conversation. This is why Jones suggests that as a people, we seek the means to “‘save’ or ‘overcome’ space and time through use of technology. They are not to be ‘overcome’, we are rather, to live in them” (Jones, 1997, p. 11). Cyberspace is then, a place we live in, albeit temporarily. But very importantly, while cyberspace becomes a place where time and space are seemingly collapsed to a great degree, it does not mean that real time is not passing by, and that the physical distance does not exist. There is a simultaneous passing of time and usage of space which cannot be easily eliminated. The amount of physical time one possesses determines the actual cyber-time one can spend being “without distance” with an online friend. Both are at work equally and simultaneously.

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The second notable advantage the Internet brings about, as mentioned earlier, is how it reshapes the boundaries of social interactive politics. Jan Fernback sums up this potential succinctly stating that “within its boundaries (of the Internet), users can act as media audiences by cruising through the World Wide Web, yet users are also authors, public rhetoricians, statesmen, pundits. . . The public arena of cyberspace allows us to break our public silence” (Fernback, 1997, p. 37). The other term frequently used to describe this is “interactivity”. Cyberspace has become a fertile ground for citizen journalism, active participation in local politics, grassroots level online shops, wikis (including high profile websites such as Wikileaks, which publishes classified documents uploaded by anonymous leakers), so on and so forth. Brenda Brasher, in Give Me That Online Religion, suggests that while the virtual nature of cyberspace contains no physical objects and is fluid and inconsistent, it contains significant cultural value and meaning that is completely determined by “the imagination of those who engage it” (Brasher, 2001, p. 6). Following Brasher’s train of thought, the primary criteria for participating in meaning construction in cyberspace is active engagement. Due to the subjective nature of the Internet, it is difficult to find “consistent physical objects”, as Brasher puts it. To be able to make meaning out of cyberspace, and contribute within its fluid boundaries, one needs to actively engage with the space. The second key term is “imagination”, which gives an emphasis to individual use and his/her impact on cyber-culture. But it is also important to recognize that while the Internet provides for the easy deconstruction of social boundaries, it does not mean that it has no boundaries on its own, neither is it immune to new boundaries. The Internet has different dynamics of social boundaries and oftentimes it is a result of human users. The space does not regulate social behaviour. For example, online forums are moderated by different people. The notion of “free speech” on the Internet may be lauded, but it is still moderated. A blogger whose fear of his father could translate that same fear to the online realm through his choice of censoring certain information on his blog. If race and ethnicity are less easy to negotiate online, other forms of social preferences are created, such as how often one is online/offline. New binaries are created. That being said, in my personal experience of computer games, particularly in the genre of MMORPGs, I notice even racial and national boundaries translated to virtual environments, with degrading and insulting remarks frequently hurled at “Turks” and “Pinoys”. The boundary of accessibility is perhaps the easiest boundary to agree on. C. Alex Freitas says that Internet technologies have “real geographies in the traditional sense of the word, in that they can be accessed in some places but not in others. Issues of connectivity and access to digital devices and infrastructure then become just as important as traditional debates surrounding open access to physical public spaces” (de Freitas, 2010, p. 632). Jimenez also highlights this limitation of accessibility as the first of his many proposed cyber-boundaries (Jiménez et al., 2010, p. 215). Certainly, the issue of digital divide is an important one as it can lead to more complex cultural and economic discussions, and aptly serves as a reminder that we must not take access to the Internet for granted. The cost of being online, while becoming lower with time, still is too expensive for those in poverty to acquire the

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necessary hardware and Internet services (Siapera, 2010, p. 189). However, while recognizing the importance of the issue of accessibility, and that it is a primary indicator as to whether one is actively practicing online activities and deserves mention, this chapter will not focus on the technological availability of the Internet. The context of my research is mainly grounded in the realm of those who do have regular access of the Internet, and within this context, the technological accessibility and status of being online and offline, as I will argue, is much more ambiguous than merely being able to tap into the hardware and start surfing. The nature of cyberspace itself creates this complication. A lot of the problems of community existence arises from the issue of “being there”. There is no default value of “kinship” as a family has the moment a child is born, and this has caused debates of whether anything beyond the material world can be indeed tangible. There is still a tendency to equate any form of real-ness, including relationships and society, with the tangible, and cyberspace does not always help itself by being notably intangible. But “spatial metaphors”, as described extensively by Stephen Graham (2010) of the Internet, can sometimes be the root problematic of how one deciphers its dynamics. The idea that cyberspace is a place that we can be in and out of, that possesses things (including relationships) we can turn on and off at will, and has the social construct of space imposed by us due to habit and familiarity causes us to treat cyberspace as a foreign realm of intangibles. On this note, I wish to argue that cyberspace is more of a “state of being” rather than a “space to be”. To further describe this, it is imperative that we shift away from “space” and begin to discuss the central component of the Internet—the human.

Online/Offline: Simultaneously Lived To discuss the state of being online, the focus is mainly on an Internet user. Principally, it is impossible at present to discuss the Internet without factoring in the human body. Allucquere Roseanne Stone suggests that the “virtual community originates in, and must return to, the physical” (Stone, 1992, p. 196). Stone regards the relationship between body and technology as changing, but emphasizes that “no matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached. It may be off somewhere else. . . but consciousness remains firmly rooted in the physical” (Stone, 1992, p. 195). In short, to discuss cyberspace is to discuss the human body—to discuss the online is to discuss the offline. I do not only mean this in a relational sense, of how offline activities affect online activities and vice-versa. I am also interested in what is happening offline when one is online and vice-versa. This is because “cyberspace is not necessarily bordered from the offline”, and that “there are individuals in society who are entering a new phase of cyber-existence, where they are always online, at least psychologically” (Tan, 2012, p. 117). Anthony Fung, in his work on online gaming communities in Hong Kong proposes that cyberspace has “evolved into a vital part of the real life to the extent that real social relationships have become

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inseparable with cyberspace” (Fung, 2006, p. 132), and that previous studies of online communities did not sufficiently considered “real offline moments and activities that may connect to cyber-activity” (ibid). Fung goes on to suggest that research is needed to discover if “remote and virtual interests of subjects realized in online space is linked to the everyday sense and complexity of human nature (Fung, 2006, p. 133)”. In other words, there is potentially a rich field of knowledge to be learnt about how life as an Internet user is as a whole. In short, the body is “cyberspace”. At this juncture, I introduce Bruno Latour’s concept of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2007). ANT, which focuses on studying networks within society makes little distinction between conventional categorisations of what an actor is. Latour asserts that humans and non-humans have agency in which they play particular roles in shaping networks. This is due to what is described as “symmetry” between humans and non-humans, affording agency to objects that contribute to the dynamics of a particular network. Symmetry, then allows people and non-human actors to have equal capacity to “act, to cause an effect in states of affairs. . .this would enable thinking about the transactions and their contexts in more detailed and practical terms” (Rimpiläinen, 2011, p. 52). This also allows for a non-deterministic stance when researching technology and society, and potentially allows for a deeper exploration of the interdependency of both living and non-living actants. This can be demonstrated on a basic level through an individual’s use of blogs for online expressions. When a blogger posts content online, the content is experienced differently by different readers—quite possibly in ways that were unanticipated by the blogger. If the blogger “retires” from blogging, but leaves his blog in the public domain, the blog can continue to interact with readers, generating meaning, experiences, and various responses. Agency, in this sense, is not to be interpreted as imputing life to something but assigning symmetry of action and effect to the blog, which is a non-living object. The blog, or a Facebook profile page, continues to interact with other actors on its own accord even when the owners of those pages are disconnected from the Internet. Thus, if we were to lay out a series of networks and associations of a particular person, the networks would not consist only of his human associations or social institutions, but it would include a vast network of non-human actants that frame and constitute a human being. Latour states that “the social skills (of humans) provide only one tiny subset of the associations making up societies” (Latour, 2007, p. 69). What I am proposing is that we are increasingly “always online because our Facebook status is interacting on our behalf, even when we are offline. Our email inbox receives letters and messages on our behalf, sometimes even responding on our behalf with “away on vacation” type of messages. Although one can make the argument that cyber-activity is pre-configured by the user, it nevertheless provokes a response from the other party, and potentially causes action of some sort. My purpose of introducing ANT at this stage is to demonstrate the possibilities that emerge from considering that the idea that cyberspace is more than just a virtual realm, but is one that encapsulates what we consider as the “offline”. Also, as discussed earlier, the Internet and its expressions cannot be considered in isolation

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because the offline strongly affects how one defines community, social boundaries, and personal expressions online. Thus, describing the larger network of associations of cyber-activity is a potentially fruitful way of studying the sociology of the Internet. Rather than limiting ourselves to the categories of “space” and “community”, we can ask, for instance, if there is a relation to how a person’s experiences during his childhood has an effect on what kind of subjects he likes to blog about. Furthermore, we can ask if his/her blogging as an expression has any effect at all on how he/she frames and re-frames his/her childhood memories. We can consider the socio-political environment being the impetus as well as the ongoing narrative of the creation and maintenance of specific Christian websites. All of these are part of everyday cyber-activity, even if one has not gone online for some time.

Everyday Religion and Organized Religion This book privileges the concept of “everyday religion” as the framework for the analysis of data due to its strong emphasis that the everyday-ness of religious activity can provide valuable perspectives into how religious identity formation and negotiation can emerge. The concept of “everyday religion”, however, is still an evolving one. This section outlines some of the existing literature that has informed my study. I will also highlight some of the limitations of the existing theory, and propose (in the next section) Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a means to further extend the use of “everyday religion”. The concept of “everyday religion” is an “activity that happens outside organized religious events and institutions, but does not mean that we discount the influences these institutions wield or that we neglect what happens within organized religion ‘every day’” (Ammerman, 2006, p. 5). The emphasis here is that that an individual’s journey of faith includes both the institutional and the personal (and the private). It is important to be careful of the pitfalls of disregarding or over-emphasizing either realms. Ammerman further points out that this approach “privileges the experience of the non-experts, the people who do not make a living being religious or thinking and writing about religious ideas” (Ammerman, 2006, p. 5). Meredith McGuire, in Embodied Practices: Negotiation and Resistance, has systematically detailed how the human body is central in most religion and in these physical practices is where we find instances of what she terms as “lived religion”. McGuire describes lived religion as “constituted by the practices by which people remember, share, enact, adapt, and create ‘stories out of which they live’. And it is constituted through the practices by which people turn these ‘stories’ into everyday action” (McGuire, 2006, p. 187). King (2009), who conducted a study on Irish religion, describes how spirituality is experienced and expressed through what he calls “performative action” with different artifacts of belief and how “such things are involved in the construction of both religious and cultural identifications” (King, 2009, p. xvii). King argues that people actively “enter relationships with objects” (King, 2009, p. 149). Beyond

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the spiritual interactions with conventionally sacred artefacts or of beliefs, “everyday religion” is also physically practiced in secular environments. Timmons and Narayanasamy’s (2011) research on how Christian nursing students in England grapple, justify, or contend with issues such as abortion and working on Sundays in their respective hospitals, provide useful insights into how one’s personal religious beliefs are expressed in the workplace. Religious beliefs also play a role in other “everyday” issues, such as making personal financial decisions (Hess, 2012), or whether to use a mainstream movie as means to share one’s belief, as described by James Trammell in Who Does God Want Me to See The Passion of the Christ?: Marking Movies to Evangelicals (Trammell, 2010). These examples suggest that everyday religion consists of a daily actions and expressions in both the private and public lives of an individual. How does one “enter” into such a spiritual relationship or engagement? At what point of a person’s actions does it constitute as “lived religion”? This is a crucial question because it problematizes the dichotomy between what Ammerman describes as “everyday religion” and “organized religion”. Ammerman notes that a person’s religious activity is beyond organized religion. This, in effect, asks the question of how a Christian engages with his or her faith outside of weekend church worship services, or how Islam is lived out by a Muslim outside of Friday prayers at the mosque. Some of these activities have been mentioned in the previous paragraphs, and these forms of everyday practices could range from personal religious rituals at home to the practice of their religious beliefs and principles in everyday circumstances. These are activities that happen beyond “organized religion”. The study of “everyday religion” then, as argued by Ammerman, is one that privileges the “experience of the non-experts, the people who do not make a living being religious or thinking and writing about religious ideas” (Ammerman, 2006, p. 5). I propose two additional ideas in relation to Ammerman’s approach to “everyday religion”. Although she cautions that the influence of organized religion must not be neglected, I contend that the activities and practices of the church (and any form of formal religious organization) must also be included as a key part of analysis within a “non-expert’s” everyday engagement and expressions of religiosity. A Sunday church service is part of the “everyday”, and what happens within the church service, even for a small few hours, must be included in the active network of individual spirituality. The experiences derived from a church service could serve as an impetus and key factor behind an individual’s actions outside of the church environment. This direct causal relationship between the church and the everyday makes it pertinent to study both aspects of Christianity as a whole. The second proposition is to privilege the “non-expert” perspective. We cannot presume that the “experts” (leaders and workers within religious organizations) experiences in their “everyday” are to be categorized separately. These existing binaries of church/non-church, expert/non-expert, popular/organized, are aptly problematized by Leonard Primiano who argues that the automatic division of organized and everyday religions leads to a formation of pre-existing ideas of how religion is experienced (Primiano, 1995, p. 39). Primiano opts for the term “vernacular religion” to identify the “experiential component of people’s religious lives”

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regardless of whether it was within or beyond organized religion (Primiano, 1995, p. 43). This approach is shared by Robert Glenn Howard. He understands vernacular religion as referring to “non-institutional beliefs and practices that exist but apart from institutions (Howard, 2011, p. 6). Vernacular religion offers an inclusive approach that further augments the need to observe and study everyday religion by disregarding pre-set ideas of who an “expert” is supposed to be. For example, it is difficult to ascertain who the experts are with regards to experience and expression— an experienced blogger might not necessarily be an experienced religious blogger, and this can be further problematized if he is a devout Christian who goes to church four times a week, reads the Bible and prays every day, etc. By excluding organized religious activities, and labelling research participants as experts/non-experts in the study of “everyday religion”, we potentially eliminate useful information in the research of everyday religion. In some cases, religious practices can actively permeate through the church walls and the home into other aspects of the human life. The argument that I am making is that it is not enough to acknowledge the influence, but it is imperative to study that relationship between the source of one’s spirituality (it could be the church, or other sources) and his or her expressions of spirituality. This is so mainly because human life is not as neatly categorized and broken into static social categories, but in reality, it is a series of interacting and changing network of actors and objects. The subjectivity of spiritual boundaries in the study of Christianity can also be discussed in terms of where and how religious meaning is derived. Engelke and Tomlinson’s (2006) argue that “meaning” in the Christian context is a contestable concept, as opposed to the traditional view of fixed and autonomous meaning within the context of Christian ritual. This means to say that it is not necessarily so that two people interpret any activity in the same manner. The authors propose a different approach to identifying and interpreting meaning—they see meaning as structure, as intention, as a symbolic process, and meaning as being. Within these many perspectives of meaning, Tomlinson and Engelke argue that meaning itself is fluid, and that one must understand that there is a possibility of meaningless rituals. For example, one cannot assume that a church service automatically translates to a spiritual experience, and if a person’s non-experience leads to a motivation to express his or her religiosity outside the church, be it through daily prayers at home, visiting orphans, talking about Jesus to colleagues, or blogging thoughts about his or her faith, then the lack of spirituality experienced within the church becomes critically linked to what is so far understood as “everyday religion”. It is not enough to say that one merely “acknowledges” the role of organized religion when it has a direct causal relationship with activities outside the church. There is much to be learnt in how people approach the meanings that they derive and how they experience things under various circumstances, rather than researching meanings and experiences itself. This is applicable to both organized Christian rituals as well as everyday rituals.

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The “Ritual” in Everyday Religion Central to the discussion of everyday religion is the ritual. There are many layers of what a religious ritual is, and in this section I present an overview of how my research would approach the definition of ritual. To avoid generalizing the term, one must remember that “ritual among humans is not limited to religion. The term can refer to any fixed or stereotyped practice, behavioural pattern, or embellishment that has no evident instrumental purpose beyond communication or symbolization” (Winzeler, 2008, p. 146). This is to say that my subsequent discussion of this term will be about religious ritual, or to be specific, the Christian ritual. There are several ways to define what a religious ritual is. I will discuss broad definitions before narrowing my focus to different nuances that exist. Winzeler’s definition is a good place to start. He says that: In the broadest sense, ritual can be said to refer simply to customary religious behaviour, action, or activity in contrast to belief, faith, or assumption. It is one thing to have faith or believe in God as a part of your conscious thoughts but another to act on it in some way. If you profess your beliefs or faith out loud (even if very softly or rapidly so what you say is inaudible to anyone else), you can be said to be engaging in ritual action (Winzeler, 2008, p. 148).

Winzeler’s definition is broad, but it does cover important ground. Firstly, Winzeler’s definition proposes that ritual is “action” oriented. Secondly, there is a certain form of “doing” that is involved in any particular ritual. Secondly, and perhaps more critically, Winzeler says that these “actions” of professing belief and faith can include even a whisper. The range of rituals that can take place in a person’s religious life then becomes very wide as it can include almost anything. For example, there is a common Christian saying that Christians should live for God. In this sense, is the entire livelihood of such a Christian individual a Christian ritual? It is possibly naïve to say that everything is a Christian ritual, but it is plausible to suggest that everything has the potential to be a Christian ritual. Such an over-arching definition of ritual certainly demands a deeper exploration of the dynamics of a ritual. As mentioned, Winzeler’s definition provides two points of expansion: Action and range. The first term, “action”, leads us to the discussion of embodiment. An action in a ritual normally demonstrates or expresses a particular meaning related to the faith. The range of how these ritual meanings are produced and experienced is again, wide. It could be transmitted through institutional practices, or could be personal expressions of faith. Talafierro (2004) notes the importance of the embodied ritual in his work discussing the values of physical expression of one’s personal faith. He states that “If it is good to contemplate, worship, and petition the divine, it is an even better good to do this in an expressive, embodied fashion, and this may involve liturgy as a specific good” (Talafierro, 2004, p. 245). These actions, therefore, potentially serve as some of the more textually rich resource for Christian meaning and expression. Physical expressions are “one of the most obvious features of rituals” (Crossley, 2004, p. 31). Nick Crossley also argues that to make sense of rituals, we need to make sense of “rituals specifically as

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embodied practices” (ibid.). Further to the embodiment is the spreading of the ritual knowledge to others. As Maurice Bloch points out, “for rituals to continue there must be a mechanism for transmission, and that ultimately, even with literacy or other artificial information-storing devices present, human memory must be a key factor in enabling continuation” (Bloch, 2004, p. 65). It becomes clear that the transmission of ritual involves “action” and propagation. These actions are varied in that is does not necessarily limited to conventional ideas of religious expression such as kneeling, praying or reading the Bible, but could encompass typing on the keyboard, sharing a testimony on a blog, and other forms of Christian expression. These actions too can play a part in an individual’s everyday Christian experience and can therefore be classified as a form of everyday ritual.

The Human Body in Everyday Religion These actions and propagations are not static, but require initiation in the form of the human body. Meredith McGuire states that “human bodies matter because those practices-even interior ones, such as contemplation-involve people’s bodies, as well as their minds and spirits. Thus, I use the concept of ‘embodied practices’ to emphasize those ritual and expressive activities in which spiritual meanings and understandings are embedded in and accomplished through the body” (McGuire, 2006, p. 188). This is a critical perspective to any research of religion. The body is, after all, the most tangible aspect of humanity. Logically, religion, regardless of how spirituality is defined, would require the body to be a medium of transmission. McGuire uses Christianity as an illustration of this, saying that “Christian religions should be particularly attentive to human embodiment, because of the theological centrality of Christ’s incarnation and, thus, Christ’s humanity” (McGuire, 2006, p. 189). In other words, a significant amount of attention within the Christian discourse is related to the bodily works of Christ—“The Word became flesh”; Jesus as Son of God/Son of Man; Jesus’ earthly nature as fully human and fully God; Jesus performing miracles and other supernatural signs and wonders amongst believers and unbelievers; Jesus’ physical suffering and crucifixion. These are just some examples to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to bodily expressions of spirituality and religion. Embodiment and action is crucial to the formation of rituals, and the ritual can in turn lead to other thoughts and experiences. “Action”, after all, is diverse, and the boundary between what is a spiritually inspired ritual and another regular habit becomes rather blur. McGuire tackles this issue by emphasizing “that we have to take seriously the myriad individual ways by which ordinary people remember, share, enact, adapt, create and combine the stories out of which they live,” and this would be defined as “lived religion”. Similar to what Ammerman defined as “everyday religion”, lived religion is “constituted by the practices by which people remember, share, enact, adapt, and create ‘stories out of which they live’. And it is constituted through the practices by which people turn these ‘stories’ into everyday

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action” (McGuire, 2006, p. 187). In Jonathan Lanman’s study and application of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDS), he both discusses the role of “action”, both through performance and observation, in reinforcing beliefs of a supreme being (such as seeing others pray, or participating in prayer him/herself), and the lack of “action”, or the exposure to it, for being a factor of generating and reinforcing non-theistic (non-belief in God) belief (Lanman, 2012, p. 15). While Lanman’s study is specific in its inquiry regarding belief acquisition of individuals, it does invoke Durkheim (1915) well-known proposition that ritual performances, particularly collective ones, has its effects on society. Durkheim’s work, however, was limited to organized religious rituals, and in much of his writing the binary of the sacred and the profane is clearly distinguished as separate entities with little interaction. It is pertinent to consider the degrees of bodily function in everyday religion. By this I mean to ask, at which point does an action constitute “lived religion”, and at which point does it “turn off”? To further explore this, consider another aspect of McGuire’s notion of embodied practices: Each of these kinds of embodied practices (in the everyday) reflects and reproduces different kinds of spiritual experiences. In each, the body is integrally present and participating. . . without the full involvement of the material body, religion is confined to the realm of cognitions. Embodied practices- including mundane and seemingly unexceptional activities like dancing, preparing a meal, or holding a flower- can link people’s materiality as humans with their spirituality (McGuire, 2006, p. 190).

While McGuire and as mentioned earlier, Crossley, appropriately highlights the need to pay attention to minute, personal, and habitual practices in an individual’s everyday life, we have to be careful to not over-interpret everything as ritual. Without any form of boundaries, it is possible the ethnographic approach to researching everyday religion could stumble into pointless obsession with minutae. Gilbert Lewis cautions us with some important questions. “Should we attend to religiosity shown in initiation and gardening practices equally? Or should we measure religiosity by time spent or frequency? The list brings in such a mixture of activities, including ones that are exceptionally and intensely emotional and activities that are common or routine” (Lewis, 2004, p. 156). Here he alludes to two ways to differentiate everyday practices—the routine, and the deeply personal. While it is difficult to place any form of practice into a definite categorical box, and that it is impossible to draw the line between habit and spiritual (because habit can lead to something spiritual, and the spiritual can induce a habit), it would be interesting to find out, from the practitioner’s perspective, what meanings and experiences they draw from their everyday action. It is clear that everyday rituals can encompass many types of actions, many of which may no longer revolve around the institution of the church. For instance, in Abby Day’s work in locating young people’s construction of beliefs in Britain, she notes that her participants maintained their religious beliefs through interactions with family, friends, and other social relationships (Day, 2009, p. 276). She notes that

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their beliefs “tend to be co-produced, through participation with family and friends in creating and maintaining beliefs” (ibid.). Her findings concur with McGuire’s contention that spirituality is increasingly “constructed through ongoing interactions with others” (McGuire, 2008, p. 52). Religious and spiritual identification, networking, and expression is now beginning to expand beyond church grounds, and Stephen Hunt suggests that “the disintegration of this basis of community (of religious organizations) is likely to lead to a decline of belief and practice whatever the religious tradition. Moreover, this tendency also suggests that new forms of religion or spirituality will not endure unless they transmogrify in shape or form (Hunt, 2005, p. 67). While I do not share Hunt’s belief in the impending disintegration and irrelevancy of the role of organized religion in society today, he is right in that religious organizations are no longer the only source of religious activity. To use online expression of spirituality as an example, activities of online religion can be considered as everyday rituals. Rituals help to accomplish a number of things. It reinforces and expresses the identity and belief of a believer. One is internal, and the other is external. Through religious blogging, for example, both these goals can be met if a blogger’s identity as a Christian is reinforced through the process of blogging and interacting online, and through his content his spirituality is expressed on a public domain, and more so if it is a regular practice—it is an everyday Christian ritual, and it is necessary to study it as a particular habitus (see following section) in which a Christian individual is affected and influenced.

Tracing the Network of Online Religion Returning to the key premise of the research question in this book, I ask how Christianity is expressed online. My interest is not only in what appears on a particular website, but also in the dynamics surrounding the construction of the published and publicly visible content. This means I am also interested in the content creator—the individual, and how he or she constructs his/her spiritual beliefs. To borrow from Pierre Bourdieu’s views on social practice, “social life cannot be understood as simply the aggregate of individual behaviour” (Jenkins, 2002, p. 74). On this premise, it is Bourdieu’s notion of the “habitus” and “field”, which serve as dispositions of identity, be it ideological or cultural, that trains an individual to function in specific ways within existing sets of rules. A person is exposed to various “habitus”, acquiring new ways of functioning in different circumstances. For example, in the case of one of my research participants, Matt, his exposure to Christian apologetics plays a significant part in his intellectual approach to his Christian identity, also known as Christian apologetics. This “literary habitus” which he has acquired translates to the general content of his blog The Busy Street, which is largely populated with content relating to Christian apologetics. Matt’s choice of expression (apologetics) seems determined by his family upbringing, but it

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is expressed in new ways unknown to the habitus of the family at the time of his childhood during his “training”.1 Bourdieu states that every individual “wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly, is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning. . . it is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know” (Bourdieu, 1977: 79). Herein begins the limitations of Bourdieu’s work. While Bourdieu’s approach to expanding the different factors involved in the construction of identity, meaning and expression highlights the necessity to look beyond the individual, his theory suffers from the presumption that the subjects (or individuals) are static as recipients of particular cultural standards in which they are supposedly indoctrinated with. The field-habitus-subject relationship is also static in that it largely assumes a one way relationship between the rules of the environment shaping the subject (even at a level that is sub-conscious to the individual, as described by Bourdieu himself in the statement above). Finally, just as Bourdieu points out that social practice cannot be studied in isolation, thus leading to the study of the habitus and field in which an individual is located, I posit that the habitus is also a non-static subject which requires further expansion and study. What is the habitus framed by? Conventional ideas of the “habitus” might include the family, the workplace, religious organizations, but these are generic superlatives. A family needs training to become a family. It also has exposure from external influences which ultimately constitute what a particular family-habitus becomes. Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus raises the right questions regarding the necessity to consider external sources of influence but fails to sufficiently establish the links between the different actors of importance. This gap can be addressed by the application of ANT methods to the research project. In broad terms, ANT is both a methodology and a theoretical approach that places emphasis on an extensive description of empirical data of particular networks. What ANT asks is that when one actor is acting, “who else is acting? How many agents are also present?”, and through these associations, even more sets of agencies would surface. One of the fundamental principles of ANT is that it considers “the growth of hybrids, networks of people, tools and concepts held together by collaboration” (Kennan, Cecez-Kecmanovic, & Underwood, 2010, p. 2). This is due to the notion that no actor is acting alone at any one point of time. Latour says that “we must not substitute a surprising but precise expression of the well-known repertoire of the social which is supposed to be hidden behind it” (Latour, 2007, p. 49). In fact, it is the actors who develop their meta-languages in which the analyst should latch on to discover further traces of associations. It then becomes imperative that one studies the network as well as the actor. Applied to Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, one must study the habitus as well as the subject it influences.

1

See Chap. 4 for the case study of Matt.

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2 Locating the “Everyday” and the “Offline” in Online You have to follow the actors themselves, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish (Latour, 2007, p. 12).

This allows for the various networks surrounding an actor to be fore-grounded more effectively because of its inclusive approach to considering what data is. Firstly, it allows us the ability to weave through the online/offline boundary seamlessly because it does not see the need to isolate an online activity as merely “online”. This is so because instead of having the researcher pre-contextualize the actors, Latour suggests that it is the research participants that should deploy their own worlds and contexts, only after which does the researcher proceeds to engage in the different ways the participants make sense of their own stories (Latour, 2007, p. 23). Nathalie Mitev observes that ANT methods allows the tracing of “actors back in time and making links between changing contexts and technology” alongside the “moving boundaries between the social and technical” (Mitev, 2009, p. 18). Mitev’s statement draws us to the point that the application of ANT methods can bridge the gap between the online/offline and “everyday religion”/“organized religion” because it views the associations between these supposed binaries seamlessly and as part of a larger set of associations. It also provides the tools to link the past/ present, distant/near, idea/practice because it considers all forms of associations and the non-human actors that serve as vital links to the associations, such as memory, idea, instances, trauma, blog, letter, etc. Because the boundaries of the online/offline and organized religion/everyday religion is a moving one, applying ANT to bridge online religion and everyday religion along with its complexities is particularly apt. For example, while a particular Christian blog may be of particular interest, how the blogger frames the blog within his personal experience of Christianity is of equal importance. According to Latour, “it is this very framing activity of contextualizing that should be brought into the foreground and it cannot be done as the zoom effect (of social context) is taken for granted (Latour, 2007, p. 186). ANT does not discriminate between the online and the offline and sees both sets of activities as part of a larger whole, and instead of deploying a theoretical magnifying glass and a particular platform of observation on the actor, one can trace wider networks of influence surrounding any particular online expression, whether it is online/offline, church/personal, or beyond. To summarize, I make the argument that online religion should be situated within the larger context of everyday religion of which online expressions have links to the simultaneously lived offline experiences. The dynamics of this ongoing relationship between the online and offline is then traced through the various actors and networks that are established and utilized to ensure the continuity of an individual’s religious expression. This process of tracing and describing networks in length can suffer the risk of asymmetry, given that I am unable to explore every network and thus having to pre-determine preferred networks (Fine, 2005, p. 95). It also has the possible pitfall of being unable to provide a full explanation or constructive analysis of data due to the over-emphasis on description (Howcroft, Mitev, & Wilson, 2005, p. 355). These potential shortcomings are overcome through the fusing of ANT methods with theories of everyday religion and internet studies. As discussed above, the

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difficulty in overcoming the online/offline binary in Internet theory and the organized/individual binary in everyday religion can be offset with the ANT approach to render these binaries as part of a larger, non-deterministic palette. This, in turn, allows both concepts in Internet theory and everyday religion to be explored and explained in new ways that are not constrained by conventional binaries.

Forms of Online Christianity Expressed With all of the above in mind, I return to survey some of the discussions that address online religion, and how we can productively think about this field of study. Has the Internet changed Christianity? Conversely, has the Internet changed Christians? The increasing presence of Christianity in cyberspace, be it church websites or personal Christian blogs, is undeniable—but the intangible aspect of its exact nature and influence in Christianity itself is difficult to grasp fully. In Heidi Campbell’s recent edited volume, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (Campbell, 2012), the contributors provide both in-depth theoretical discussion regarding online religion along with several case studies to shed light on some of these debates. In the first part of the book, the key areas of debate identified as important to how one frames his/her views of online religion are “ritual”, “identity”, “community”, “authority”, “authenticity”, and “religion”. In Christopher Helland’s discussion of “ritual”, he considers the question of whether “online rituals are real religious rituals” (Helland, 2012, p. 25), and presents opposing perspectives on how an online pilgrimage might or not might not be considered a sacred journey. In Pauline Hope Cheong’s chapter on how the Internet could potentially affect religious authority, she proposed ways in which the online could be seen as a threat to the church as well as how it could be used to complement and reinforce the authority of the church (Cheong, Fischer-Nielsen, Gelfgren, & Ess, 2012, p. 72). Similarly, Lövheim (2012) and Radde-Antweiler (2012) respective chapters on Identity and Authenticity, brings to bear the complexity of online religious practices and how it can affect a person’s religious experience. Many of the themes discussed in Campbell’s book are also central points of discussion and debate in this book. It would be particularly useful to allow the Malaysian context and case studies of how online religion is expressed to contribute to the discussion of how personal spiritual identities are affected by online practices, whether blogging provides for spiritual experiences of any sort, and whether social-networking groups can significantly impact traditional religious hierarchy.

Researching the Actors: A Note on Methods So far, I have discussed the theoretical background of my research as well as identified the research questions which my project is primarily interested in. This book is interested in the different roles the Internet plays in the lives of Christians in

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Malaysia, both on a personal and institutional level. I am interested in how the Internet is used as an avenue of Christian expression both on a personal and organizational level. How is this online Christian content framed? This is largely a discussion that considers how the “offline” actively constructs the online expression and vice-versa and brings to bear a deeper analysis of the dynamics of online/offline Internet practices. Finally, in view of the above questions, one can ask how these new practices potentially impact the larger society in which they are located. To answer the above questions, there are some conditions necessary for the acquiring of useful data. Firstly, there must be active and consistent reading and updating of relevant websites, blogs, forums, and other identified web-pages. This is a very important source of data for my research. It is useful that most websites that are selected for constant monitoring are active websites. This, however, does not discount the importance of inactive websites, or websites that gradually decrease in activity as these decreases also provide information about its lifespan and the factors behind its inactivity. Also, the websites studied are categorized as a site that is primarily “Christian” in nature. Secondly, if there are to be extensive description and discussion about the relationship between the online and offline, then it is equally important to research the offline as well as the online. To be able to practically see how the offline and online are part of an integrated whole, observation must be carried outside the computer screen. A research informants’ blog, for example, may be a journal, an expression, or an actor on its own—but it is not a solitary existence, void of any pre-conditions and influences. A blog is a result of something and results in something. As such, I am interested in various aspects of any subject's Christian life and social life in order to see how these might shape the way the online life is lived, and vice versa. To this end, I suggested employing ANT, useful for its potential to make crucial links between actants, and to navigate the unpredictability of networks that may arise in the procurement of data and its subsequent analysis.

Ethnography and the Internet To achieve the above conditions, I employed ethnography as the primary means to map the process of meaning and experience production to actual product. Interviews with Christian bloggers, web site moderators, and church pastors, combined with observation of blogs, websites, and online mainstream coverage of Christian issues would provide insight into why and how Christian expressions are formulated and expressed. Ethnography aims at “getting close to people and making them feel comfortable enough with your presence so that you can observe and record information about their lives” (Bernard, 1994, p. 136). Similarly, Schensul et al. characterises it as, “a process of learning through exposure to or involvement in the day-to-day or routine

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activities of informants in the research setting. . .” (Schensul, Schensul, & LeCompte, 1999, p. 1). Since my research relies on extensive ethnographic work through the Internet, it is necessary to highlight some differences that might arise when researching the Internet. There are a number of useful places to begin when discussing Internet ethnography. In Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet, Christine Hine identifies the conventional components of traditional ethnography, such as interaction and travel, and how these might be represented differently in online ethnography. Traditionally, anthropology and ethnography usually entail some form of travel to a place of interest and interacting with people of interest. This has been a basis of generating ethnographic authenticity in a material form. Internet ethnography is move away from face-to-face interaction and travel. Hine argues that “Internet research focuses more on experiential rather than physical displacement. . . and that it is possible for an ethnographer sitting at a desk in an office to explore the social spaces of the internet. . . The lack of physical travel does not mean, however, that the relationship between ethnographer and readers is collapsed” (Hine, 2000, p. 45). By this, “being there” takes on a slightly different meaning. “Being online” is quite literally “being there” if that involves being in a web-forum, chat room, playing an online game, or reading a blog post. Secondly, the medium of communication has also changed. Whereas in traditional ethnography, oral interactions (due to face-to-face interaction) are preferred and more commonly practiced with written text as secondary sources of information, the Internet positions online written text as “ethnographic material which tells us about the understanding which authors have of the reality which they inhabit” (Hine, 2000, p. 51). Moving about the Internet involves a large amount of reading of words, and to some extent viewing images and other forms of media texts as well. The primary form of interaction, however, is the written text. In this sense, Internet ethnography involves a significant amount of graphical and typographical material. Oral communication is also commonplace in cyberspace now with numerous instant messaging software incorporating video broadcast using web cameras, and voice chat. While this opens up the possibility of face-to-face communication, it does not fully overcome the earlier mentioned concept of physical “travel” and it is also premature to assume that the traditional textual forms will be eliminated from Internet practices. Taking a step back from the two extremities of the online and offline observations, one can make the argument that, as Pink mentioned earlier, both “worlds” are subjective with the researcher as the instrument of description. Regardless of whether it is immersion within local coffee shop in a rural village or in a virtual lounge in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), both require the researcher’s engagement with the community that is presented to the researcher—even if one appears to be less materially authentic than the other. All of these suggest that observing and describing the online requires additional techniques for effective data gathering and analysis, but at its core, retains the same principles as offline ethnography—being exposed to a different culture, learning as much as possible about a social culture through active involvement, privileging the informants’ perspective, and giving an account of one’s findings. How these goals

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are achieved, however, are slightly different due to the nature of the Internet, which is a cultural platform that reinterprets space and utilizes technology and text as the primary mode of interaction. It is worth noting then that ethnography is not a static research method and by adapting it to different contexts and environments, new form of research possibilities would surface. With these factors in mind, Kozinets provides a useful step-by-step approach to engaging online communities, participating, storing digital information, and how to handle people, media texts, as well as the ethics of Internet ethnography. Kozinets’ work can be seen as adapting the similar principles of the aforementioned principles of immersion and informant observation for online interactions. He states that in a netnography, “descriptions will be a combination of what is seen on the screen and what is experienced by the researcher” (Kozinets, 2009, p. 115). While it is useful to know how to approach a closed and private online group, how to analyze online conversations and forum postings, it does not sufficiently identify the methods in which one can link the relationship between the online and the offline. It is important not to dwell on the methodological extremities that might emerge in studies that take place only in cyberspace such as the difference of text, place, etc. There is also a need to attend to the equally important discussion on the necessity to blend online and offline research methods to generate information that relates to both online and offline environments. In the context of my research question, where online/offline environments, actions, and relationships are important link in my findings, there is a need, as Shani Orgad suggests, to combine not just online/offline methodologies, but online/offline forms of interactions. In Orgad’s research regarding cancer patients who use interactive breast cancer websites for information and social support, one of the ways he approaches his informants is by “establishing a relationship with informants online, and moving with informants from online to offline (Orgad, 2005, p. 51). Orgad highlights this approach by stating that exploring both sides of the online/offline binary is not to prove the authenticity of the real/virtual, but rather “in what ways might offline interaction with informants enhance the interpretation of the data obtained through online interaction” (Orgad, 2005, p. 53). The aspect I appreciate most in Orgad’s fieldwork approach is the flexibility towards informants. Some of Orgad’s interviews took place entirely through email while some through other online platforms. There were also those that he eventually meets in an offline environment for a face to face interview. He described that both online and offline forms of interviewing had productive and unproductive values. This suggests that it is unwise to prescribe a narrow platform for engaging with informants. Orgad reflects: In some cases informants were more collaborative and articulate online, in some cases it was rather the move to offline interaction that encouraged them to open up and be more talkative. Reflecting on the move from online to offline endorses our thinking about the interdeterminacy of the Internet and the complexity of the relationship between online and offline experiences (Orgad, 2005, p. 63).

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This approach resonates strongly with my own experience. Almost all of my research informants were “discovered” online. My first instance of communication with all of them was either through email, private messages sent to their blog accounts, or Facebook messages. These informants include lay Christian bloggers as well as pastors. Many of them were responsive through our online conversations. Although I make several attempts to meet each of my informants at least once during my fieldwork period, I was unable to do so due to a number of reasons. The most notable reason was physical distance. Some of my informants are residing in other urban settings in Malaysia. One of my informants relocated to another country and two pastors whom I contacted shuttled frequently from country to country that it was finally decided that I would “meet” them at common territories called “Skype” and “Whatsapp”. For the majority of informants whom I managed to formally interview at least once in a face-to-face setting, I communicated with them online regarding my research prior to the formal interview. In a number of cases, a discussion was already ongoing through emails and chat programs (Facebook Messenger, Google Talk), and our face-to-face interview was a continuation of what was already an ongoing discussion. Online ethnography thus retains the same principles as offline ethnography— being exposed to a different culture, learning as much as possible about that particular culture through active involvement, privileging the informants’ perspective, and giving an account of one’s findings. How these goals are achieved, however, are slightly different due to the nature of the Internet, which is a cultural platform that reinterprets space and utilizes technology and text as the primary mode of interaction. It is worth noting then that ethnography is not a static research method and by adapting it to different contexts and environments, new form of research possibilities would surface. As Miller and Slater aptly state, “in the tradition of material culture analysis we are as much concerned with how subjects are constituted within material worlds as with how they understand and employ objects” (Miller & Slater, 2001, p. 3). Kozinets also indicates that netnography “represent the researchers’ attempt to acknowledge the importance of computer mediated communications in the lives of culture members, to include in their data collection strategies the triangulation between various online and offline sources of cultural understanding” (Kozinets, 2009, p. 60). This triangulation of the online and offline can be fully explored through “focusing on practice, experience and the continuities between how individuals experience their identities when using hypermedia and traditional text” (Pink, 2006, p. 297). This means that a broader approach to online ethnography would include not just the visual texts and representation of that are expressed online, but also the users that experience or express such content. This, in a way, is not too different from traditional offline ethnography in that researching the online is also researching the offline “since individuals interact with and experience hypermedia differently, hypermedia authors might wish to account for the various strategies in which users engage” (Pink, 2006, p. 297).

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ANT and Ethnography So far, we have considered the contextual differences of conducting online research, the flexibility of communication methods, and the need to conduct both online and offline research for a comprehensive study on online behaviour and expression. To be able to “account for the dynamic between the user and text”, as Pink puts it, it is imperative for the many facets of my research project to have clearly defined linkages in order to make sense of the data. More importantly, the network in which a subject is situated is not always immediately apparent and observable. For example, merely knowing and making contact with a blogger and reading his blog does not reveal very much about the many factors of influence leading up to his choice of blog content. One must be careful to not arrive at conclusions at the expense of uncovering the less apparent facets of a blogger’s life to make further sense of his blogging habits. This problem is solved by allowing the actors to demonstrate how their many contexts and experiences contribute to their Christian life and subsequent Christian expression online. Their demonstration is not necessarily explained in tandem with what we expect it to be, as “actors are also able to propose their own theories of action to explain how agencies’ effects are carried over. . . actors also have their own meta-theory about how agency acts. . .” (Latour, 2007, p. 57). Even though their narratives, language, and terminology might be inconsistent with the jargon that analysts use, it does not mean that their explanation of a particular issue is invalid. It is through their “meta-language” that more traces and associations are revealed (and to be followed by the analyst). Michael Callon, another ANT pioneer, states that “ANT is so tolerant that it ends up presenting an actor which is an anonymous, ill-defined and indiscernible entity” (Callon, 1999, p. 182) and that in a conventional sense, it is impossible to explain everything. However, this “tolerance”, although described by Callon as ill-defined and indiscernible, is potentially a more honest assessment than an actor that is socially explained, but non-defined. To this end, ANT approaches the research questions empirically through description. ANT proposes that by describing in detail and in as much entirety as possible, the state of affairs that are associated with the actor, less theoretical explanation is needed. Instead of framing everything theoretically prior to fieldwork, the data must be described in as much detail as possible. In ANT terms, a good description would require little explanation, as the inventory of events, traces, and associations charted down would, according to Latour, explain itself. With a significant amount of empirical data, various theoretical perspectives can then be employed to make sense of the data. This actor-centric approach is favoured despite the many potential (and I expect there will be many) inconsistencies that may crop up in the actors’ deployment of his world because it positions the researcher as the non-expert and the informants the expert. As stated earlier, “only later, we will ask you (the actor) to explain how you came about settling them” (Latour, 2007, p. 23) Furthermore, it is not just tracing these contexts that are important but also describing how actors frame their own contexts. According to Latour, “it is this

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very framing activity, this very activity of contextualizing, that should be brought into the foreground and it cannot be done as the zoom effect (of social context) is taken for granted” (Latour, 2007, p. 186). In this sense, it is not just the contexts but the actions that produce the framing of contexts by the actors that serve as fertile data for analysis. This is a key component of ANT practice. In Science in Action, Latour suggests that it is not enough to study science as a product, but to study science and technology in action. It is also not enough to “study a statement, but to look instead for all the transformations it undergoes in other hands” (Latour, 1988, p. 59). Again, this is applicable in the social sciences where it is not enough to just consider the result of contexts but to also consider how these contexts make sense, change, and transform as actors act. Once again, such a complex approach is only achievable by description instead of explanation. Latour draws a parallel of this methodology with ethnography: Anthropologists, who had to deal with pre-moderns and were not requested as much to imitate natural sciences, were more fortunate and allowed their actors to deploy a much richer world. In many ways, ANT is simply an attempt to allow the members of contemporary society to have as much leeway in defining themselves as that offered by ethnography (Latour, 2007, p. 41).

ANT is a research methodology that allows “the complexities of collectives to be deployed, rather than fit them in frameworks and existing theory” (Latour, 2007, p. 57). Its emphasis on letting actors work freely is a refreshing approach to gathering data, and is particularly useful when applied along with ethnography. It serves as an important reminder that actors are usually more aware of what is happening with them than the analyst does.

Research Design The data presented in the following chapters of the book was collected over two periods of time. The first period of fieldwork took place in 2011, and this constitutes the bulk of the work represented in this book. During this time, my focus were two sites for generating data. The first is the offline context, where I could gain an insight into the lives of my research informants. This was done through interviews that I conducted with Christians who actively blog about their faith, or actively participate in faith-related social media groups. The second site for data generation was cyberspace. I participated in avenues on the Internet that are expressions of Christian spirituality in any way, such as forums, Facebook groups, tracking blog updates and correlating these findings to the offline findings for analysis. The other aspect involves textual analysis. Taking the view that much of the social world or mediated communications, are “pervaded by messages which contain visual as well as linguistic signs” (Bignell, 2002, p. 14), analysing a website that generally contains large amounts of text (word), photographs, and other visuals would provide much data. In short, as Marcel Danesi put it, looking at visuals from a semiotic perspective

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helps the researcher ask three questions: What does a certain structure mean? How does it represent what it means? Why does it mean what it means? (Danesi, 2002, p. 43). By looking at the choice of signs, I was able to derive how certain terms, feelings, expressions were represented in these websites. The second fieldwork phase took place over a few months in 2015. The scope of my research was significantly smaller, as it was mainly a follow-up project to specifically track the development of a new Facebook group, as well as focus on a small number of case studies associated with my previous participants. Most of my findings stemming from this period of time can be found in the latter chapters of the book.

The Fieldwork Phase My fieldwork phase, which took place mostly in 2012, consisted mainly of three phases—Web trawling, informant invitation, and finally interviews and observations. The initial phase of fieldwork involved a lot of “surfing” for blogs, websites and Facebook groups created, written and maintained by Malaysians. This proved to be tedious due to the saturation of blogs in the Internet. When checking a website or a Facebook group, there were a number of criteria that needed to be met prior to being shortlisted as a website for potential use. Firstly, the website needed to have a significant portion of its content dedicated to explicitly Christian content. Although I did not measure in quantitative terms what a “significant portion” of Christian content is, any blog that contained roughly at least 30–40% Christian content was considered. This means that on average, in every three blog posts I read, should there be at least one post relating directly to matters concerning Christianity, I would shortlist it. I anticipated some blogs that I observed might become inactive during my fieldwork period. This might appear to be an obstacle but it actually served as an opportunity to ask my informants reasons for their decreasing lack of activity. Secondly, there needed to be an indication that the particular site was currently active. This was easily determined at first glance. If it was a blog, a quick look at the most recent blog spot would indicate when the blogger was last active. As a general principle I did not consider any blog that did not have any postings prior to March or April 2011, which was roughly the start of my fieldwork. In the case of Facebook groups, any lack of recent activity on the “wall” or “events” indicated a lack of activity. Thirdly, the author of the website must be a Malaysian. This was also relatively easy to ascertain—a click on the author’s profile indicated where he or she was from. The search for “Malaysian” blogs and groups grew easier over time. There were two reasons for this gradual ease. Firstly, most blogs and Facebook groups observed were linked to other bloggers. One of the most useful ways of searching for other blogs was by searching through links that were listed on the blogs that I had already started observing. In a sense, this was allowing a Christian blogger to tell me where other Christian bloggers were—and the links served as fertile signposts. Another

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factor that aided me in my search for Christian bloggers was personal recommendations by my informants, who introduced me to their friends, invited me into their Facebook networks, and took the effort to ease my subsequent invitations. A number of these recommendations led to some excellent resources and informant involvement. After short-listing a number of websites, I proceeded to invite the authors of these websites primarily through email. In some cases where their emails were not publicly shown on their blogs or groups, I sent them messages through the blog channels. After initial contact was made, I proceeded to arrange the interviews.

A Survey of Research Informants Below are two tables providing an overview of my informants’ profiles. The first table contains information relating to their age, gender, and denomination while the second table shows basic information regarding their online activities. There are two groups of informants. The first group of people I interviewed were Christian bloggers who are lay members of their respective churches. The second group were church pastors. The pastors in the table are indicated by the “Ps” abbreviation in their name (see Table 2.1). There are some notes regarding the type of people I interviewed. Firstly, almost half of my informants are currently regularly attending a church in the evangelical denomination. The evangelical bias was not intentional as it was not a criterion in my search for informants. It does however, point to the possibility that evangelical Christians are currently more inclined to have a personal space online. Secondly, there is a good mix both in the categories of gender and age. However, all my informants who are pastors are male. This is likely because a majority of pastors in Malaysian churches are male. Similarly, while youth and young adults make up most of the numbers in the category of lay-members only one pastor would fall in the category of young adult, the rest being in their late-thirties upwards. In summary, the demographics of Group 1 represent younger bloggers while Group 2 would provide data is more representative of the church institution as well as older individuals. The second table below indicates the different types of online platforms utilized by my informants. “Personal blogs” refer to weblogs that are single-authored by the informant, and that the content of the blog is primarily representative of only him/herself. “Group/Church Website” refers to a number of different types of websites such as official church websites, websites of Christian organizations, online forums, church blogs, and Facebook groups whose content are representative of a group or organization. Also a criterion for this category is that they are the gatekeeper (or a play a part in gatekeeping) of content of the particular group. The third column, “social networking sites” indicates whether or not the informants are active on other popular social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Table 2.2). Apart from being bloggers, two of the lay informants serve as gatekeepers and/or key authors for group sites. In the case of Darren, he is currently the sole author of a

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Table 2.1 General demographics of informants No. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Pseudonym Darren Indah Eve Jane Anne Stark Alfred Jennifer Nate Suvi Alphaa Helen Felicia Ps. Sivina Ps. Justin Ps. Ong Ps. Steven Ps. Homer Ps. Stanley Ps. Lenny Ps. Samb Camb

Gender M F F F F F M F M F M F F M M M M M M M M M

Age range 31–40 21–30 21–30 51–60 18–20 30–40 30–40 20–30 20–30 20–30 40–50 30–40 20–30 50–60 40–50 40–50 30–40 50–60 50–60 30–40 60–70 50–60

Interviewed May 7, 2011 July 6, 2011 August 1, 2011 August 11, 2011 August 3, 2011 August 4, 2011 July 14, 2011 September 21, 2011 September 30, 2011 October 10, 2011 December 12, 2011 December 15, 2011 December 2, 2011 October 19, 2011 October 6, 2011 November 11, 2011 October 10, 2011 September 12, 2011 February 2, 2012 February 3, 2012 March 19, 2016 October 21, 2016

a

Alpha, and Ps. Sivin opted not to be anonymized Ps. Sam and Cam are founders of a Facebook group, anonymized as the End-Time Watchmen. They were interviewed during the second fieldwork phase. Cam is not a Malaysian. This exception is made due to his active involvement in the administration of a primarily Malaysian Facebook group

b

church blog (its contents largely mirrors his personal blog). As for Stark, she created and administrates a closed Facebook group that discusses apologetics and related issues pertaining to Christianity. However, quite a high proportion of pastors moderate groups online both on their own church websites and on social media. This gives rise to the question of whether pastors are also increasingly becoming gatekeepers of information online and that it is not necessarily a very different environment offline where churches are seen to be pulpit centric. Throughout the process of making contact, explaining and discussing my research project, arranging for interview appointments, conducting interviews, and maintaining communication with my research informants, I have come to value the necessity of what I now consider a “multi-platform interviewing process”. Due to the nature of convergence, it is increasingly difficult to put firm boundaries on how a researcher prefers to interview an informant. There is an increasing discussion of how email interviews, chats, virtual world participation can contribute to research,

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Table 2.2 Survey of online activity of informants No. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Pseudonym Darren Indah Eve Jane Anne Stark Alfred Jennifer Nate Suvi Alpha Helen Felicia Ps. Sivin Ps. Jack Ps. Ong Ps. Steven Ps. Homer Ps. Stanley Ps. Lenny Ps. Sam Cam

Personal blog Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No Yes No No

Group/Church website gatekeeper Yes No No No No Yes No No No No No No No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes

Social networking sites (eg. Facebook, Twitter, etc Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes

and my experience with my informants does, to some extent, exemplify the challenges involving converging communication technologies. The standard process I undergo with any potential informant is as follows: After observing that a blog that contains significant amounts of Christian content and expression I contacted the blogger either through email (depending on whether his email is publicly available) or through a private message to the blogger. In the email I explained my research project and invited him/her to participate. A positive response normally included a short series of email exchanges with some questions about my research, arranging for a good time to meet, exchanging phone numbers, and eventually meeting up for a face-to-face interview. For some of my interviewees, regular contact through email, Facebook, and SMS was maintained, and further discussions about their online ventures took place in a less formal way. There were exceptions to the above model of conducting research. One of my informants, Pastor Steven was primarily based in Thailand but frequently returns to Malaysia. During the month of June 2011, he was in Bangkok, experiencing severe floods in the city. I first approached him in May 2011 after noticing his blog. We kept in regular contact through email. He was the first person to send me a PDF copy of a completed and signed consent form as he was in Taiwan at the time. We tried

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2 Locating the “Everyday” and the “Offline” in Online

numerous times to meet for an interview whenever he returned to Malaysia but for a number of reasons the interview never materialized. We did speak on the phone on a number of occasions but my research project never really came to the fore of these conversations. On his own initiative, we linked up on a popular mobile chat program Whatsapp. He suggested that I interview him on Whatsapp, which functions similarly to Windows Live Messenger and Google Chat, only that this is a chat program for smartphones which we both possess. I am not entirely unfamiliar with interviews on chat platforms as I have conducted them before but I have not tried conducting an interview with text on my mobile phone. However, the experience resulted in it being an extremely fruitful session. Over the subsequent weeks of contact, Pastor Stevenn discussed not only matters regarding his blog but the chat conversation also became a demonstration of how he, as a missionary, uses the Internet to assist with his work. Using Whatsapp, he would describe the flood situation in Bangkok, sent photographs he took from his phone, forwarded maps for my reference, and explained what the churches there were doing. Pastor Steven eventually added me on Facebook and continued to keep me in the loop with his frequent status updates regarding the floods in Bangkok. This was a taste of Internet ethnography. His online activities were concurrent with his offline activities, and the interview process was not only informational, but highly demonstrative. There were a number of other cases where formal interviews took place in cyberspace. A common platform was Windows Live Messenger which I used to interview two of my informants. Similar to the experience of Sanni Orgad (2005), I have found my informants to be extremely adept at articulating their thoughts through text. The elements that are sacrificed are potential observation of body language and spontaneity in exchange for long text responses. Another avenue which I utilized was Skype, which allowed for free video-conferencing. This was perhaps the platform that provided a more balanced approach for informants who were geographically distanced from me in terms of being able to see them. In short, the plethora of communications platforms utilized for my research was complicated. Whilst arguably inconsistent, it has also provided me good insights into a diverse range of informant expressions and, in some cases, a first-hand experience of how online media contributes to everyday Christian practices.

What to Expect To keep my findings organized, the following chapters will present narratives in three different contexts. The first thread of spiritual expressions and narratives described are personal experiences using the blog for personal spiritual development. The emphasis is on how different participants approach the blog, why they blog, and how the act of blogging is situated in their everyday Christianity. The second thread expands discussion to the institution—how do churches view blogs and social-media engagement, and perhaps the most significant contribution in this

What to Expect

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thread is an in-depth exploration of what pastors do online? This, of course, re-casts the pastors as everyday Christians, as opposed to being strictly associated as representatives of the church. The third thread of findings presented will further branch out from the personal and the institutional, to how Christians engage with the broader (non-Christian) community in Malaysia, particularly in the socio-political context.

Chapter 3

The Personal Experience: Blogging as Development of Spiritual Identity

The narratives of Malaysian Christian bloggers described in this chapter presents the multiple contexts and environments that shape their online expressions of their faith, as well as how their current practices of blogging actively contribute to their personal spirituality, contexts, and environments. As explained in the previous chapter, rather than dwelling on whether a website allows for physical or practical interactivity, these case studies demonstrate the expansive networks of everyday Christianity within the individual’s life, and how these various relationships play a crucial role in the formation and expression of online Christianity. Only through the description of the larger network can we fully appreciate how the Internet is yet another incorporated extension to the already diverse repertoire of everyday Christian expression of spirituality. The description of five primary case studies in the following sections will progressively highlight three related ideas—that there is a link between the online and offline environments; that human interpersonal relationships can be developed; and that while the internet affords certain liberties, new boundaries also emerge. These ideas will inform the analysis of online religious practices not only in this chapter, but serve as a theoretical signpost for the rest of this book.

Parts of this chapter was first published in two separate edited volumes and are reprinted here with permission: Tan, M.Y. (2013). “Malaysian Christians Online: Online/Offline Interactions and Integration”. In Malaysian Christians Online: Online/Offline Interactions and Integration. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848881785_010 Tan, M.Y. (2012) “Negotiating the Liberties and Boundaries of Malaysian Online Christianity: Case Studies”, in Hopkins, Julian and Julian Lee (eds), Thinking Through Malaysia: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century, SIRD Publications, Puchong. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_3

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The Blog: Where Online and Offline Converge Case Study 1: Matt’s Blog Matt, the principal author of the blog The Busy Street, grew up in the township of Ipoh, Perak. Growing up in a family that practices Chinese ancestral worship, Matt was exposed to Christianity at the age of fifteen, where he began to actively negotiate the beliefs of Christianity within his own life. Matt describes his conversion to Christianity as one that required a lot of intellectual thought. Matt converted to Christianity in his school’s Christian Fellowship (CF). Christian Fellowships are relatively common in Malaysian secondary schools and colleges, serving as a society and platform where Christian students of any denomination can gather together. Also common is the involvement of an external Christian NGO called Fellowship of Evangelical Students (FES), which provides training, and support to Christian fellowships in schools, colleges, and universities around Malaysia. These gatherings normally constitute as an official extra-curricular activity for students. In Matt’s case, the CF served as his early influence of Christian spirituality. He explained in the interview that it was due to this early involvement with the CF and FES that shaped his spiritual instincts. He also said that ‘my instinct is very interdenominational. I knew Christ through FES. CF is also very inter-denominational’. This particular thread is revisited when Matt discusses his current Christian ministries and activities, including his blog. Soon after accepting Christ, Matt grappled with his new religion of choice. He admitted that the conversion was not an easy choice due to the deep involvement of his family in ancestral worship. Prior to his conversion, he considered the momentous weight of the Christian belief—that making a decision to worship Jesus Christ would make the difference between heaven and hell. Upon becoming a Christian, Matt recounted that two factors helped him negotiate his faith. Firstly it was his father, who frequently asked him questions about Christianity and challenging him with tough questions. Inquisitive by nature and having a liking for reading books, Matt searched for answers to his father’s questions. It was in this exercise of poring over Christian literature where Matt’s liking for Christian apologetics began. He explained it as such: The place where I found the most help was through books. That’s where it [apologetics] started. One of the books that helped me a lot that time was a small booklet by Josh McDowell. The first one that I read answered some of the questions that I was asking so that kinda grounded me in my faith. Soon, I realise I was approached by cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, so I started to ask what’s the difference? So my friends also bought me books on cults so I learnt the difference.1

Matt’s shared extensively about his interest in Christian literature. At several junctures when explaining particular thoughts and ideas, he would refer to the different authors that inspired him, like James McDowell and Tim Keller. As 1

Matt. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, May 7, 2011.

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Matt’s Christian life progressed, he began attending a Methodist church in Ipoh which he described as a ‘rather charismatic group’, where members learnt about ‘Word of faith’, ‘health and wealth’, ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues’.2 These are issues and practices that are more common in evangelical churches in Malaysia. In that church setting, Matt and his friends were actively involved in praying for revival in their township. Despite this, Matt alluded to a generational difference within his church. While Matt did not elaborate further on this inquiry, he stated that a personal spiritual milestone that happened when he was around 17 years old, which he referred to as part of his ‘second conversion’: There was a case of a friend in our youth group. His mother had cancer so we prayed for her and did everything we knew about laying hands and anointing with olive oil and speaking in tongues and everything. Everything. Binding and deliverance, that sort of thing. And she recovered for a while and she was baptised. But there was a quick relapse after that, and she passed away. And that was an event got me questioning my beliefs. I thought I did the right things with the wrong results.3

Soon after the above occurrence, which left Matt with new questions about his faith, he moved to Kuala Lumpur to attend college. During his pursuit of an education in computer studies, he made a decision not to return to Ipoh during the holidays, and instead found a job at a Christian bookstore. During the few months where he worked at the bookshop, Matt enjoyed the side benefit of being able to read whatever he wanted while taking care of the shop. He read extensively on several issues—disappointment with God, issues of faith-healing, speaking in tongues, so on and so forth. He used that opportunity to find answers to the failure of his spiritual endeavour involving his friend’s mother who died. While Matt did not explicitly state what the ‘second conversion’ is, he said that it was during the time when he worked at the Christian bookshop where he moved away from ‘Word of faith, that sort of thing.’4 This second conversion then, refers not so much an embrace of a new religion, such as when Matt became a Christian; but rather an embrace of different doctrinal perspectives. Matt is now married with two children, working as a business consultant, and has been attending a Presbyterian church in a thriving Kuala Lumpur suburb. Matt says that this Presbyterian church is not much different from his Methodist experience as it is also rather progressive. They do speak in tongues, and have charismatic influences such as contemporary worship services. Matt attended the mother church of Puchong Presbyterian Church (PPC) for roughly 7 years in a nearby suburb of Subang Jaya, stating that one of the key reasons that he stayed on is because the sermons are more expository, where preaching is based on a particular text in the Bible and exposing various topics and issues that come with it. This is perhaps easiest to contrast with ‘topical’ preaching, where the narrative of the sermon is to

2

Ibid. Ibid. 4 Ibid. 3

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highlight a particular topic of interest, then referring to various Biblical verses that deal with the said topic. After the initial 7 years with the mother church in Subang, PPC embarked on a project to set up other branch churches in other towns as well. Influenced by Tim Keller’s church in New York, PPC adopted and partnered with the church in a ‘city to city’ church planting effort. Matt availed himself to the church for this ministry and moved to the new church set up in Puchong, where he serves as one of the leaders. Matt currently preaches once a month. He prefers writing down his entire sermon prior to delivering it, sourcing for information from various places, and ensuring that everything that he says on the pulpit have been thought through thoroughly. After the service, he would normally post the entire transcript online on the semi-institutional website, The Busy Street, for viewers of his blog to access it. Although little has been said about the blog that Matt authors so far, this account of his spiritual journey from his conversion to his current position in his personal journey of the Christian faith serves as the social context in which Matt’s blog content is formulated and expressed. The above narrative, coupled with a parallel journey of inquiry with some of his friends, which will be further described later, forms the social context of his blogging habits and preferences. Although tedious, the ANT approach of allowing Matt’s own interactions with the various actants in his blogging network—be it a dying woman, a book, a place, a denomination—to surface, serves as a better mapping device of the story of Matt’s blog, rather than talking about what is the blog appearance currently like, and what could possibly have influenced him. The Busy Street is a blog that is partially described as ‘A Ministry for the Malaysian church by Puchong Presbyterian Church’. This definition is stated on the blog heading. It is important to mention this first, as one will find that as more is described about The Busy Street, it is less apparent that the blog is about PPC, but rather a blog about ‘the Malaysian church’ at large. What, then, is this ‘Malaysian church’? This is perhaps best defined through the intent and content of the blog. In the year 2003, Matt and a few friends from PPC were out for a drink at a local coffee shop discussing matters concerning the church and the Christian faith at lunch. Matt remembered that one of the key ideas that surfaced in that conversation was that there was a lot of ‘canggih’ (Malay word for complex) issues out there which are relevant to the grassroots church members who might not have been carefully discussed. This was when The Busy Street was birthed. It was designed as a connecting platform between grassroots and complex issues. We needed something to make it relevant for them. Perhaps to put it on a lower shelf that they can reach it. Then it can make them aware and maybe hunger for more things. So we try translating into a lingo that people can reach it. It takes out the theological jargon and all that [. . .]. We’re engaging with contemporary issues.5

A quick look at the blog now sheds more light on what these ‘complex’ issues are. The five most recent blog posts cover issues such as ‘If Jesus is so great, why are 5

Ibid.

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some Christians just plan jerks?’; ‘Nurturing imagination of children’; ‘Some ideas regarding Hinduism, Islam, and other faiths’; ‘What is Hell?’; and ‘Christian spirituality’. Before discussing these topics, another reference point of what the blog is popular for can be found in two listings of ‘most popular’ blog posts and ‘hot topics’ on the left column of the website. Some topics include ‘Is the Bible real?’; ‘Why Does God allow people to Suffer?’; ‘Can Christians do Tai Chi?’, ‘What does the Bible say about homosexuality?’; and ‘Has science disproved God?’ Most of the blog carries these topical veins. It tackles several challenging questions pertaining to Christianity, operating as a blog about apologetics for the lay person. At least that is what Matt says he hopes to achieve. One of his goals for the blog is that it would not appear to be trying to be overly intellectual, because he envisions his blog as a sort of a marketplace of ideas, where ideas are exchanged. In its heyday (he confesses that these days the blog is not as popular as it once was), the blog served also as a platform for offline discussion groups to take place. One of the other authors of the blog actively got in touch with mostly university students from around town through the blog, set up discussion forums, and meet up for a face-to-face session. Matt proudly claims that there was a participant that came all the way from a distant state of Terrenganu (about 4 h drive from Kuala Lumpur) for a discussion forum. At the time when I interviewed him, Matt is the only active author of the blog. The three other founding members of the blog have moved on to other things in life. One of them is serving in a government department in the northern Malaysian state of Penang. Another has begun another website specifically ministering to Malay language speaking people. Matt, however, continues his work on The Busy Street. He explained that the blog is an important part of his life. I feel like my passion is in this blog. So no matter what I do, whether it is in church or in the office, that’s the core of what I want to do: to teach, to write. It is an expression. So if I don’t do that, I’ll feel very pressured. So the blog becomes an outlet where I can release some of my energy. It’s a part of who I am. If I don’t I’ll feel trapped, like ‘what am I doing here?’.6

Matt stated that the process of writing material for his blog forces him to think through the many issues that come up. Because he has to post material for a wider audience on his blog, the research keeps him intellectually sharp. He said ‘it forces me to think through these things and being engaged keeps me going’,7 and that without thinking and reading, he would feel stagnant, and not progressing. Here we can see that the blog is part of a large network of Matt’s personal spiritual journey. From a purely online perspective, the practice of blogging was a habit that Matt picked up when he first participated in a Yahoo! Groups forum, constantly writing his ideas and answers about Christianity with random strangers. However, the description above demonstrates that there is more to just the online. Habits and issues in the past also play a defining role in his online expressions. Matt’s conversion encouraged the habit of poring through books for answers, a process which was

6 7

Ibid. Ibid.

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repeated in his self-described ‘second conversion’. These two are poignant networks of the development of his willingness to engage in issues that are difficult to the Christian belief. This is further compounded by his early Christian experience of his school’s Christian Fellowship, which inculcated an inter-denominational preference to his Christian identity. This crossing of denominational boundary is also replicated on his blog The Busy Street, where he engages not just Christians but people of other faiths in various subject matters as well. To revisit two of the arguments presented at the beginning of this chapter, one can clearly see that the online expression is constantly defined by Matt’s everyday experiences of Christianity in the offline, from the past and in the present. Some of these everyday experiences consist of some issues that emanate from situations in the church which prompted a personal response, further establishing the symbiosis of organised religion and everyday religion. The culmination of these experiences is an example of how one can follow the actors and allow them to construct their own lived experience, and to see ‘which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish.’8

Case Study 2: Helen’s Blog Helen’s story is notably different from Matt’s. She was born and raised in a Christian home, and attended a local Methodist church with her family for the most part of her teenage years. Helen was active in the church, particularly with her youth group, during that period of time. She described herself as the sort of Christian who was rather judgmental, although such an evaluation of herself was not evident at the time. As an example of how she approached to Christianity when she was younger, Helen said that ‘if I see somebody who is not going to church I go ‘how can they not be going to church [. . .]. They must be far away from God [. . .]. They must have backslided or something like that.’9 This ‘judgmental’ approach, as Helen puts it, to Christianity underwent some change as Helen entered her late teens and adulthood. When Helen moved to a different part of the city to pursue her tertiary education, she had to look for a new church. After a brief period of exploring various churches in Kuala Lumpur, she chanced upon a charismatic church, which she has not experienced before. She was introduced to a different brand of Christianity, since her background was largely Methodist. The main difference between her previous conservative Methodist church experience and this new church experience is a more liberal approach to spiritual expression.

8 9

Latour, Reassembling the social, 12. Helen. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, December 17, 2011.

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I was exposed to the charismatic way of worship and I really liked that because God is suddenly so close to you [. . .]. It’s not, you know, the words you read in the Bible but people can pray over you and speak words of wisdom, words of knowledge [. . .]. A very personal God. So it felt like intimacy.10

Having enjoyed this particular denomination of beliefs and practices in Christianity, her search for a more permanent church to settle in soon ended. She settled mid-way through her college years through to the early years of her career in journalism in an evangelical church, City Centre Church (CCC). The evangelical practice of CCC appealed to her, much as how it is described above, and as she re-learned the ropes of her Christian faith and doctrine, she embraced most of the new doctrinal teachings introduced to her, and she soon began to be trained by the church to be a lay leader. It is at this juncture where her ‘judgmental’ instincts underwent rapid change. Mid-way through her training, Helen grew sceptical about the teachings of her pastor, whom she says started to preach and teach heavily in the area of ‘prosperity teaching’.11 Helen recalled that during a particular leaders’ training, the pastor made some statements that she found disturbing to her beliefs. Two such examples concern the situation when the pastor of CCC said that a worship leader (the person who leads the church congregation in song to worship God) should build up the atmosphere of a church service. Helen found such approach to worship ‘very manufactured’, and bordering on being man-made methods to ‘manipulate people’.12 This concern of congregational manipulation is evident in the second example, where the pastor teaches the leaders and the church members on the principles of finances, and specifically giving to the church. She says that the pastor would quote ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone’13 from the Bible to then claim that ‘when you give you must die to it, it must hurt only it will produce fruit then God can give you back’ and that ‘you must give until it hurts. It must be sacrificial giving otherwise you cannot get blessed [. . .].’ It was around this time when she began to realise that this charismatic brand of Christianity can be taken too far. She increasingly grew uncomfortable with the church’s over-emphasis on finances, claiming that the leaders used Bible verses to ‘manipulate people’ to give the church more money for various projects. She said that ‘a lot of things you are doing is to manipulate people, basically [. . .] and I’m very anti manipulation so I was very upset and they used scripture also, to

The term ‘charismatic’ is commonly associated with churches that place an emphasis on the works of the Holy Spirit in the modern era of humanity—such as prophecy, free worship (as opposed to structured hymns), and most notably, speaking in various tongues which they assert is divinely inspired. Other notable distinctions include the use of contemporary musical instruments, unique perspective of handling money, and others. 11 Prosperity teaching is a strand of Christian teaching that places a strong emphasis that God intends for every Christian to be financially rich. Some contend that there is no Biblical basis—Helen being an example in the case study above. 12 Helen. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, December 17, 2011 13 John 12:24, New King James Version. 10

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manipulate.’14 Helen believed personally that the particular verses mentioned in John 12:24 refers specifically to a different context, and has nothing to do with financial giving or sacrifice. Helen, who described herself as one who did not like confrontations, left the church without bringing up the disagreement. I became very disillusioned and upset so finally I left [. . .]. I was there for one year [. . .]. Because of this experience every time I went to church I had the critical spirit where you go out judging what the pastor is saying whether it is correct or not [. . .]. It turned me off church for a while and for a long time I wasn’t able to go to church without that mindset.15

The above statement captures the transition of Helen’s aforementioned judgmental target from those outside to the church to the church itself. Immediately after her leaving CCC he first critical blog post directed at the institution of the church was posted on her personal blog, HelenK. In the posting, Helen directed her criticisms at CCC in a tell-all fashion, naming the pastor and the church in the process. Helen explained that her intention of telling the entire story of CCC and her experience did not carry any intent to harm anybody, and that blogging the experience ‘was just something natural because I was talking about my life and this part of my life’.16 However, the blog post did not go unnoticed, and Helen, conceding that she did not anticipate the fallout that ensued, received word that the pastor of CCC was very unhappy about it. She recounted the incident as such: The first post that I posted about church [. . .]. If I remember correctly, there was a fall out and I withdrew the post and [. . .] I didn’t expect things like that [. . .]. I don’t like confrontations [. . .]. It’s very hazy now. The pastor [. . .] he said, ‘Oh I trusted you so much [. . .] training to be a cell group leader [. . .]. How can one of my leaders do this to me.’ [. . .] He took this as a betrayal [. . .]. Because I left then I wrote about it [. . .] but I didn’t talk to him directly.17

Driven by a certain measure of guilt, Helen removed the blog post, but re-posted it without mentioning any names. At the time of this ‘blogging fallout’, Helen had already been blogging quite regularly on a number of blogging platforms. However, her blog gained a huge surge in traffic and popularity when she decided to publicly describe the circumstances in which she quit the church, naming the church and the pastor in the process. Many people posted comments in support of her story, and identifying themselves as fellow victims of manipulative pastoring. A lot of people say I have the same experience with my church you know, or [. . .] a lot of churches are like that [. . .]. When I started blogging about church it drew a lot of people who were also disillusioned to church [. . .]. In fact [. . .] a lot of people who were very negative about church.18

From that point on, Helen’s subsequent postings, many of them relating to questions she has about the church, became a very popular website. Helen jokingly

14

Helen. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, December 17, 2011 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 15

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mentioned that if I used Google to search for her first name, which is relatively generic and common (like Helen), her blog would be the second link to appear in the search results. This high readership and interactivity in turn, spurred her to continue blogging. She admitted that the attention she received felt quite good, and that the affirmation that many others felt the same about her life issues was one of the key factors she blogged even more. The other result of this newfound gathering of ‘disillusioned’ Christians, was that the affirmation of her negativity further reinforced the negativity, which in turn serves as the impetus for newer content. The blog lasted roughly 3–4 years—covering a wide range of issues that, as Helen described it, brought together an online community of fellow disillusioned Christians. Helen attended at least three other churches during the entire lifespan of HelenK, with her posting questions regarding services she attended, practices which she found discomforting, or issues that arose in her consideration of the Christian faith. Interestingly, the end of HelenK was not caused by any church ruse, but by an element closer to home—her mother. Apart from blogging extensively about the church, Helen also writes about her parents, with whom she had a testy relationship during that same period of time. Her mother, upon finding out about the blog, asked Helen for permission to read it, to which Helen obliged. Helen’s mother, upon reading certain blog posts describing her, proceeded to confront Helen regarding those posts, stating that it is unfair that ‘you talk about your family. People will think bad things about us and they only get one side of the story and you they’ll think we’re horrible people.’19 Helen’s response to her mother’s critique was similar to her response to CCC when confronted about the contents of her blog. Although HelenK was not an anonymous blog, Helen had never revealed her blog to her own family members, who were not aware of Helen’s blog until this confrontation. After Helen’s mother read the blog, and was not pleased with it, Helen decided to stop posting on HelenK entirely, mainly because the security of her online content has been compromised, and did not wish further confrontation with her mom (who had also revealed the blog to other relatives in the family, causing further discouraging comments to surface). Helen soon started another blog, this time anonymously—but she never rediscovered the edge that she once had, stating that ‘although I had gone anonymous and there was an element of safety the fact was the bubble had been breached where you feel like you can say anything because this was my space. . . It wasn’t the same anymore’.20 Because HelenK is now an inactive blog, my interview with Helen provides me with an additional perspective—hindsight. While describing my informants’ life is largely situated in hindsight, Helen is able to talk about her blog in hindsight, something which is unique amongst all my informants as the other informants are active bloggers. This allowed me to probe Helen further about her feelings about her blog now, and to consider if there are any lasting impressions made in her life today.

19 20

Ibid. Ibid.

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Helen, upon reflection, says that the blogging experience had an effect on her spiritual life, saying that it ‘created a crisis which [. . .] lasted many years [. . .] because I couldn’t go back to church [. . .] after that I kept trying to force myself to go back to church and it didn’t quite work’.21 Although she did not elaborate further, I posit that the blog became her new ecclesia—the ‘church’. Through the communal sharing of problems with the Christian church, Helen’s spiritual security, as it were, found its base online. This online platform of church critique took on the role of Helen’s everyday Christianity, and Sunday excursions to a potentially new physical church could not offer the same community support that she has established online. If this is at least partially accurate, then the impact of her online community runs deeper than the lifespan of the blog itself. In fact, this is an example of how an online practice directly impacts the offline practice. She only began to regularly attend a local Methodist church 4 years after the above events. Hindsight has also generated a different view of her own blog. Helen states quite categorically that if she were given an opportunity to re-live that period of her life again, she would not have blogged the way she did. Her reason is as such: After I had moved out of that phase I found that that was not helpful anymore because a lot of people just want to talk negative things about church but it’s not edifying and not useful [. . .]. It’s nice to be told that you are right, but it’s not helpful. I would rather have a discussion.22

On the other hand Helen considers the HelenK phase a part of her Christian life that contributes directly to her personal spirituality—perhaps not in the sense of having divine experiences during her blogging activities, but how it could be part of a greater spiritual journey. It was a part of my journey with God. Definitely it taught me certain things [. . .] like if I’m not in church it doesn’t mean I’m not walking with God [. . .]. I realise that in God’s big picture if you’re not in church it doesn’t mean you are far away from Him it’s just part of the journey that the person has to walk and you don’t know whether the person will go back to church later or not and his journey with God is so much bigger than just being in church because it’s also about being aware of his presence, walking with him every day, trying to serve him and do the best you can wherever.23

There are a number of things we can draw from Helen’s journey as a blogger. Her own description of various events and issues suggest to us that the blog, HelenK, cannot be studied in isolation. All the numerous actors in the network that are described above, their practices, and their direct and indirect associations are all intricately linked, and collectively constitute the identity of HelenK and Helen as a Christian. As demonstrated above, we can see that HelenK was birthed out of an existing network of both religious and social factors in the offline, such as personal attitudes, church experiences, exposure to different Christian denominations and others. The blog itself became a platform for Helen to represent herself as a 21

Ibid. Ibid. 23 Ibid. 22

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Christian. Although her representation of Christianity might be seen as a non-conventional one, it allowed her as a Christian individual to fully express her various discontents with the more traditional institutions of the church, and introduced her to a network of people whom she had not much exposure to. It is worth adding that this online community in turn, led to at least one offline occasion of meeting up with another well-read Malaysian Christian who became disillusioned with the church. All of these practices are interlinked, beyond the blog itself, to the point of reinforcing and impacting her Christian life post-blog. Brenda Brasher, in Give Me That Online Religion reminds us the importance to ‘articulate ideas of the divine that are credible and meaningful against the backdrop of its time. Skipping or mishandling this task can cause an eclipse of the divine’.24 Christopher Helland, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, has provided an important academic entry into articulating religion in the backdrop of cyberspace today. However, the two case studies above underline the importance to move away from studying ‘websites’ and whether they are ‘online religion’ or ‘religion online’ and consider the larger backdrop, which is the surrounding networks of the website, such as the offline, as well as the totality of the human experience. Spirituality, or the divine, as Brasher puts it, will not likely be discovered or experienced in the isolation of a website, but in the points of connection between the various actors in a particular network that culminates in a spiritual experience. Understandably, it is impossible to fully trace all the networks of any individual’s life, but it is important nonetheless to begin framing online/offline discussions side by side. The blogging experiences of Matt and Helen provide a glimpse of evidence that online and offline experiences are, in the greater network of things, inseparable. Adam and Tatnall explain the necessity of such an approach: The process could better be seen as an iterative one and after the actors have been identified and ‘interviewed’ and networks of interactions between actors have been examined, the process continues to look for new actors and for how the technology may have been translated in the process of adoption

Real Spiritual Relationships Online? So far, we have seen that because the online and offline realms are inseparable entities, much more can be said about how online Christian content is constantly negotiating with the offline world and whether these effects are to be desired. If the case study of Matt and Helen’s blog illuminates the interactive relationship of the blog to the blogger and possibly to a broader community of like-minded believers, this section will foreground the discussion of whether online experiences can serve as a genuine spiritual platform for the individual and whether meaningful relationships can be forged through online interactions.

24

Brenda Brasher, Give Me That Online Religion, (San Francisco: Josey Bass, 2001), 186.

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One general observation is that the lay Christian bloggers are people who do believe in online interactions and the potential for personal Christian development. They are also generally open to the idea of a more expansive and less censored form of interaction between church, Christians, and people of other faiths. These ideals, however, are either rejected or strongly cautioned against by most of the pastors whom I have interviewed. The concept of online communities, relationships, and interactions are largely unpopular because of the perception that there is no apparent and physical element to it. This lends credibility to McGuire’s claim that Christianity is “particularly attentive to human embodiment” (McGuire, 2006: 189) because of the key expressions of embodiment in the central events and figures of Christianity. The need for the physical within Christianity is a recurring theme in my interviews with Malaysian pastors. In my discussions with pastors, I regularly raised the question of online Christian involvement by providing different scenarios where online spirituality might be experienced. I asked their general views on whether Christians can gain anything spiritual through the Internet. At a basic level, the pastors interviewed were not opposed to Christian activity online. Pastor Ong, 47, who pastors an evangelical church near Kepong in Kuala Lumpur, said that “there’s room for the Internet. It has a lot of things. Information, good websites, devotions”. This is the consensus amongst the pastors. How this is practiced varies from pastor to pastor, and will be discussed more in a later section in this chapter. However, once the discussion turned to issues of greater online interactivity, pastors become more cautious. There were two main concerns highlighted by pastors with regard to online Christian expression by their church members. Firstly, excessive online interactions endanger the role of offline relationships. Secondly, unbridled online expression endangers the church. The second theme will be covered in detail in Chap. 6 in the discussion of how blogs and websites can be used to affect the church directly and how churches respond to the rising phenomena of “free speech” on the Internet. The emphasis here will be on the first concern, which is on online relationships. Pastors are not in favour of Christians’ overdependence on Christian community and networks. Pastor Homer, a dean at one of the larger Bible colleges in Malaysia who is in his sixties, is an active Facebook user and a blogger of Old-Testament topics. While he has found some use of social-networking in helping him stay up to date with some of the things his church members do, he believes that genuine relationships can, ultimately, be only fostered in an offline setting. This is true even in the church. He explained that: One can hide easily behind a Facebook avatar, put up a non-descriptive picture of yourself, then you are comfortable because you can’t see who you’re talking with. And the youth find it very comfortable that way, but it doesn’t help with building relationships. So in church when they finally see the person they have nothing to say, or they talk and their eyes don’t even meet. I always believe when you talk your eyes should meet.25

25 All quotes attributed to Pastor Homer are taken from an interview conducted on September 12, 2011.

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Pastor Ong’s view is not so different. He stressed that “online relationships are secondary. Primary is still physical relationship. Let me give you an illustration. You want to marry a wife, you physically marry her. You can’t marry her online”. Although the statement came across as rather amusing, Pastor Ong meant it quite seriously, saying that while it is alright for Christians to make friends online and network with other Christians from other parts of the world, genuine growth of Christian relationships church ultimately is still located within the physical church. I posed him with the scenario of Malaysian Christians exclusively attending online churches in the near future. Pastor Ong reacted negatively against the notion of the online church, citing the example of Jesus’ disciples in the book of Acts in the Bible, where “they gathered together, apostles, doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread. . . Because you cannot have breaking of bread fellowship I don’t think you can ever be a member of an online church”. Pastor Ong’s comment brings to mind the example that Christopher Helland brought up on the online church The Church of Simple Faith (2007). In this particular online church, there are clear directions given to the readers on how to participate in an online communion. Although Helland uses this case study to discuss whether it constitutes an “online ritual activity” or not, I pose the question of whether partaking in the communion in front of the computer constitutes as a valid ritual within the Christian context itself. Helland rightly says that “the online religion environment allows people to live their religious beliefs and practices through the Internet medium itself. This requires significantly more than just the ability to click hyperlinks and receive information” (Helland, 2007, p. 12). Indeed, in this case study, the aspect of “more than” constitutes the simultaneously lived offline ritual experience which works in tandem with the instructions given on the website. Still, it does not fulfil the requirement of a “physical fellowship” as indicated by Pastor Ong through the emphasis of a physical church community. Pastor Ong, as well as Pastor Homer, did make an exception that such online rituals are acceptable in circumstances where there are no other avenues for church gatherings but that it is not preferable. It is difficult to draw the exact boundaries of what is acceptable or not since praying through online platforms, although communal in that it involves at least two people, does not allow for a literal physical “laying of hands” or “anointing the sick with oil” as described in the Bible. Pastor Jack, who pastors a church in Shah Alam comprising mainly of students from a nearby university, said that when it came to communicating online with his church members, he found it a difficult practice. He recounted his experience of why he believes that online churches are potentially difficult to administer. I’m not sure about the touch. The personal touch. I tried. Let’s see. I tried hosting an online meeting on MSN last time. I found it quite hard. It was a camp meeting to discuss something. I found it difficult. I find sometimes members disappear. You can’t see them! I’m talking to person A, but person B is talking, person C is talking, then person C disappears. Then five minutes later he says something again. Now that you ask me, thinking about the service that way... I’m not too sure.26

26

All quotes attributed to Pastor Jack are taken from an interview conducted on October 6, 2011.

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From what has been discussed so far, the common thread that can be observed is the strong emphasis placed on the materiality of Christianity and how it is still crucial. Although the discussion in this section is mainly regarding Christian relationships, it can also be expanded to ritual and spiritual engagements. As Pastor Ong highlighted in his comments about praying together and breaking bread together, without the physical breaking of bread it is impossible to replicate the Biblical concept of communion. Pastor Lenny, the youngest pastor I interviewed, however, provided a slightly different perspective to the role of the online when it comes to pastoring. Although Pastor Lenny provided similar sentiments about the importance of the material church, he utilizes the Internet heavily for his work as a church minister, going so far as to call Facebook his “office”. In my church we have a tag line where what we want to do with others is to give them a look, a touch, and a word. These three things. The touch is missing. You can’t get a hug. You can send an “emoticon”, but a real physical touch I think makes a whole lot of difference especially people who are like depressed... a world of difference... It’s a relationship factor.27

Despite his general belief that physical touch is still essential for the Christian community, Pastor Lenny strongly advocated for the use of the Internet as a means to further strengthen physical relationships. When I first met Pastor Lenny for an interview, he showed me his new tablet, a portable mini-computer, proudly telling me that his church members bought it for him for his recent birthday. While it is not uncommon for pastors in urban areas in Malaysia to be increasingly technologically savvy, Pastor Lenny explained that the tablet plays an important part in his pastoral capacity. He stated that Facebook is his “office” for a two main reasons. The first reason is that the physical church is small and is not equipped with the necessary facilities, such as Internet connection and a computer. This is because Pastor Lenny works in a small church not exceeding the membership of thirty people. If the church were to set up an office for him at the existing church premises, they would have to factor other costs such as electricity and water cost. To minimize cost, he would go to a place with free wireless Internet connection (Wi-fi), like Starbucks or McDonalds and have lunch while working. Apart from reducing cost, Pastor Lenny further justified his use of Facebook by stating that it met the needs of his church demographics. Most of Pastor Lenny’s church members are either university students or young working adults from different parts of the city instead of being centrally located in a particular residential area. During the day, many of these members would be busy at work or in classes, which makes it impractical for him to meet up with his church members during working hours apart from lunch hours. He thus uses Facebook to stay in touch with his members throughout the day. In other words, when Pastor Lenny appears “online” it is a sign that he is at work. Most of the time, he “chats” with his members online through text based platforms (such as Facebook chat) instead of using video and audio communication platforms like Skype. The reason for this is that “most of the time everyone’s multi-tasking, so they are chatting and doing something else. If I use 27

All quotes attributed to Pastor Lenny are taken from an interview conducted on February 3, 2012.

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video chat it’s one on one and they’re not necessarily available for that. Chat is very simple”. Pastor Lenny’s approach is to contextualize his methods of communicating with his church members within the dominant routines and practices of his members instead of simply drawing conclusions regarding the pros and cons about the technology. In a conversation with an elderly pastor from my church, he commented that pastors in general should not be spending so much time online, when the time could be used to be where the people are and doing things such as visiting people are the hospital. If we were to aim this critique at Pastor Lenny, it would yield two opposing conclusions. First, Pastor Lenny would be deemed as a pastor wasting his time working from home (or a cafe) communicating with his members online through an immaterial platform. Secondly, according to Pastor Lenny’s rationale earlier, he is in fact being where the people are—online. Pastor Lenny was also quick to dismiss conventional perceptions and criticisms of online communication. In contrast to what Pastor Jack described as “disappearing members” and the havoc of discussing things online, Pastor Lenny weighed in with his experience: Now that I’m thinking about it, we are less distracted when we’re chatting. When we’re face to face we get disturbed by the next butterfly that flutters around. I notice that, so you tend to get distracted by a lot of things.

With regard to the aforementioned concern that online interactions endanger the role of offline relationships, Pastor Lenny also provided a different perspective to what was highlighted by the other pastors. For him, it depended on the sort of online interactions that are going on. In his case, much of his online interactions are conducted with his own church members and that, contrary to endangering offline relationships, plays a useful role in cultivating healthier friendships. This is partly due to the small number of people in his church where most members know each other quite well. He said that the church is “pretty homogenous so we’re like family, we are who we are online and offline”, and that he has no concerns of his church members being unreal or hiding “behind an avatar”, as Pastor Homer described it. What Pastor Lenny is suggesting is a paradigm shift in terms of what constitutes building relationships and effective pastoring. Based on what has been described so far, Pastor Lenny’s methods suggest that the usage, effects and influences of online platforms cannot be generalized and shunned but rather applied to varying degrees depending on the demographic profile of church members. Different people are different. My church members are very open with me from my experience. No problem. We’re a smaller church, we’re very open anyway. The good thing about online conversations is that you can constantly talk without a lot of commitment. You can just prod and prod. That way they know you are there, you are available. You don’t even need to be online at the same time. Then you can comment later and you can find out what’s going on.

In this scenario, “being there” is redefined. Despite the disjointed communication process that is inherent to the Internet, the ability to leave messages and spread out conversations can generate a feeling of “being there” from the perspective of church

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members. For example, when Pastor Lenny posts a prayer for a church member on his or her Facebook wall, he does it with two intentions—to actually say a prayer for the person, and to “let the person know he is being prayed for”. Beyond that, he also sees the Internet not as a place to dissolve the value of communication and relationships but to open a “bigger door” for further conversations. He explained that through the various casual interactions with his members on Facebook, it is easier to eventually progress to a phone call. “It’s a bigger door. If I don’t have this avenue, it’d be very hard. I’ll have to call everyone and ask ‘Hi, how are you?’, and that seems to take away a few steps already.” Pastor Lenny constantly referred to coldcalling his members and asking them “how are you?” as “taking a few steps back” when in fact, responding to Facebook statuses already softens the approach to more meaningful conversations. You don’t need to know what they talking about exactly (on Facebook)... I think nowadays with the people that I work with, if they wanted to keep things a secret you wouldn’t see it at all. They wouldn’t talk about it. But the fact that they put it out there means they are looking for someone to respond to it.

Pastor Lenny’s approach in considering the dynamics of the Internet serves as a reminder that the Internet is a platform where diverse interactions take place but that it is not a destination in itself. The central argument of this chapter so far is that there are varying levels of recognition of spiritual transactions between the online and offline. Pastors Lenny, Ng, Homer, and Jack may all have differing opinions about what their church members should or should not do online but they share the same awareness that the online interactions of their church members play a role in the development of their individual Christian identities. The issue of authentic relationships and genuine communities, however, continues to elude the endorsement of the pastors above. Although Pastor Lenny differed from my other informants in that his usage of the Internet to foster relationships is significantly higher, his Facebook activities still served to complement and build upon already existing relationships.

Case Study 3: Suvi’s Blog The sentiment that there are limitations to what can be experienced online as argued by the said pastors above are not necessarily shared by lay Christian bloggers. I stated earlier that from my observation, lay Christian bloggers are generally more receptive to the idea of a more expansive and less censored form of interaction between church, Christians, and people of other faiths. This is certainly true for Suvi, author of the blog Just Love, who strongly believed that the Internet allows people to transcend certain boundaries to communicate more effectively than the church. Suvi, an Anglican, is a twenty-something research associate from the southern Malaysian city of Johor Bahru. Suvi has been very active on the social media scene since her mid teens, having authored numerous blogs on other blogging platforms

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such as Blogspot28 and Wordpress29 prior to authoring her current blog on Tumblr. Her interest in social media extends beyond blogging as she is currently pursuing a career in social media research, focusing on how social media can assist in the lives of medical patients. Even from the outset of her blogging ventures, Suvi has a preference towards posting Christian content. However, certain functions in Tumblr have allowed her expression of Christian content to become more pronounced.30 This is easier to understand after explaining how Tumblr functions. When a person signs up for Tumblr, he or she does not sign up to own a “blog” in the conventional sense of the word, like Wordpress or Blogger, where signing up for a blog means being given a page in which one may freely manage on one’s own. Instead, Tumblr automatically links a person with a network of other members of Tumblr according to their interests. These interests range from subjects such as “art” or “food” to “spirituality” and “science”. All of these are customizable, and one is able to “follow” blogs of interest within the Tumblr community similar to how “following” functions on micro-blogging website Twitter.31 As the blogging network expands, one can end up following hundreds of people’s blogs, and any updates on their blog will appear on the user’s main Tumblr page, much like how one can read updated feeds of friends’ status updates on social-networking site Facebook. In short, Tumblr’s unique aspect is its amalgamated format of blogging, sharing, and making new friends. According to Suvi, the combination of features made it very easy to post Christian content. Although other social networking sites allow for the posting of text, video and image files, Tumblr makes sharing with others very easy. Suvi tells me that in her previous blogs she put up a lot of Christian songs and wrote about God but that “it was never in a way to inspire others, but more an outlet of my expression”. She goes on to explain that: It’s a lot easier to share and put up more Christian content using Tumblr because of the “reblog” function. There are millions of photos and quotes floating around written by Christians on Tumblr, or by non-Christians who randomly likes a C.S. Lewis quote. I’ve found it easier to find a solid Christian community on Tumblr and they’re from all around the world. We make our own Christian graphics to share, to remind each other, to inspire and to tell our testimonies.32

Suvi’s explanation has a number of points worth discussing. Firstly, her motivation to blog more Christian content partly lies in the convenience of “sharing” not just her expressions but other expressions as well. The “reblog” function that she mentioned basically allows a user to share what another blogger has posted on his or her own blog. When used, this makes Suvi’s blog, for example, an archive of not only Suvi’s personal postings but of what she found inspiring. In my interviews with

28

http://www.blogspot.com http://www.wordpress.com 30 http://www.tumblr.com 31 http://www.twitter.com 32 All quotes attributed to Suvi are taken from an interview conducted on October 10, 2011. 29

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my informants, the notion of sharing one’s own belief is prominent and often raised. This includes the sharing of their faith and belief to people who are not Christians.33 The second notable aspect of Suvi’s online Christian habits is that she has found a strong Christian community on Tumblr. Apart from what has already been mentioned above, Suvi claimed that she often prays for people on Tumblr: If someone requests for prayers on their Tumblr I do say a quick prayer for them from where I’m sitting. I think prayers don’t hurt. I care, so I pray. If God answers, then good! It’s not like I’m praying for a faceless person.

Although this may seem like a simple thing to do, Suvi revealed the motivating factors behind her practice of praying for others online. Firstly, she recounted the story of the blog What’s it Like to be Told You’re Terminally Ill, written by a man who was diagnosed with a severe case of Pulmonary Fibrosis and was given not too long to live.34 On his website, the sidebar reads “I’m looking at everything as if I’m seeing it for the first time, which may well be true, and it gives me such appreciation for things I’ve taken for granted in my life”. Suvi explained that the author lived alone in America, and chose to blog about his experiences leading up to his death. He blogged for roughly 3 years before his final posting in 2010, the year he died. What happened with the author was that his postings received a huge following, and that people would call him to talk to him and encourage him, or volunteer to visit his home to take care of him in situations where he was not feeling so well. While Suvi has never been engaged to such an extent when responding to other blogs, she has made new Christian friends through Tumblr just through interacting with the different content and bloggers whom she encounters. Tumblr has this nifty little thing called the “ask box”. You can ask the Tumblr-er questions, and get to know them and their opinions. When I'm really interested in what someone blogs about, I'd ask them questions, and a few times an online friendship strikes off from there. Occasionally I add them on Facebook.

Tumblr also played a role in the change of her perspectives of Christian spirituality. Although Suvi journals offline, going online allowed her to consciously decide what sort of content to share with others. Together with a community of bloggers who share their lives with one other, her blogging activities remind her of “who and what God can be to different ppl [sic.] in different situations”. This has also led to her beginning to pray for people who required prayer on their blogs. She says that the act of praying for others is significant because people are connected through that demonstration of care, regardless of whether it is online or not. The prayers are also not bound by location and physical presence. She explained: Sometimes I think if people cared to pray in church like how I’ve seen some on Tumblr do, even by just writing a few texts, this world can be a little more loving. We don’t need to be flowery and eloquent with our words or having to see it in person per se to pray. One text post from someone makes me feel cared for and I hope when I do the same the other party also feels the care... Sadly quite a fair bit of churches are lacking in the prayer department.

More will be discussed regarding “conversion” in the next chapter. For now, it is only necessary to discuss the extent of such sharing. 34 http://www.whatitisliketodie.tumblr.com 33

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Her criticism of the church suggests an irony that the institutional church has not been as effective in fostering a culture of praying for others. Suvi also says that Tumblr “facilitates not only prayer, but the ability to view and track people’s journey in the Lord from all across the worlds and we can learn from them and vice versa”. To phrase it differently, what Suvi implied was that the church has a capacity to facilitate spiritual activity and foster an environment where people share and learn from one another, but does not do it well. She compared the blogging community’s effectiveness as building a worldwide network of sharing their spiritual expressions to that of the church as an example of how online Christian communities can potentially be more genuine and compelling, even to the extents of interacting in the offline setting as demonstrated by her example of case the blog What’s it Like to be Told You’re Terminally Ill. The author of the blog, in one of his last posts, made a comment after a visit by a follower on Tumblr which partly affirms Suvi’s critique of the church: If people who you only know as a friend from Tumblr are willing to go way out of their way to come visit, how is it that people you have been good friends with for years can turn their backs so easily, never look back, never care to ask how you’re doing, and head on down the road? Seems a little cold to me but what do I know.35

Suvi’s experience certainly lends credibility to the conduciveness of the Internet in fostering authentic friendships and spiritual activity, something which is relatively different from the perspective of the pastors I have interviewed. If what the pastors asserted in the earlier part of this section is true, then Suvi’s social ventures on her blog are completely in vain. Although it is easy to juxtapose the pastors’ opinion against Suvi’s within a genuine/non-genuine binary, it is pertinent to establish that while the pastors question the use of the Internet as the primary channel of Christian fellowship, they did not say that there is completely no value in online friendships. The point of disagreement, however, is in the emphasis one places on cultivating friendships online. In this regard, the pastors assert that, ultimately, the best relationships are still formed within the church, while in Suvi’s experience the church has lagged behind the Internet.

Liberties and Boundaries of Online Religious Experience The final section of this chapter will further develop the ideas from the previous sections, to consider the extent of the newfound liberties in engaging with spirituality online, as well as explore its limitations. The case studies here will demonstrate how the Internet can provide a liberating experience for Christians in Malaysia. However, I will show that, at the same time, there is also a paradox that exists within what many consider to be the liberating qualities of the Internet. To assist in making the

35

http://whatitsliketodie.tumblr.com/post/749727303/which-makes-me-wonder

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analysis, I will draw upon some ideas from Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory to make sense of this paradox. Mark W. MacWilliams, in Virtual Pilgrimages on the Internet, describes the Internet, within the context of religion, as an interactive medium (as compared to radio and TV), providing “a dynamic multimedia environment for communing with the sacred” (MacWilliams, 2002, p. 319). Whilst that is true, it is important to note that dynamism and interaction, while often lauded as strengths of the Internet, are not necessarily unbridled, unrestrained, or uncensored. MacWilliams, in the same article, also aptly notes that “cyberspace is not only textual” (MacWilliams, 2002, p. 322). Although in his writing MacWilliams suggests that one can have a sense of a real presence in cyberspace, I think there is more to it. In the case studies below I will describe how cyberspace is lived and practiced in ‘real’ life, therefore it is not just “textual.”

Case Study 4: Stark’s Blog Stark grew up as a Taoist in Nilai, a major township along the West coast of Malaysia. She describes herself as inquisitive, and always “asking people questions and examining my own beliefs since I was little.”36 She goes on to say that as early as she could remember, she was a “stickler for setting things straight,” especially if it was something that mattered to her. She attributes to this inquisitive approach to life to her subsequent conversion to Christianity at the age of 18, against the wishes of her parents. Stark’s conversion to Christianity, coupled with her ongoing relationship with her parents and other relatives, plays an integral role in the making, motivation, and maintenance of her blog—Another Christian Girl’s Journey. Stark explains that prior to her conversion, she had heard the message of Christianity a couple of times from friends, but those attempts never convinced her to convert. This was mainly because of her experiences as a Taoist—which up to 18 were “real” enough for her to not consider other faiths. She explains it as such: I’d seen a lot of supernatural stuff as a Taoist. The fact that these deities were real spirit beings and had power was quite firmly established in my head. So previously, whenever my Christian friends tried to convert me, it never worked because I knew that my religion was real.

The felt reality of her spiritual experiences changed when she met Rob through mIRC, an online chat program. Although never having met Rob in person, Stark struck up a friendship with him, and began discussing Christianity. Rob, according to Stark, is a rather motivated Christian, trying to share his Christian beliefs to whomever he can. Much of their early discussion, however, was limited to just that—discussion. As mentioned earlier, Stark believed in the reality of the tenets of

36

All of Stark’s direct quotes are taken from an interview conducted by me on 4/8/2011.

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the former religion due to her experiences with séances, spirit-embodiment, fortune telling, and other form of spiritual rituals performed by Taoist mediums, sometimes at her home by invitation of her parents. Over the months, the friendship continued to grow and Rob decided to visit Stark. He lived in another state, and they had begun to develop a romantic interest in each other. During his brief visit, Rob made Stark a deal: “Why not pray to God? If God doesn’t answer, then go on believing what you believe. You have nothing to lose.” Concluding that Rob was right, Stark decided to ask Rob how to pray. Stark says that “when I decided to do that, you could say all hell broke loose.” This event led to a form of spiritual experience, explained Stark. By the time Stark reached home from her meeting with Rob, there was already a séance taking place in her house, and the medium was with her parents—accusing Stark of starting a relationship with a foreigner, sleeping together out of wedlock, and other matters that Stark explains were untrue. Stark felt that this was a form of hostility, demonstrated by the spirits that she usually prayed to, just because she wanted to inquire if the Christian God was real. This ultimately served as a launch pad for her to find out more about Christianity, as she could not accept that all along she was worshiping a god that, in her words, was “malicious, slanderous, wholly without honour or kindness, comfortable with accusing and lying . . . basically, every emotionally manipulative and psychological trick in the book that might work, this thing had no problem saying it.” One of the events that allowed Stark to finally find some space to sort out her spiritual journey was going to college. Moving out on her own to the city for her A-levels gave her the opportunity to visit churches, attend Christian Fellowship (CF)37 through her college years, and freely explore Christianity both on a personal and an intellectual level. Because she was entirely new to the faith, she began to “ask a lot of questions that people couldn’t really give answers to,” which led to a lecturer from college who had become her mentor buying her a study Bible for her to further study Christianity. She describes her time in college as such: It wasn’t a very happy time. It wasn’t a secret to other people apart from my own family and that was easy enough to do, ‘cause college was far from home and there was no overlap. I kept quiet when I went home; my behavior there didn’t change too much. But yeah, on campus, I talked to my friends. What happened with the spirits had a really deep effect on me. My entire worldview shifted and I wanted to tell people, if I could, what I knew of the truth. I wanted them to know that God is the only God who should be worshiped... the only One you can trust and believe in... Everything else is a lie.

Stark’s tendency to ask many questions regarding Christianity, as well as her aforementioned desire to tell people about Christianity are evidently expressed on her blog, Another Christian Girl’s Journey. Stark says that “if people ask me for my testimony, I tell them. If they want to talk about God, I tell them. Basically if I think there’s an opening I tend to talk about it,” and one of the ways she chooses to “talk about it” is through her blog. Stark started blogging roughly 5 years after her

37 It is quite common for education institutions in Malaysia to have a Christian Fellowship (CF) formed by students as an extra-curricular club or society.

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conversion to Christianity. By then she had married Rob, and moved away from her parents. The permanency of her separation from her parents was not mainly because of her marriage, but owing to various events that affected her family. Stark explained to me that she does not know all the details to this day, but her parents at some point got involved with loan sharks, borrowing large amounts of money, and, being unable to pay off the debts, went into hiding. Stark currently suspects that both her parents are out of the country, although they still have the occasional phone conversation. The origins of her blog had a specific trigger. Stark had been contemplating for some time to start a blog as a means to share her personal Christian journey with others, but somehow never got around to doing it. It was when her sister-in-law, who she termed a “backslidden Christian” (by which she meant a Christian who had stopped practising the faith), lost a baby and became bitter with God, blaming God for the loss of her child. Stark interpreted the bitterness of her sister-in-law as the grief coming out as anger, and chose not to argue or suggest otherwise. However, “biting her tongue” around the sister-in-law, as Stark puts it, pushed her to start a blog as she needed an outlet “for all the things I was thinking and more importantly why I was thinking them.” Writing blog posts wasn’t initially particularly difficult for Stark, especially in terms of content. With her sister-in-law in mind, she started writing her personal testimony of all that she had experienced with regard to her Christian faith. However, that was only the beginning. I knew where I wanted to start, so the first 40 posts or so was just me writing out my testimony. Once that was done, I started writing the things that stuck on my heart the most because of unbelief ... what does the fear of the Lord mean; how should you look at the problem of evil; why should Christians choose to do the right thing; abortion; creation ...

According to Stark then, the second audience that she wished to address after writing her personal journey of faith were unbelievers. A brief glance at her blog topics and categories confirms this—a recent post was titled “of monkeys and men,” in which she wrote at length in defence of creationism. The another frequent category of her postings are what she calls “debunking” posts, where she attempts to contribute to inter-religious as well as intra-religious debates about various issues. The posts are written largely in essay form, with references to the Bible and articles. This meticulous blogging behaviour can be traced back to her life-long habits of reading, writing, and “wanting to set things straight.” She tells me that sometimes, it takes her days to finish writing a particular blog post. Despite the blog being very public and accessible to anyone who might come across it, Stark is careful to not let her parents know about its existence, which is why she uses a pseudonym on her blog. Her real name, or her husband’s and any other person’s name, is never mentioned anywhere on her blog—all characters in her thirty-something posts of her personal testimony have pseudonyms. Stark explains the reason for this:

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I’ve thought many times about opening the blog and not keeping it anonymous anymore, because I actually want people to know my testimony. But it’s never felt right. It’s like I know there will be a day when it’ll all come out in the open, all the disconnected dots will connect and the full picture will be seen by everybody ... but my family’s not in the place for that. For their sake, I don’t let as many people know about the blog as I would like, because I didn’t spare details. There are things that would shame and infuriate my parents if they knew I’d written them down for people to read. So I think on some level, I’m waiting for the day when they will want to testify how lost they were, and then there’ll be no problem ... whereas if I did it now, they wouldn’t understand and it’d have quite the opposite effect.

It is clear that the blog has provided Stark with an outlet to express her religious beliefs, as well as her side of the story with regard to her conversion. These expressions would not have been possible, or at best, received with some measure of hostility, in the physical presence of her parents. However, as we can see from the above quote by Stark, the liberty within cyberspace is hampered by the possibility that her parents, or some relative, having the same freedom to access her blog. Stark consciously reconstructed the boundary of not addressing the issue of religion with her family members on her blog. It is worth noting as well that although the taboo is recreated, her motives for doing so were different. In her earlier years in college, her silence at home was driven largely by a fear of yet another argument with her parents. The blog, however, remains anonymous by choice because she is hoping for her parents to become Christians one day, to “testify how lost they were, and then there’ll be no problem.” However, these different motivations produced the same effect—a distance between Stark and her parents. Here we can see that by crossing certain boundaries into particular networks, be it online or offline, Stark was very aware of the performance that was required by her to maintain her relationship with her parents.

Case Study 5: Alfred’s Blog While Stark’s online/offline negotiations revolve largely around her relationship with her parents, and her conscious efforts to conceal her identity, Alfred’s approach to building boundaries is somewhat different in that the subject of the/his blog—his church—is well aware of his blog’s contents, but feigns ignorance at the same time. The blog in question here is Winged. Winged is actually Alfred’s fourth foray into writing online. In my interview with him, he described to me at length his online journey over the last several years. It began roughly in the year 2000 with a website hosted on web-provider Angelfire38 (the website still exists, although it is no longer updated). He started that blog when he was in college, where he first discovered theological concepts such as Arminian theology, open-theism, logical contradictions, and others. These theological inclinations are quite contrary to his experiences as a Christian growing up in a Lutheran church in Petaling Jaya.

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Shortly after, he was introduced to blogging. He set up an account with Blogdrive.39 The flexibility of the blog (as opposed to a website) which is easier to update coincided with his new interest in post-modernism and writing about cultural issues. His third foray into the web (this time with a Blogger40 account) started when he began working in the college where he currently teaches. His current blog, Winged, was created in 2010, after a 1 year hiatus from blogging. The current blog is perhaps best described as an amalgamation of his previous blogs, with theological discussion, cultural and political commentary, and philosophical inquiries into thinkers like Slavoj Zizek (his philosophical muse at the time of interview). Somewhat like Stark, Alfred has a deep love for reading, although he attributes a surge in his interest for alternative views of theology to a break-up with a girlfriend when he was around 18 years old. Coincidentally, it was also the same period of time where Alfred, being raised in a Christian-Lutheran home, says he made the Christian faith his own. My first girlfriend left me one or two years after form 5. Being a rather intra-personal kinda guy, it hit me quite deep. It didn’t really affect my faith, it’s just that I clung on to my faith as a result of that. And at the time, so happen books started coming in ... and because when you are very emotionally hot, you grab on to a book, and it feeds very strong.

It was during this period that he started taking his faith seriously, getting more involved with church activities as well as with his college CF. He acquired a taste for what he calls “quirky stuff,” such as Brian McLaren’s idea of the “emergent church,” which is a self-described post-modern church, as well as open-theism. Open-theism is what Alfred describes as a brand of Christian belief where “God can be influenced by what we do and God truly responds to what we do. God genuinely interacts and enters into dynamic give-and-take relationships with us.” In short, Alfred describes open-theism’s primary belief as being that “God faces an open future,” where individuals are given complete free-will, and salvation is not predestined. Opentheism is quite clearly at odds with classical theological perspectives, which commonly imply that God is omnipotent and omniscient—which suggest that God already has foreknowledge of who will be taken to heaven, and who will go to hell, even before the existence of man. This difference is important because Alfred’s leaning toward open-theistic discourses is not endorsed by his Lutheran church. As Alfred began to explore these church and theological approaches, he ran into conflict both offline and online. Alfred said “Yes!” with certainty when I asked him if it is difficult being a Lutheran and endorsing open-theism at the same time. He says his father, who was a pastor, warned him against the teachings of open-theism. Alfred recalls a major instance of tension: In 2007, Brian McLaren came down . . . I took some of his DVDs and I wanted to introduce some ideas on the gospel and the world to the youth. Some of the young adults who were very highly Calvinistic came in and told me to stop. There was a brief moment of revolt. It was very strong tension, and I was in the thick of it.

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While Alfred did not elaborate on that event, he noted that he doesn’t think anyone in his church accepts his open-theism, although they accept him as a friend. He acknowledges that his viewpoints are quite well known in church, yet he is still on the roster for preaching in the church every month or two. He says that his blog is well known to his members but it is clear that it is not discussed. Also, Alfred states that it is within his personal ethics that he never preaches open-theism when he takes the pulpit. “Keep the quirky stuff to a minimum,” he said, and “don’t piss people off.” He indicated that his primary goal when addressing his church is to edify and preach on whatever would be of help to the congregation. When asked to clarify, Alfred agrees that what he is in fact doing is separating his blogging and pulpit activities.

The Social Cyborg: A Brief Discussion To advance my examination of the descriptions above, I will in this section bring to bear on my discussion the social metaphor of the cyborg, first put forth by Donna Haraway in The Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway’s development and use of the cyborg was initially applied to feminist studies, but has since proved to be a useful theoretical platform for Internet studies. According to Haraway, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (Haraway, 1990, p. 149). Conventionally, the term “cyborg” may generate images of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Terminator form, or Luke Skywalker with a robotic arm. However, the important distinction to make here is that it is the philosophical construction of the cyborg that the social sciences are interested in. The unique characteristic of a cyborg is its dualistic nature, of inhabiting both machine and flesh, organic and technological, veins and wires, and other tangible binaries. In a philosophical sense, the cyborg is a “condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (Haraway, 1990, p. 150). The cyborg’s ability to fuse two strongly oppositional binaries—such as fact and fiction, black and white, immaterial and material, racist and non-racist, etc. can provide us with a unique perspective of the world we live in.41 Chris Hables Gray, in Cyborg Citizen, states that “cyborgs are proliferating throughout contemporary culture, and as they do they are redefining many of the most basic political concepts of human existence” (Gray, 2002, p. 19). To use the

41 Some of these themes have been explored by various scholars, such as Jutta Weldes (2002), who considered the original fictional concept of “globalization,” and how it is politically tangible today; as well as Constance Penley (1997), who detailed how Star Trek and NASA’s history is somewhat a sequence of mutual influence, from technological advancement to crisis management.

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Internet as an example, Gray notes that cyberspace is “part of the rest of reality. It does open ways of relating and being that are entirely new” (Gray, 2002, p. 132). The theoretical discussion above regarding a cyborg’s approach to internet is important for several reasons. Firstly, it demonstrates that the study of the virtual alone is not enough simply because the virtual, or cyberspace, overlaps and interacts with the “non-virtual’. In fact, I would argue that cyberspace is less a place than it is a state of being. It is easier to approach the cyborg notion of inhabiting binaries when we consider cyberspace as a ‘state’—Basically, we can be online and offline at the same time. As Teli et al. put it, “the virtual is not the opposite of real. ‘Virtuality’ is one of the multiple ways of living in a context”(Teli, Pisanu, & Hakken, 2007) and that “virtuality is one of the most important devices involved in reality creation”. In the case of online Christianity, one can identify the fusing of an old institution— Christianity, and an infant (relative to Christianity) technological medium—the Internet. These merging components create exciting prospects regarding how Christians experience and express spirituality. However, the cyborg is not all about freedom and new expressions. It has a paradox. While there has been much celebration regarding the philosophical potential of the social cyborg—to transcend boundaries and binaries, it can only achieve this if there are existing boundaries and binaries. A simple analogy would be to say that one can only fight an enemy if there is an enemy in the first place. Michel Foucault says, although he does not specifically refer to the cyborg, that “on the one hand, they [the oppressed] assert the right to be different and underline everything that makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything that separates the individual, breaks his links with others . . . and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way” (Foucault, 1982, p. 212). That is to say, because of the cyborg’s oppositional qualities, it is then forced to identify itself with the subject that it resists. This means that the cyborg is never fully able to be the liberating metaphor that it strives to be. The paradox of the cyborg is that it requires an ‘other’ to exist. To take the Internet as an example—the paradox of liberty and boundaries is clear. The Internet can potentially actively build boundaries as well as break them—if one argues that powerful binaries encapsulate gender, race, and others, are deconstructed online, I would propose two questions. First, are these binaries deconstructed in practice? Second, if there is an active deconstruction of familiar boundaries, are there new boundaries and binaries that are being set up? I suspect so, as demonstrated in the case studies of Stark and Alfred, but a detailed description of the nature and extent of these boundaries has yet to be undertaken. Many of the ideas described above in relation to the cyborg are, I believe, evident in Stark and Alfred’s experiences with their personal and online Christianity. In the case of Stark, the boundaries and dynamics of her networks changed after she left her parents’ household and got married. It may appear that these changes, while circumstantially difficult, would provide her with new personal freedoms, particularly in the area of Christian expression. Furthermore, the Internet would enhance these freedoms with the many liberties with which many have credited it. To a large extent, Stark does explore these freedoms, and tells her stories openly, and shares it with others freely—yet she consciously reconstructed the boundary between herself

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and her parents that existed offline. Therefore, it seems clear that despite the potential for a blurring of many boundaries, the ‘human half’ of the cyborg is still human in its need for boundaries, and thus Stark replicates an old boundary, despite the liberties that the online world offers. In the case of Alfred, we can observe the way that he carefully manages his online and offline presences, and keeps them distinct. While his Lutheran church knows about Alfred’s core doctrinal beliefs, which are in direct opposition to Lutheran doctrine, he is, however, given regular responsibilities to preach during the church services. Accordingly, Alfred never allows his blog topics to cross into the church pulpit. There is a balancing act taking place, participating in by Alfred’s church, which makes the discrepancies between his online and offline views possible. Therefore, what we can see in my description of Stark and Alfred is that, in addition to demonstrating the fact that while the Internet does facilitate new ways and possibilities of Christian expression, that some of the boundaries that occur in the offline world are replicated online. Thus, the liberties of the Internet are at present circumscribed by the limitations of the human being’s existing social boundaries.

A Sidebar: Blogs, Conversions, and the Importance of “Telling” A useful way to end this chapter is to consider the commonalities of all the above case studies. While all of the Christian bloggers featured so far blog for different reasons, and are motivated by different factors, there is one commonality in their offline discourse that I posit factors into why they choose to publish their views in a public sphere. A recurring theme, in both online and offline environments is religious conversion. Although in my fieldwork there has been no account of religious conversion because of accessing online content, it does not mean that conversion has no part to play in online religion. Bryan S. Turner characterises that conversion as providing an impetus for a radical change. Religious conversions “claims to overthrow the dross of tradition and to transform the personality (or subjectivity) of the believer and to throw off the comfortable, but misguided, practices and beliefs of the past” (Turner, 2009, p. 19). Rambo, while cautioning against over-generalization, also recognizes that most religious conversions “are shaped, to some degree at least, by the norms, practices, expectations, beliefs, and patterns of the group” (Rambo, 2010, p. 435). The precise meaning and nature of religious “conversion” itself is elusive. On a functional and surface level, “conversion” normally implies a change of religious affiliation, i.e. a person converting out of Buddhism to Hinduism. That, however, does not suffice, because while the act of conversion may seem straightforward, the implications of a conversion might include the emotional, spiritual, practical, and even the political. William James, in one of the earliest psychological studies of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature,

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demonstrates the complexity and multiple dimensions in the subject of conversions. Many phrases, such as “experiencing religion”, or being “regenerated”, be it “gradual or sudden” can all be located within the general definition of “conversion” (James, 1905, p. 150). Rambo, in his article Conversion Studies, Pastoral Counseling, and Cultural Studies: Engaging and Embracing a New Paradigm, provides a comprehensive overview of the various definitions of religious conversions. A key point that he makes it that most existing definitions are embedded within academic and philosophical disciplines, such as seeing conversion from a psychoanalytical perspective or from a feminist perspective (Rambo, 2010: 440). This presents a problem for any form of analysis as the underlying motives of each discipline, while valid in its context, is confined within the limits of their frameworks. In his article, he states his preferred definition, following that of William L. Merrill: No single, universally applicable definition of conversion is possible or even desirable. Instead, conversion is better conceived more relativisitically. A relativistic notion of conversion acknowledges that different religions define and evaluate conversion differently (Merrill, 1993, p. 154).

Although Merrill’s perspective can be construed as being inclusive and broad, it does highlight the necessity to privilege religious definitions of conversion. This approach resonates with the research philosophy of Bruno Latour’s Actor-NetworkTheory (ANT), in which actors’ expressions and explanations of social and cultural frameworks are privileged more than pre-existing theoretical frameworks which in the case of conversion, can be laden with theological or disciplinary norms. As demonstrated above, and this is certainly evident in the stories conveyed by my research informants, conversion experiences are significant in the spiritual journey of a Christian individual. It is oftentimes easily remembered, often recounted, and possibly serves as a reference point in how an individual’s life is “radically different” from the life prior to the conversion. This would, in turn, affect the way online expressions of Christianity would be with regards to its content and the motivations behind the development of the content. But, before specifically dealing with online religion and the issue of conversion, I will first highlight certain conversion narratives of my informants to foreground the role of “conversion” amongst my informants. Conversions are prominently featured in two forms amongst my informants. The first is their personal conversion to Christianity. All of my informants are Christians in the sense that they made a choice at some point of time in their lives to “convert” to Christianity. Many of my informants are first generation Christians. This means that they were born and raised in a non-Christian family and environment. Amongst the informants introduced so far, Darren and Stark serve as examples of conversion from ancestral worship, Taoism in both these cases, to Christianity. In the case of Darren the point of conversion was poignant in that it initiated an intellectual shift; while in Stark’s case, the point of conversion involved a spiritual event which provided her the confirmation of her newly made choice to “follow” another God instead of her parents’ ancestral gods.

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Apart from conversion from one religious system to another, there is also a form of conversion within the same belief system—Christian becoming Christian. As ironic as it sounds, this happens especially for second generation (and beyond) Christians. Many of my informants were born into Christian families. Although these individuals identified with Christianity when growing up, many of them also underwent a process of change, where they make the faith “their own”. This can perhaps be best surmised as an individual departing from the parents’ belief system and fully understanding and internalizing the belief system for one’s self. Examples demonstrate varying circumstances in which such conversions happen. For example, in the case of Indah, a Malaysian Chinese journalist in her early twenties, the death of her mother at the age of eleven led her to a search for a spiritual answer to her grief. Without her mother, who served as the nurturer of her Christian belief up till her death, Indah was forced to discover her personal spirituality. By contrast, Alpha, a freelance copywriter and former pastor, came to a personal conversion at the age of five under very different circumstances: From the perspective of a five-year old... I was talking to my mother. We were at the garden sitting at the swing. Somehow the name “Jesus Christ” came up in the conversation. I can’t even remember how, but it did. In my five-year old mind, I heard ‘Jesus cries’ as in, Jesus ‘weeps’. So I asked ‘Why does Jesus Cry?’ My mom did not correct me to say it’s not ‘Jesus cries’. She continued to say Jesus cries because we sin. At that point I had a very distinct feeling of wanting to cry myself, and not wanting Christ to cry anymore... That’s a deep memory.

Although in the case of Alpha the spiritual trigger was not “death” as in the case of Indah, the common thread is nevertheless a form of sorrow. In the case of Darren whom I mentioned earlier, he had what he termed as his “second conversion” after the death of a woman in his church, which caused him to reconsider certain doctrinal principles of the denomination he was a part of at the time. For those who grew up as Christians, these trigger events are prominent. The few cases I have highlighted here involve some sort of “death” narrative (even Stark’s motivation to start her blog was indirectly spurred by the death of her infant niece), but the spiritual journey to making the faith their own is not necessarily always located in such extremities. Alfred and Eve, for example, both went through a transitional phase after failed romantic relationships in their teenage years—in response to their heartbreaks they turned to God for solace and assurance. For Nate, the change happened when he was healed of a sickness without medication and medical advice, leading him to renewed belief in God. All of these experiences are deeply rooted in the memories of my informants and are easily recalled and retold when prompted. The second form in which conversion plays a large part is the desire to see others convert to Christianity. This is quite clearly demonstrated in the case of Stark who frames a large portion of her entire Christian blogging experience along the personal desire for her family, particularly her parents, to eventually convert to Christianity. On another level, Stark’s blog content that deal with Christian apologetics (judging from her blogging habits, she is especially interested in participating in science and religion) also indicate her desire to see people convert out of atheistic beliefs. Similarly, Indah revealed that it is always her intention to influence her good friends

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through her blog and that her blog is “quite evangelistic” in tone. A look at her blog indicates that her model of “converting others” is significantly different to that of Stark. There is no indication anywhere on Indah’s blog that she is attempting to convince people of her beliefs or provide arguments that suggest people should change their beliefs (as in the case of Stark). Indah’s blog, however, contains various personal stories. The Christian terminology of this is to give “testimony”. This is not an uncommon approach to conversion in Christianity. Indah’s blog contains stories of how a day fraught with a series of unfortunate events (getting lost in traffic; going to the wrong venue for a news story; her car malfunctioning) all led to her to believe God was “speaking” to her about how in the end, one should trust God in all things. Other examples include short posts about asking God for help and strength, Bible verses, poetry regarding her love and need for God, and short comics. Because Indah stated that her intentions are always evangelistic, whether online or offline, we see the intention to convert others that lead to a particular way of posting/writing content, yet no direct evidence appear on her blog because the model of sharing personal stories is used. Another example of the use of testimony to convert others is Nate, a Christian who recently graduated from university, and is currently involved in Christian missionary work on a full-time basis. He also uses his blog with the hopes of leading others to conversion, although in his case, his primary audience is his sister. Although Nate and his then 13 year old sister was born and raised in a Christian family, he believes that his sister has yet to make her faith “her own”. In this case, part of the reason why Nate blogs is because he knows his sister reads the blog and capitalizes it as an opportunity to guide her to a personal form of Christianity. He explained it as such: I want my younger sister to really find God for herself. I think she has not reached that point where she’s found God for herself. She’s more of just following parents. And she’s also at the age where she’s easily influenced by her peers. I want her to really follow my influence when she reads my blog. Hopefully she can see God for herself and experience Him.

The content that Nate frequently posts on his blog are updates of his missionary work. While he also includes song lyrics, pictures, and other types of content for the purposes of expressing his feelings or encouraging other readers of his blog, most of the posts detail his missionary efforts in East Malaysia. Nate would tell of his team’s work, such as cleaning up church grounds, giving free lessons to underprivileged children, praying for various people with needs, testifying of miraculous healings, and other stories on his blog, and always casts the stories in reflection of God’s love for him. He uses these testimonies to demonstrate his personal spiritual journey with God, and, as he explained above, these stories serve as an example in which his sister can follow to “see God for herself and experience him”. A few months later in a casual conversation I had with Nate, he mentioned that that his sister joined him for a short stint in a village in East Malaysia in which she participated in Nate’s missionary work for the first time. Although he did not give specific details about what had happened during her stay there, Nate reported that at the end of the trip, she gave a

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testimony at the local church about what she had learned about God, and how she has been touched by God’s love for her and the people in the village. Nate was very happy when he provided me with the update, believing that his wishes had come true. It is hard to ascertain exactly how big a role the blog played in the outcome of this case study but it is certain that it played some role, at least to the extent that is was strategically deployed as part of Nate’s efforts, to build a sphere of influence in the matter. To conclude, the point of the section in discussing conversion as a link to the bloggers’ activity is to state that these blogs serve a spiritual function in these individuals’ lives, and these spiritual functions would only have come to being if they were aware of their own spiritual journey. The blog, then, serves as a form of “telling” where personal testimonies or other types of Christian content are told in order to convince some reader out there about the validity of their beliefs. In brief, we can see the full cycle of a person’s Christian expression—the offline discourse serves as a basis of what is expressed online, and what is expressed online is designed to have an impact beyond the self. The idea of “telling” in this chapter has so far been shown to be productive and useful for the bloggers but it will be problematized in the next chapter when we take “sharing” to the institutional level, where we ask if it is right to publish content that challenges the church authority.

Chapter 4

Church in Cyberspace: Authority, Transparency, and Pastors as Online Authors and Citizens

In the previous chapter, we looked at how various Christian individuals could begin to initiate some changes to the way Christianity is being practiced. The featured bloggers demonstrated how various Christian individuals express their religiosities differently through their online practices, and how these practices are an extension of their Christian identities, and in turn contribute to the continued development of their respective spiritualities. In these narratives, pastors and the institutions they represent served as a prominent group of supporting actors, with their viewpoints on issues like materiality and relationships key to understanding how Christian bloggers think of their own online activities. It is appropriate then, that this chapter provides us with the opportunity to shift the focus to the Christian institution—the church, and the pastors. What do pastors think of some of the impact the internet has had on religious organization? In the last chapter, relationships was discussed, in this— authority. The changing dynamics of church authority will firstly be discussed in the context of two anonymous blogs that publish content in relation to a Malaysian mega-church’s widely publicized financial disputes, and how other pastors consider such actions. This will be followed by a second section that feature pastors’ online narratives to be described and analyzed. They are, after all, online citizens too, with their own unique experiences in engaging and immersing in the internet. To begin, I will contextualize the role of the Internet vis-à-vis the Malaysian church. I will discuss how the Internet has been used by some Christian individuals to affect the institutional church in terms of religious authority. With the Internet, one can no longer take for granted that church communication predominantly privileges the pulpit. Rather, a greater participation of lay-people can be expected. This is because the Internet (the blog in particular for this chapter) is a “dialogical medium—that is, it is produced not only by the blogger, but also by multidirectional overlapping voices” (Hopkins, 2012, p. 85). This is demonstrated through the textual analysis of two blogs featured in this chapter, Calvary Today and Now Stand, which are positioned on opposite ends of the spectrum in their (non)support of a prominent church in Kuala Lumpur. Online religion does not necessarily revolve around specific individuals, as featured in the previous chapters, or limited to official church © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_4

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websites. In the case study of Calvary Today and Now Stand, we can see how blogs can be utilized by groups to publicly express their concerns toward their own church. Through analysing the content and appearance of these rival blogs, one can gain insight into the different contestations that take place within church discourse. Both blogs, particularly Calvary Today, serve as public sites of online Christian expression that transcends to a wider readership around the country, potentially affecting the way Christians think about how church problems should be handled by its members. The model of using the blog to represent the issues requires further discussion. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss the necessity of churches providing Internet education to their members for the purposes of curbing unwanted public expressions of church problems from the perspective of the pastors I interviewed. The notion of freedom of expression on the Internet is of prime concern in this discussion. Should Christians be allowed to express their opinions freely; and should Christians resort to the blog to get their voices heard by church authorities? It is evident from my fieldwork that opinion on this matter is divided.

New Media and Religious Authority While the Internet is an e platform for things such as alternative information source, greater intellectual discussion, re-defining the power hierarchies and structures that traditional institutions hold, it remains an untapped potential if the human user remains “un-liberated”. We must not forget that the Internet is essentially a social tool, and these tools are dependent on users, along with their pre-existing fault lines, biases, motivations, and cultural identities. Mia Lövheim argues that we need to approach “the construction of identity in relation to online interaction as a process situated in the structuring conditions of the offline as well as the online” (Lövheim, 2004, p. 61). Steven Jones also contends that primarily, the Internet is “a ‘piggy backed’ medium, one that follows the path we already know” (Jones, 1997, p. 8), indicating that cyber-practices are translations of the offline. Finally, Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas Cowan assert, in the context of religion, that “life in cyberspace is in continuity with so-called ‘real life’, and this holds true for religion as well. People are doing online pretty much what they do offline, but they are doing it differently” (Dawson & Cowan, 2004, p. 61). Earlier, in Chap. 3, I used the notion of the social cyborg to explain that to establish the terms of liberty online, one must define what they are liberated from, thus in effect recreating old restrictions online. This dual nature of liberties and boundaries are demonstrated both in the individual case studies and in the national issue of conversion in Malaysia. On an individual level amongst my informants, their Internet practices have certainly been influenced by offline actors, and vice versa, and that their personal Christian identities are also being shaped to some extent. However, the discussion of how religious authority is expressed and negotiated on the Internet is also necessary. In previous chapters, although the focus was chiefly

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on Christian individuals, there was also some allusion to the issue of Christian authority and the Internet, particularly in section where I described differing viewpoints on the role of the physical church as opposed to an online church. The dominant view in my sample of pastors is that an online community cannot generate genuine friendships and thus, cannot foster deep spiritual experiences raises the question of whether it is because direct influence of the church wanes with decreasing dependence on the church for spiritual resource. The changing dynamics of church influence is more pronounced in the case study of Helen, where her disagreements with the teachings of the church pastor led to an online expression which generated a significant following. These case studies bring to bear the question of how churches perceive and interact with the Internet. Pauline Hope Cheong suggests that religious authority can refer to “a range of thinking on divinely related control or influence, to exact obedience, judge, govern, and make consequential pronouncements” (Cheong, 2012, p. 74). The extent of control or influence that church authorities exert can vary depending on the structures, teachings, and individuals in power. Within the context of the Internet, this can be demonstrated in how different pastors utilize the Internet and their views on what members should do or should not do online. Cheong proposes two dominant categories of church-internet relationships that are useful in our understanding of how the Internet can affect church organizations. She states that “relationships between religious authority and the Internet have primarily been characterized as relationships of dislocation or coexistence”(Campbell, 2007, p. 1044; Cheong, 2012, p. 74). Firstly, the religious authority and the Internet can be viewed as a relationship of “disjuncture or displacement”, where new media plays a role in the “upheaval and/or disconnectedness” of traditional notions of religious authority, as well as “supplanting power and furnishing an equivalent authority in place of another” (Cheong, 2012, p. 74). Secondly, the relationship between the church and the Internet can be defined as one of “continuity and complimentary”, when the church utilizes the Internet to further establish its influence and authority over its members, and that leaders have “expanded their scope of influence, restructuring their communicative practices online, bridging and online forms of social capital to spur administrative and operational effectiveness” (Cheong, 2012, p. 80). Cheong’s balanced approach of identifying different perceptions of religious authority provides for a useful platform to further discuss Christian online/offline interactions. But we can go further. As Heidi Campbell cautions, one must be specific in what aspect of religious authority one is researching when we consider how the Internet transforms or potentially challenges traditional notions of religious authority. She explains it the following way: Is it the power position of traditional religious leaders? Is it the established systems by which policy decisions are made and information are passed on to community members? Is it the corporate ideology of the community? Or is it the role and interpretation of official religious rhetoric and teaching? Studying authority online involves identifying these multiple layers in order to discover whether it is religious roles, systems, beliefs, or sources that are being affected. This multi layered approach to authority seeks to offer a new and more subtle way for researchers to study questions related to authority online (Campbell, 2007, p. 1044).

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Applying this directly to the discussion of Malaysian Christianity, I will be providing textual analysis of a blog, Calvary Today, which is an independent blog that provides alternative information and critique of the Calvary church in Kuala Lumpur. The blog content is centred mostly on the pastoral leadership of the church as well as the policy decisions that stems from the established systems within the church. The case studies will also revisit the dependency on old boundaries when discussing the social cyborg and its implications on the liberties and boundaries of Internet practices. I will show how the notion of how a blog attempts to upheave and supplant the church “authority” while ironically propagating the same “weaknesses” online. The notion of the blog, in particular, is of interest. Paul Emerson Teusner expressed that the blog in particular “provides a public voice and a space to be heard” to those who feel “excluded or silenced in their local faith communities”, and that blogging provides lay church members the power to “create alternative voices of authority on issues of theology, leadership, and polity and religious institutions” (Teusner, 2012, p. 183). Because authorship and authority is established within the confines of a blog account without the consent of the church authority, these alternative voices may prove to be an inconvenience or “sin” to church leadership as discussed later in the chapter. Apart from studying how online dissent can be expressed and negotiated on blogs to varying degrees of success, I will also make reference to Jun-E Tan and Zawawi Ibrahim’s approach to considering how blogging can aid in fostering an environment of democratization. In Blogging and Democratization in Malaysia: A New Civil Society in the Making (2008), Tan and Zawawi details the usage and dynamics of the blogosphere in Malaysia throughout the 2008 Malaysian general elections, and how it played a significant part in the process of democratizing a Malaysian civil society. One of the important chapters in the book, titled “Blogs and Malaysian Civil Society”, provides a framework of how blogs could potentially play “an active role in setting or raising agendas for policy-making” (Tan & Zawawi, 2008, p. 49). Although the book is primarily situated in the political context in Malaysia, their insights are also applicable to understand the influence of blogs in any institutional setting—in this case, the Malaysian church. Teusner adds that, “blogging also promises a democratization of voices and freedom to express personal views on public religious issues” (Teusner, 2012, p. 183). This chapter is an assessment of this presumed process of democratization within the church through engagement on blogging platforms. For the case study of Calvary Church, I refer to a number of characteristics associated with “Freedom of Expression” in the blogging context such as it being a space for “discourse”, “freedom of information”, and “setting policy agendas” as described by Tan and Zawawi. Later in the chapter, the discussion of how the Internet can (or cannot) play a role in the process of engaging with church authority is expanded to include my research informants, particularly the pastors. Their perspectives are invaluable to identifying the distinguishing features of church/ online relationships as highlighted by Cheong earlier.

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Case Study: Blogging Disagreements with the Church Calvary Church is one of the largest churches in Malaysia. At the time of research, it had a membership of roughly 5000 members. It was founded in 1968 by Prince Guneratnam and his wife,1 and is one of the more visible churches in Malaysia. This is due to a number of reasons. Their pastor has been the chairman of two major Christian bodies in Malaysia, the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF) and the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM). He, along with the church, has also garnered attention from the wider community for his philanthropic efforts. The pastor was awarded the title of “Tan Sri” in 2008, a prominent title awarded to civilians in Malaysia, in recognition of “his meritorious services to the country and to the people”.2 The church is also well known for its annual Easter celebration event. Open to the public at no cost, these celebration events usually consist of large scale plays and musical performances. These Easter celebrations have been covered numerous times in past years by the mainstream media in Malaysia.3 However, not all public coverage of the church is positive. In 2009, The Star published a news article, “Crisis Rocks Calvary Church”. The article reported that members of the church lodged a police report “demanding for accountability and transparency over the use of church funds from the Calvary Church’s Board of Deacons (BOD) led by senior pastor (SP) Rev. Tan Sri Prince Guneratnam”. The article highlights some of the key elements of the police report as such: The disagreement, among others, includes the rising construction costs of the Calvary Convention Centre at Bukit Jalil, alleged transfer of substantial funds from the church into the accounts of a personal ministry headed by the SP4 without members’ knowledge, poor financial management, claims of nepotism, and the sacking of a well-respected deacon for speaking out. The spat, which began 19 months ago, was said to be the main cause for the dwindling congregation at the church.5

Central to the dispute above was the construction of the Calvary Convention Center, a proposed six storey, 5000-seater multiplex that serves as “God’s call to enable Calvary Church to fulfil its new millennium role and responsibility to be a Jesus Generation, an Equipping Institution and a Sending Church”.6 This RM150 million project, along with other internal disputes, led to some members informally creating a group called the Truth, Transparency, and Good Governance

1

Much of the information on church history can be found on the church website at www.calvary. org.my 2 www.easter.org.my 3 “Inspiring Easter Musical at Church” http://thestar.com.my/metro/story.asp?file¼/2010/4/2/cen tral/5974118andsec¼central,%20last%20accessed%2029/4/2012 4 SP—Senior Pastor. In this context Ps Prince Guneratnam. 5 “Crisis Rocks Calvary Church”, http://thestar.com.my/metro/story.asp?file¼/2009/11/18/central/ 5118315 6 For information on the church building project, Calvary Convention Centre, refer to http://www. calvary.org.my/ccc/

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Group (TTG) in order to advocate for transparency in the utilization of church funds. The disagreements soon resulted in a lawsuit by seven members of TTG against the church regarding the validity of certain decisions made in one of the said church general assemblies.7 Church disputes are not uncommon in Christianity anywhere in the world, but the case study of Calvary Church stands out due to its public nature. This chapter, however, is only interested in the issues surrounding the church in itself, but on two blogs that published extensively about it. The two blogs of interest are Calvary Today, a blog set up during the outset of the church disputes to keep readers informed about the TTG view of things, and Now Stand, a blog set up around the same period of time where the blogger actively defends the reputation of Calvary Church on the same issues. The bloggers of Calvary Today openly question church authority, and publicly exposes internal dynamics of the church. They also use the blog as a platform to rally support from Christians within and outside the church. Now Stand, on the other hand, published posts in an attempt to break the anonymity of the “rebellion” within the church, and to encourage church members to reject these people.

Calvary Today: Blogging as Protest8 Purposes and Objectives Calvary Today posted its first article in the year 2008. In its first posting, the writer (s) laid out its purposes and objectives. The bloggers emphasise that their purpose is to seek out “truth” and “transparency” in church governance. The second notable theme is the appearance of a desire to engage in a two way interaction between the church and the dissenters. This is implied in statements like “to provide the Church leadership with objective and useful feedback from Calvarites9. . .” and “to provide a platform for continuing open discussion on the issues raised, to solicit for constructive comments and suggestions. . .”10 The third theme is the blog’s acknowledgement of some level of spirituality pertaining to their efforts and the church. This can be found in their reference to their church leaders as a “calling as chosen leaders in the Church”, and the blog’s purpose of restoring Calvary Church as an important church in Malaysia.

7 The court case listed in the Kuala Lumpur Law Courts is: Wong Hong Meng (as a voting member and an observant member of the Calvary Church (Assemblies of God) Kuala Lumpur representing a class of members of Calvary Church (Assemblies of God) Kuala Lumpur) & Ors v Prince Guneratnam & Ors [2010] 9 MLJ 457 8 http://www.calvarytoday.blogspot.com – content and quotations used with permission. 9 Members of Calvary Church are colloquially referred to as “Calvarites”. 10 http://calvarytoday.blogspot.com/2008/09/testing.html

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Authorship, Readership and Comments There is no clear indication of the blog’s authorship with regard to specific individuals. A look at the blog’s “About Us” tab at the top of the page leads to a brief profile of the group of writers as an entity. It is inferred that this blog is written or, at least, managed by more than one individual. However, the blog is clear in its affiliation, which in turn indicates whose interests do the blog serves. The blog reports on TTG activity extensively, providing readers with their latest efforts to “expose the truth” of the wrongdoings of the church leadership. By analysing the framing of contents, one can derive two categories of intended audiences. The first are members of Calvary Church. The blog states that the bloggers are members of the church, and there is a side-bar entitled “Call to Calvarites”, which urges members of the church to take action on certain matters. The other intended audience can be deduced from their purposes and aims—and that is the church leaders. Apart from them, the blog has drawn a wide readership from beyond Calvarites and church leaders. In total, more than 200,000 visitors have read Calvary Today as of August 2012. This would equate to roughly 5000 readers a month. Since the blog’s existence, a majority of blog posts receive between 50–200 comments from various readers. A browse through the comments will indicate that there are many readers from outside the current Calvary membership. Due to the extremely high percentage of anonymous respondents, it is difficult to state with certainty the identity of these respondents. But in general, we can easily classify these respondents into three groups: Existing members of Calvary Church, former members of Calvary Church who follow the saga keenly, and Christians from other churches who have no affiliation with Calvary Church in any way but who are interested in the issues. The high number of anonymous comments demonstrates a lack of emphasis on what is colloquially known amongst bloggers as “responsible blogging”, an “ambiguous code of ethics” for bloggers (Tan & Zawawi, 2008, p. 55). While Calvary Today’s blog articles may at the very least fulfil some standards of responsible blogging by providing some evidence of research, thus lending the content some credibility, the comments do not. Much of the comments can be categorized as “snipers” under the cover of anonymity. There is a contradiction that appears to be functioning in the dynamics of Calvary Today. Transparency is so vigorously sought and demanded by blog authors to the point of posting audio files and financial documents to “expose” the truth, but the transparency of the authors and their readers are not evident on the blog. Secondly, although a high number of comments may indicate a robust discussion taking place, most of the comments are anonymous comments supporting the blog author. It appears more as a gathering of a specific interest group rather than a two way discussion between the authors and the readers. There are two possibilities to this: either pro-Calvary Church members do not visit the website and post comments to engage in discussion or the webmasters of the blog moderates or filters comments that do not agree with their views—an accusation a

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pro-Calvary blogger has in fact made.11 Again, we cannot know for sure. Tan and Zawawi explain that the “feedback mechanism propels blogs. . . as it encourages conversations and discourse to be held up to public scrutiny” (2008, p. 52). It is true that Calvary Today has utilized the “feedback mechanism” very effectively to rally support for their cause, but quite clearly there is also not much “conversation and discourse to be held up to public scrutiny” taking place at present.

Notable Content What is most unconventional about Calvary Today, however, are the content that is made public. There are two steps to understanding the content that are posted on the blog. The first step is to look at the context in which the authors themselves frame their content. This can be found in the categorising or “labelling” of every post. There are currently 25 labels displayed on the blog. The major label or labels are the bloggers’ reports and accounts of the church Annual General Meetings (AGM) and Extraordinary General Meetings (EGMS), which accounts for 26 blog posts. Another major set of labels include “Church Conflict”, “Church Issues”, “Church Legal Issue”, “Church in Public Media”, and others, which report on the on-going activities of TTG, how the church responds to them, and updates on their earlier stated efforts. There are more than 50 posts in this category. These labels overlap, and there are other substantially covered labels as well. Most of the posts exclusively address issues affecting Calvary church. The second step to understanding the content in the blog is through looking at the how the content is constructed by observing some modes of disseminating information and building the blog’s credibility as a source of church information. Tan and Zawawi, in their research with socio-political bloggers in Malaysia, find that many of them “take their responsibilities to share information and spread influence seriously (2008, p. 59)”, showing how certain bloggers approach their work on the blog as a potential source of hard news, through either filling in gaps that appear in mainstream media, or through getting inside information from credible informants. This can be partially seen in the content in Calvary Today. For example, in the posts that details of the AGMs and EGMs held by the church, the writers give a detailed account of the matters discussed in the meetings, and their critique and analysis of how the discussions transpired. This includes a critique of the church finances, plans for various projects, dispute of membership, as well as their attempts to expose the church pastors’ less than ideal attitude. What Calvary Today does to build credibility as a source of information is to post financial records of the church (as presented in the meetings), as well as portions of audio recordings of how the meetings took

11

See the blog called Now Stand, located at http://nowstand.blogspot.com for an example of a pro-institution perspective of the above case study. For the specific postings accusing Calvary Today of filtering comments, see “calvarytoday. . . and tomorrow” dated May 5, 2010.

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place, thus offering “proof” of their various allegations. It is generally not common for internal church information to be easily made available for public consumption. The other steps taken by the blog to establish their authority is through invoking reader comments and letters to affirm their right to publish. For example, in a 2009 blog post entitled “An Open Reply to an Email from Overseas”, the writers of Calvary Today featured email they received from a reader who asked the writers two key questions—who were the members of TTG, and why is the blog anonymous, asking them to “not hide behind a blog but be open and reveal yourself. Hiding behind a blog and throwing darts is not helping”.12 The writers then proceeded to write an open response by justifying their decision to stay anonymous by saying that people who are involved in the church disputes would already know who they are, although they declined to demonstrate how. To briefly summarize, two key methods are used to build and maintain the credibility of the blog. Firstly, it is through the public release of internal church documentations, to establish a “factual” verifiability of their posts, and secondly by invoking a spiritual “calling” or authority to continue with their quest for “truth” in the church.

Calvary Today: Democratizing Religion? The description above about this one blog, Calvary Today, lends some validity to Tan and Zawawi’s definitions of how a blog can be used as an “instrument of democratization”. But if Tan and Zawawi’s definitions are to be used as a benchmark of responsible blogging, there are also indications on a textual level that the blog does not fully measure up to the ideals. To summarize, Calvary Today is a strong representation of the freedom of express, and through its reported engagement with the church, and the authors’ steadfast updating of alternative news (as opposed to the mainstream, or “official church” news), there certainly is a different discursive practice within the Christian hierarchy. As to how effective this blog will affect the church, and how alternative Christian blogs and websites can affect Malaysian Christianity and the church institutions within it remains to be seen, but Calvary Today, due to their high readership and reach, is worth observing in time to come to see how its efforts further develop. However, we can also see that in the blog’s quest to destabilize the existing church hierarchy, there is also a clear re-construction of hierarchy within the blog itself. This is due to possible content filters, an endorsement of anonymity despite a call for transparency, and a largely singular perspective on the various issues discussed. All of these practices demonstrate the limitations of the blogs’ freedom to express. This is one of the ironies of the Internet, that whilst as a platform it provides a great potential for unparalleled freedom of expression and information, it

12

http://calvarytoday.blogspot.com/2009/11/open-reply-to-e-mail-from-overseas.html

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is the human organization that often finds the need to apply controls over how it functions. This then, could also mean that these Christian expressions online will not change a thing, but replicate the status quo in a different form. Also, Calvary Today is only one of many avenues where issues regarding Calvary Church are discussed, which means that it is not the only perspective that is available to readers.

Now Stand: Overview Another example of a blog discussing issues within Calvary Church is Now Stand.13 Now Stand serves as a point of direct comparison with Calvary Today and can assist us in our analysis and discussion of the Internet as a democratizing space in the Malaysian context. If Calvary Today is described a type of anti-institutional blog (although more specifically the blog appears to be opposing the current leadership team lead by Ps Prince, as opposed to being anti-church in itself), Now Stand serves as an example of a pro-institution/pro-Ps.Prince blog. Although the blog was active for just under 1 year (November 2009 to October 2010), the content that is available indicates that the coverage of issues within Calvary Church is parallel to Calvary Today, such as the construction of the Calvary Convention Center, church finances, and reports on the church AGMs. Now Stand is on the opposing spectrum of Calvary Today, frequently critiquing Calvary Today and the TTG, the group that is alleged to be behind their activities. Still referring to Tan and Zawawi’s definitions of blogs as a democratizing tool, I will describe Now Stand under the same categories of analysis as Calvary Today to provide a more holistic comparison at the end of the chapter.

Purposes and Objectives The website layout of Now Stand is more simplistic in its layout compared to Calvary Today in that it has less pages, or tabs, that provide information about the purpose of the website. In Calvary Today, a casual observer only needs to click on the “About Us” tab that is very noticeable at the top of the page. Despite its lack of a go-to page for information about the purposes and objectives of the blog, the information relating to the aims of the blog can still be found if one searches for the very first blog post through the default blog archives tab located on the right-hand side of the web page. The first post, dated November 17, 2009, is entitled “Calling All Christians in Malaysia”. This first post provides the over-arching theme of the blog, which is to deal with rebellion in the church at large. It states that “this blog was created to address the issues of rising rebellion in many churches in Malaysia”.14

13 14

http://www.nowstand.blogspot.com http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2009/11/calling-all-christians-in-malaysia.html#comment-form

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It goes on to say that “most pastors/deacons are leaders are clueless on how to handle this rebellion in their local churches”.15 The authors of the blog then provide their spiritual basis on which their blog will function upon by invoking Ephesians 6:10–20 from the Bible. At this point, we can see three things that Now Stand attempts to establish with the introductory post. Firstly, the blog makes the assertion that “rebellion” in the church is not confined to just one church, namely Calvary Church (at this point Calvary Church is not yet mentioned), but is a problem faced by churches across Malaysia. Perhaps this is a strategy to draw the attention of a larger audience. Secondly, the blog authors assert that churches, particularly their leaders, were at the time of writing not capable of handling rebellion in their churches. Although there is little evidence provided by the bloggers to lend credibility to their assertion, it would appear that the blog would provide some “clues” as to how such rebellion could be handled. Thirdly, the blog establishes a form of spiritual authority to set up the blog by quoting the Bible and stating their belief and adherence to its principles. Through these statements, the blog presumably takes on the mantle of assisting churches in the effort to quell rebellion within the church. The following is the list of goals that the bloggers listed out to achieve the over-arching goals: What are we trying to achieve here16: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Create a voice for the silent majority. Enable the pastors to exchange thoughts. Provide encouragement for the leaders. Expose these rebels. Provide an avenue for mediation, collaboration and negotiation. Assess the impact of rebellion in the local church. Assess the impact of the rebellion in the general public.

From the list above, we can see that my initial assessment of the blog’s assertions are right in that the bloggers claim to be a sort of mediator between church leadership and those in the “rebellion” and that they have the capacity to assess and handle the issue of rebellion, such as exposing them. Despite the blog’s broad approach to the issue of rebellion in the church in the first post, the purpose and objective of the blog narrows significantly within days. 2 days after the first post, the article entitled “The Star Metro Article—Crisis Rocks Calvary Church” was posted.17 The blog post makes reference to the news article that is discussed above. If Calvary Today appears somewhat approving of their

15

Ibid. Ibid. 17 http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2009/11/starmetro-article-crisis-rocks-calvary.html#commentform 16

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efforts to bring the crisis of Calvary Church to a wider audience to expose any possible wrongdoings of the church, Now Stand’s approach to the event is to expose those who exposed the story. It is also in this post that the first mention of Calvary Church, TTG, and Calvary Today appears. As I expanded my search in the Internet I came across a blog called calvarytoday.blogspot. com. It seems that the TTG (not sure what is the abbreviation stands for) is on a smear campaign against their own church and their leaders, it's like throwing cow dung at your parents and the house that you grew up in.18

The blogger proceeds to describe the people behind the expose as those who are “against the will and ways of God”,19 and this is indicative of the bloggers equating the act of going to the media and taking the church leadership to court as a form of “rebellion” in the church. The blogger goes on to state that “starting from this week, we will expose the people behind the TTG group by posting their picture in this blog—which is also one of our objectives” (Ibid.). This initiative to publicly expose the members of TTG falls within the scope of the objectives stated in the first post to expose “rebellion”. The names of some of the members of the “rebellion” are listed in this post and subsequently profiled individually in the following weeks as part of the effort. From this point on to the end of the blog’s lifespan, most of the blog posts are written in the context of the issues surrounding Calvary Church, with less emphasis on the initial goal of dealing with national level church rebellion. Based on this, it is fair to conclude that this blog is a counter-blog to Calvary Today. Now Stand, over the course of the year, frequently critiques the Calvary Today coverage of events, posts articles that suggest that Christians should not sue the church (as opposed to Calvary Today frequently posting articles that are in favour of taking the church to court on the premise of exposing sin in the church), and provides some updates on church activities and announcements, although it is done with much less detail compared to Calvary Today.

Authorship, Readership and Comments If there is one aspect of Now Stand that is similar to Calvary Today, it is in the bloggers’ approach to their identities. In fact, it is harder to build an authorship profile akin to Calvary Today. In the case of Calvary Today, although the authors are anonymous to the average reader, there is a general description of who the authors are. In the case of Now Stand, no such general descriptions are available. Throughout the lifespan of the blog, there have been indications that there are more than one individual responsible for posting articles and updates. This is most evidently explained in a December 2009 post stating that “some of us will be going on vacation

18 19

Ibid. Ibid.

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(local and abroad); however, this blog will be managed by a sister who has volunteered to help out. I will be logging in from Bali from time to time”.20 Beyond that, the other certainly is that these bloggers are people with some knowledge of the various issues and events surrounding Calvary Church. It is reasonable to assume that the bloggers are members of the church, since they have mentioned the church AGMs on some occasion which implies their membership. What is ironic about Now Stand’s approach to anonymity is that in the first post where the blog is first introduced, the blogger clearly states that they will not allow for anonymous comments. It states exactly as such: “We welcome your comments; however we will not accept strong worded comment and anonymous comments. You may however choose to be anonymous by indicating that you do not prefer to be identified”.21 There are three points that we can glean from what we have discussed so far with regards to the authorship principles of the bloggers of Now Stand. Firstly, the bloggers make little effort to identify themselves but requires that respondents identify themselves. Secondly, the blog functions in the same tandem as Calvary Today. Calvary Today propagates anonymity for its authors and respondents, while actively attempting to expose the identities and activities of wrongdoers in Calvary Church. Now Stand’s methods are almost exactly the same. The bloggers practice anonymity for the self while actively attempting to expose the people behind Calvary Today along with the other “rebellious” people in the church. If the aspect of authorial anonymity is alike in the cases of Now Stand and Calvary Today then the approach to their readers are even more alike. This is an indicator that in the negotiating of power relations on the Internet, anonymity is useful tool for the protection of the self and uncovering the anonymity of others is a weapon against the enemy. There is a “we can (be anonymous) but you can’t” approach being taken by both these websites. The readership of Now Stand is also difficult to map, partly due to the low number of readers and the lack of interactivity (i.e. through comments) on the blog. Compared to the 250,000 hits that Calvary Today has generated since going online, Now Stand’s hit counter as of August 2012 indicates 5415 visitors. As is the case with Calvary Today, it is difficult to determine if the statistics display on the blog indicates “unique hits” or “total hits”. In the same manner then, the comments would serve as a more concrete evidence of the level of readers’ activity on the blog. In this regard, Now Stand pales in comparison to Calvary Today, with the almost non-existent comments section on their blog indicating that very few people have read the blog. Although as mentioned earlier the bloggers request for the identity of the respondents, anonymity is actually practiced on the website and most respondents use either pseudonyms such as “A Pastor” or “Ms C”, or the most common one—“anonymous”.

20 21

http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2009/12/notice-from-administrator.html#comment-form http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2009/11/calling-all-christians-in-malaysia.html#comment-form

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Notable Content Although Now Stand does not tag or label their postings into particular topical categories, its content is not very diverse, and can mostly be divided into three broad categories: Articles that promote the qualities of Calvary Church and their leaders (including profiling some of them); content that discuss the issue of Christians suing another Christian, and content that specifically opposes the blog Calvary Today and TTG. There are some blog posts that do not fall within these categories, and will be classified as “miscellaneous” for now. Of all of the above themes, the blog’s effort to discredit Calvary Today is most prominent, with repeated posts criticisms of the blog and their support for TTG. Now Stand’s dislike for Calvary Today has reached the extent where one of the bloggers stated that “it’s hard for me to say that I love the TTG or the people behind Calvary Today” in the post “Calvary Today. . . and Tomorrow” dated 26th May, 2010. One of the frequent criticisms made by Now Stand is Calvary Today’s biased moderation of comments, claiming that Calvary Today only approves comments that affirm their position on their issues and are critical of Ps Prince. This issue is most prominently featured in a post called “Try a Little Kindness”, posted on 9th April, 2010, where the article proposed a test on Calvary Today: Write something really nice about Rev Prince Guneratnam, or the Board of Deacons, or the Associate Pastors, and then post it to the blog belonging to those who are not happy with Calvary Church. Then, write something angry, or something bitter about the same group of people and post it up to the same blog. We can assure you that none of the comments from the first attempt will get through! The blog administrator will disapprove, or ignore every nice things you gotta say about Rev Prince Guneratnam and his team. That is also the reason why the blog sounded a little angry and bitter, and it is reflecting as though nobody has any good things to say about the leadership of Calvary Church.22

On Now Stand, the comments also require administrator moderation prior to a comment being published. In what are the few comments that appear on the blog, much of them are comments of approval of the content that are being posted up on the blog. One can ask if Now Stand practices the very act of filtering negative comments which it so vehemently accuses Calvary Today of. It is also possible, of course, that there are very few readers from the opposing camp. It is evident that readers of Now Stand (or at least the bloggers themselves) are aware of Calvary Today and constantly prods the blog, but there is no indication that the attention is reciprocated. Not all of the content on Now Stand is pro-Calvary. In fact, in several postings, the bloggers acknowledge that there are issues within the church, such as the one found in “Let us Pray—Part 2” on 9th April, 2010, where the article asks the church pastors to not ignore the problem of “empty pews” (suggesting that people are leaving the church) and that “you (the church leaders) cannot deny that there exist a problem in the church and that all these while your problems are still neatly swept 22

http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2010/04/try-little-kindness.html#comment-form

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under the carpet”.23 The bloggers however, always reaffirm their support for the leaders despite these issues, encouraging others to pray for Calvary Church. The blog has also made a call to Calvary Today and TTG to leave the church, saying that they will deal with their pastors their own way, once again intimating that there are issues within the church and that Calvary Today and TTG’s methods are wrong.

Comparisons Between the Two Blogs Although at first glance, it may appear that both these blogs provide an unfair comparison due to the differing life-spans of the blog as well as an obvious difference in success, both these blogs are chosen as a point of comparison because of their similar subject matter, similar approach to dealing with the “opposition”, and that both blogs are located on the same platform (the Internet) and from the same church. The difference in readership and comments does not render the comparison an unfair one but rather raises the important question as to why one blog has garnered massive reception whilst another did not. Here, I will summarize some of the key similarities and differences between these two blogs particularly in the context of what I have defined a number of times as the paradox of liberties and boundaries of the Internet and Tan and Zawawi’s description of blogs as tools of democratization in Malaysia. The notable similarity is the blogs’ reproduction of power hierarchies. I discussed early the irony that Calvary Today calls for transparency amongst church leaders while propagating anonymity within their own ranks, thus demonstrating a lack of transparency. This, then, appears not as the contestation of church hierarchies but rather, a transfer of authority from the church to the bloggers. Although Now Stand is for the most part, a pro-Calvary Church blog, it suffers from the same restriction of the self. One of the primary goals of the blog is to expose Calvary Today’s lack of transparency. Despite their asking their readers and those who comment on blog to refrain from anonymity, it is hardly implemented—even the bloggers are anonymous as well. The last post on Now Stand is quite telling, the blogger says that “since Senior Pastor warned us that posting anything about the AGM in the internet is not ethical—We will not mention anything about the AGM”.24 This could be taken as a hint that the leadership of Calvary Church is aware of the highly informative reports of blogs such as Calvary Today, and proceeded to warn against such actions. The bloggers of Now Stand plays its part in reinforcing the authority of the church to instruct church members of what they can and cannot do. I posit that from the perspective Calvary Today, Now Stand’s agreement to not report the AGM would indicate that they propagate acts of “covering up the truth” and being antitransparent. While some people can “turn to the blogosphere because they feel 23 24

http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2010/04/let-us-pray-part-2.html http://nowstand.blogspot.com/2010/10/praise-god-for-wonderful-agm.html#comment-form

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disaffected by authority structures” and “utilize this public space to articulate their convictions through the promotion of good blogging practice”, as Teusner suggests, it is not always easy to determine what “good blogging practice” really is. Teusner readily acknowledges that the blogosphere has its structures of authority (in the context of his research he refers to the Technorati blog ranking system), and it is clear the both Calvary Today and Now Stand propagates a self-governing structure, with Calvary Today in particular moving to supplant power and furnish themselves as an “equivalent authority” in both the positive and negative sense of the issue. Moving on, these blogs are also a demonstration that blogs can be used as “feedback mechanism” (Tan & Zawawi, 2008, p. 52) in the process of using blogs as a tool for institutional democratization of the church. Regardless of the tone of writing, both blogs provide feedback to their churches—one for instigating change in the church, and the other reassurance of support. Both however, also fall short in their internal feedback mechanisms, with Calvary Today’s appearance of selective filtering of comments, and Now Stand’s inability to generate many comments at all being various reasons why I conclude that both blogs fall short in encouraging “conversations and discourse to be held up to public scrutiny” (Tan & Zawawi, 2008, p. 52). Ultimately, both these blogs serve to reinforce what Jan Fernback describes as a form of limitation of the Internet. Fernback says that virtual space is, like real space, “socially constructed and re-constructed space”. This view is also taken by Antonio Garcia Jimenez et al., who argues that cyberspace is “no less real than geographic space” (Jiménez, Orenes, & Puente, 2010, p. 214), and is it governed by different layers of boundaries and dimensions as the ‘real world’. The notion of the cyborg also resurfaces here, and we can clearly see how despite attempts to use the blog in a novel way to transcend certain authorial boundaries of the church, the blogs suffer from recreating the same boundaries within their own management of their respective blogs. It seems that the reconstruction and transfer of social boundaries and hierarchies is one which is unavoidable, whether intentional of not. In the context of Christianity in cyberspace, this is certainly true, as demonstrated by the two blogs in the above case study (as well as the individuals in the previous chapter). Beyond that, one must ask the question of why Calvary Today has generated a greater level of interactivity and cyber-longevity than Now Stand. Here, the differences between the blogs become more evident. The one key difference that I would like to highlight is that Calvary Today constantly works at reinforcing their credibility as a source of news and facts while Now Stand does not. This is done through Calvary Today’s willingness to publish confidential information as well as post audio-recordings of events to prove their accusations right. Whether the information is taken out of context or not is a separate issue but at least the impression of credibility is constantly maintained. The blog also frequently shares some of the letters they receive from both church members and non-church members stating how impressed they are with the level of detail in their reports and analysis. By comparison, Now Stand does not equal the effort that is demonstrated by the Calvary Today bloggers. Partly because of the lack of readers, it appears as if Calvary Today is a collective voice while Now Stand appears to the work of one individual within the

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church. Now Stand, beyond profiling some of the members of the “rebellion”, does not take their responsibility to “share information and spread influence seriously” (Tan & Zawawi, 2008, p. 59) as far as Calvary Today although this could be in part due to their principles of not exposing the church publicly as argued for a number of times in their blog. Even in their profiling of the members of TTG, they only provide minimal information of which they are and what they do without offering any semblance of proof that they are, in fact, the people behind the church “rebellion”. Compared to the accounting and audio postings offered up by Calvary Today, it would appear that this blog severely lacks in the credibility factor. This chapter has so far set out to provide a discussion of whether the Internet can affect change in the way Christianity is practiced on an institutional level, and one can see different levels of this in the case study that I have described above. While in the case of Calvary Today and Now Stand, there appears to be little practical effect on the church at the time of writing. I suspect that the high response rate, particularly in Calvary Today along with the Internet’s potential to bring sensitive issues within the church into the public sphere, should eventually lead to churches responding to the phenomenon of “blogging about the church”. The discourse of “talking about the church” amongst lay people is not a new phenomenon at all, with “coffee-shop talk”a colloquial reference to the act of gossiping about the church, a common practice in the Christian community. But the Internet is providing both Christians and non-Christians an avenue to ask questions of the church—in a more defining stance—partly because the Internet provides a certain permanence to everything that is discussed.

Handling Church Conflicts Internally or Publicly Beyond just the highly publicized issues of Calvary Church, the subject of how church disputes and conflicts should be handled is a matter of strong and differing opinions amongst my research informants. When it comes to the subject matter of resorting to the Internet to engage in church issues and conflicts, a number of pastors whom I interviewed expressed the need to educate their members about their responsibilities on the Internet, stating that just because the Internet is a space for freedom of expression it does not mean that church members must engage in it. At the other end of the spectrum there are pastors who engage directly with social media as means to further improve their pastoring or to raise the quality of feedback mechanisms for the church. Returning to Cheong’s two categories where the Internet can be construed from a perspective of disjuncture/displacement or continuity/ complementarity, the following two sections will systematically highlight the concerns some of the pastors have regarding the use of the Internet to publicize church disagreements (disjuncture/displacement), and the discussion of whether Internet education is a necessary thing for churches (continuity/complementarity). To begin, all the pastors that I interviewed stated quite clearly that church conflicts are unavoidable and that as pastors they are open disagreements and

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engagement. However, many of the pastors I interviewed attached common conditions to such a process of engagement, and how one should express disagreements. The first condition mentioned by more than one of my informants was the importance of engaging an issue or a topic instead of attacking a particular person. Pastor Sivin, a Lutheran pastor in Kuala Lumpur, said that while issues in the church should be talked about, one should “stop short of personal attacks to individuals in disagreement”. Pastor Ong, a former engineer who has been pastoring a local church in Kuala Lumpur, explained his philosophy of expressing disagreements: I think engaging is good provided how he engages. Engaging a sermon the same way in critical writing you disagree with another author. . . my views your views. Engaging without being personal I think is OK. It's the way you write it. I think in any engaging as long as it's engaging on information it's perfectly ok. But when you become personal and there’s no basis for this engagement it's not good. Any debate I support. Even my sermons, if you disagree it's OK. But if it's personal, like – I don’t like your sermon because I don't like you. . . . It's the how that matters. Even in blogs, in critical writing, you disagree with someone is OK, but still engage him politely.25

Pastor’s Ong’s view on the importance on “how” a disagreement is expressed is shared by Pastor Jack, a 30 something year old pastor who pastors a church predominantly comprising of university students in the Shah Alam township. He explained, like Pastor Ong, that issues need to be addressed without attacking specific people and provided a perspective that by attacking individuals rather than topics, others could be affected in their church experience as well. He recounted a story that illustrated his view. One of his church members went for a holiday with his mother in Penang, an island state in Malaysia roughly 4 h away from Kuala Lumpur. During the holiday, he decided to attend a church service on a Sunday. Being a visitor in the state he went to a local church and brought his mother along. The member’s mother had not been to church for more than 10 years prior to the event. During the service, the pastor of the local church held up a book by Joseph Prince, a prominent pastor in Singapore, and spent a majority of the sermon preaching against the contents of the book.26 Pastor Jack had this to say: The preaching was against Joseph Prince on the pulpit. I feel that maybe you're right, I'm not talking about the topic, but first of all Prince is not there. . . on the other hand, the lady who came to church after 10 years, got no clue what's going on. She won't even know who is Joseph Prince is. Yeah, so you can talk about "grace" whether "grace is free" and all that, you know. . . talk about the issue, but don't talk about Prince or talk about New Creation Church. I think when you go into that you get into a lot of mess.27

25

All quotes attributed to Pastor Ong are taken from an interview conducted on Nov 11, 2011 Pastor Joseph Prince is an internationally well-known pastor and speaker from Singapore. He has generated some controversy due to his teachings which some accuse as a propagation of the “prosperity gospel”. Much of his views can be found in one of his best-selling devotional books, Destined to Reign: The Secret to Effortless Success, Wholeness, and Victorious Living. 27 All quotes attributed to Pastor Jack are taken from an interview conducted on 6 Nov, 2011. 26

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Pastor Jack’s primary concern was about the mother of the church member, who might be given a misleading impression of how the church functioned. He then proceeded to explain that these same concerns can be applied to the Internet. He asserted that Christians should not just engage in a topic but to do it in a way that does not give a bad impression of Christianity and the church. This leads to the second common condition. Church disagreements should be dealt with privately and kept largely within the confines of the church without being made public. Pastor Jack raised the issue as such: You gotta know what we are talking on the social media because our language is open like glass, transparent to the entire community and I think sometimes there's some Christian argument going on, but it's so open. You know what you're talking about, but maybe 60% people of your friends don't know what you are talking about. But one thing they know, when you are slashing each other, being rude, unkind words, that one they know.

Due to the accessibility of the Internet, issues and criticism of the church are more easily viewed by the public when pastors do prefer issues to remain within the church. One of my non-pastor informants, Alpha, who authors a blog that frequently questions conventional views of Christianity and the church, mentioned that while one might think that lay peoples’ expressions of open dissent is the fault of the Internet, it does not mean that dissent and disagreement only recently surfaced. He said, “actually you’ve never been able to stop them. Last time they do it over the telephone. No record. Now it’s published. It stays in Internet archives for a long long time”.28 Alpha’s perspective suggests that the Internet has a quality of permanence, lending the dissenter the proper avenue to express an issue that would otherwise be buried in the silence of a disconnected phone line. At the outset, this may seem as an advantage to church members to advocate particular issues. Cheong states that part of the disjuncture between the online and the church is the members’ ability to challenge authority “by expanding access to religious information in a way that can undermine the plausibility structure of a religious system” (Cheong, 2012, p. 75). Although in the context her research, Cheong highlights mainly disjuncture in the areas of alternative and authoritative interpretation of religious texts and knowledge, it is highly applicable to the differing views on how public church issues should be expressed. However, what is oftentimes lost in the discussion of the Internet’s freedom of express information for public consumption is how damaging the information might be if it is found to be untrue. Pastor Ong raised this particular concern in my interview with him. To further build on Pastor Jack’s point that online engagement of issues can have a negative effect on the perception of others toward the church, Pastor Ong provided me with an example of how the Internet, if used hastily in a public manner, could have unnecessary detrimental effects on the pastor and the church.

28

All quotes attributed to Alpha are taken from an interview on December 6, 2011.

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Take any pastor, for example, maybe he committed wrong, or is suspected of doing wrong. Then everyone blows it up on the Internet. Now, if the thing were true. . . the guy has to go, it's OK. But what if the thing was not true. You destroy the pastor. . . then they want to try to come back to rectify it, it's too late. The church is dead already. It's already in the public domain. So the church is destroyed. Who is to blame? Blame the silly people who jump in to comment and never apply the intellectual sense into the thing and kill the pastors.

In this scenario, those exploiting the disjuncture to “undermine the plausibility structure of a religious system” would be guilty of misinformation and would have little room to maneuver in terms of rectifying the impact that it caused to the church and the individual accused. But, as demonstrated to some extent in the case study of the blog Calvary Today, public expressions of dissent (whether accurate or not) can generate some sort of reaction to the issues, and remains a potentially useful channel to voice concerns. Pastor Sivin attempted to provide me with the balance between public and private handling of church affairs, particular in the area of disputes and disagreements with the church authority. He explained that how a church member deals with the issues depends on how members perceive the church itself. If a member views the church as an “institution”, then it is legitimate to expect the church to be transparent and open to criticism, and thus being more aggressive in the approach to expose any wrongdoings of the church. However, if a member views the church as a “family”, the approach would be significantly different. In my church we look at issues first as friends, then family, then only as an institution. Then I wouldn't do what I do in public towards my family. Then the dynamic of culture, family relations and friendships come in. So would I publicly criticise my friends? Would I publicly criticise my father? Very unlikely. But would I criticise his ideas online, without referring to him? Maybe.29

Pastor Sivin was not the only one who came up with the metaphor of the family. In my discussion with Pastor Ong, I asked him what he thought about the issue surrounding Calvary Church, and whether he thought having church members going to the press and blog to publicly expose details of church disputes in that particular context was acceptable. His response was firm, saying that “I can clearly tell you that the engagement on that level is wrong in my viewpoint”, and that “that particular issue is a church issue. It shouldn’t be in public domain. If you want to engage, you should have a forum and lock it all within the church and keep it within the church”. He argued that it was the Biblical way to resolve conflicts within the church and that blogging about these issues is akin to publicly telling everyone about personal family disputes.30

29

All quotes attributed to Pastor Sivin are taken from an interview conducted on Oct 19, 2011. This reference to a Biblical way of handling conflicts was also raised by Pastor Sivin, who specifically mentioned Matthew 18:15–17 as a model of handling conflicts. It says: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector (New International Version). 30

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It’s like. . . I have family problem with my wife and kids, then tell the whole world, publish in newspaper. Everybody knows I have problem. But if I have a problem with my wife and kids, I’ll talk to my family. . . my father mother maybe in laws maybe a counsellor. . . all within this level and it should be done within that you see.

As mentioned earlier, Cheong highlights “disjuncture/displacement” and “continuity/complementary” as different approaches to churches’ relationship with the Internet. What I have just described are how there are fractures within the frameworks of challenging authorities in the public domain of the Internet. Additionally, there is also the issue of how church leaders deal with of unbridled Internet expressions by turning the Internet into a complementary tool of their pastoral duties. This is done mainly by expanding their “scope of influence” to include educating and influencing their members regarding their online activities.

The Need for Educating Church Members If religious blogging or using social-networking to express religious thoughts and ideas is be considered to be a form of “everyday religion”, particularly amongst lay people of the church, then the issue of whether church members should be educated on how to use these tools can be seen as a means of church leaders to manage their members’ everyday ritual practices. In Chap. 2, I highlighted the need for a more inclusive definition of what constitutes everyday religion. I argued that instead of strict partitions of “everyday religion” and “organized religion”, one must consider how organized religion can permeate into everyday practices. If the church plays an active role in educating its members on how the Internet should be engaged in, it becomes a scenario where authority within organized religion is used to affect the everyday experience of its members. However, the extent to which such teachings are practiced differ according to the church and its leaders. In the previous section, it appeared to be consensus that the Internet should not be used for public criticism of the church, but when it comes to whether there is a need to educate church members on the boundaries of the Internet, the perspectives are more varied. In the previous section, I highlighted Pastor Jack’s emphasis on the importance for church members to be aware of how they represent Christianity and the church on social media. How that is achieved through his pastoral capacity. Pastor Jack makes it a point to preach regularly on the responsible use of social media because he does not “just leave them to figure it out. Without teaching, I’ve seen a lot of mess”. There are two key aspects he focused on. Firstly, although Pastor Jack recognized that the Internet is a space that allows for a great sense of freedom of expression, “we’ve got to come out of that level in our Christian walk, that maturity level”. This means that, from his perspective, just because the Internet is free does not mean people must engage it without restraint. He made this comment in response to some people commenting to him that he was being controlling and that he was not allowing his church members to freely express themselves.

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This is related to the second area of Pastor Jack’s teaching on the Internet and social media. He explained that members should also know what they should be trying to achieve in their online practices, particularly on blogs or Facebook updates, where their personal expressions are easy visible in the public domain. I always say if you are not going to put any statement that is going to build up somebody, then don’t put it. Your Facebook status updates as well. If it’s not going to build somebody up, if somebody reads your status and go “ahhh! it’s killing”, or “it’s negative”. . . don’t do that. I emphasize a lot on status updates. We want you have status updates that is really building people up, so even though if you feel like going into the cave and all that. . . . I don’t really encourage my members to put negative status even though you feel down.

It was these comments that generated the comment that Christians should be above the apparent right to freedom of expression on the Internet, and that it should be used primarily for the purpose of encouraging others. This returns us to the previous section, where I discussed the views of pastors that how Christian individuals expressed themselves online is representative of the church and Christianity. Although it may seem that Pastor Jack may be suppressing individual expression for the sake of creating a sanitized Christian representation online, it is not all there is to Internet education in the church. Pastor Ong explained that the purpose of educating church members on the boundaries of Internet usage is also for their personal safety and wellbeing, although not everyone may agree with his views, particularly young people. I think the problem is that young people post things everything under the sun. Very silly to post things under the sun. They’re very silly. One day they may regret. Now everything is fine, nothing happens. Nobody knows. One day they may regret they put so many personal photos. My own children also I would keep reminding them. On the pulpit I would also remind them to be careful.. In the youth meeting we would encourage them. Of course some would not listen lah because they think it’s very funny, cool, everybody knows everything.

In my interview with Pastor Ong, it took me some time to develop the issue of online expressions to how it might potentially affect the church. The moment the issue of “church members and blogs” came up, he passionately talked about the irresponsibility of especially young people these days in their online habits. He stated that “it is absolutely necessary to teach them not to simply put things online”. The seduction of popularity could be misleading with severe social complications in the future, something he finds lacking in his church members who blog. Such irresponsibility, if unchecked, could result in future repercussions for the individual. Some private things are meant to be made private. Of course the word “private” is very subjective. Some people like to tell the whole world. . . They’re just lonely. They like some attention. You put in a very sexy photo of yourself, immediately everybody would come and see because why? You put something suggestive of yourself. Of course the joy is you become very popular. The disaster is 20 years down the road you may regret it. Let’s say you put up a half-naked photo of a person. When you are 16-18 you think it's cool. When you are married with kids. . . 40 years old, I cannot tell my kids not to do the same thing you know.

I did not press Pastor Ong for a further description of what “half-naked” meant or referred to, but it is quite safe to presume that he is not keen on his church members’ habits of posting semi-revealing (at the very least) photographs of themselves and

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others and engaged in other forms of activities which might jeopardize their future. Based on Pastor Ong’s illustration above, the concern is the issue of how one is represented in the public domain, unlike Pastor Jack’s concern about how the church is represented. In Pastor Ong’s view, it is how the individual is represented, and how this representation might affect future developments, such as when an individual becomes a parent, and his children stumbles upon these past photographs and other content. Indirectly then, the notion of “setting an example” is behind Pastor Ong’s motivation to teach both his own children and church members regarding the dangers of unrestricted use of the Internet. So far, we have seen how the Internet is perceived to be a dangerous space that requires training by the church authorities to successfully navigate through it without harming the self and the church. But there are also views that that teaching in this area can be construed as a pastor exercising control within his church. The result of excessive control of expression does not necessarily lead to a reduction of church criticism or self-expression, but could lead to alternative forms of expressions which the church is unaware of. For Pastor Homer, an elderly lecturer in one of the largest Bible colleges in Malaysia, the risk of the unknown outweighs the risk of a vocal and sometimes irritating dissenter in church. This is why he does not outwardly tries to curb Internet activity or stop people from expressing dissent on their blogs or Facebook pages. If I put a control, then they will also say, you pastor you also talk about all sorts of things. I cover all sorts of things you see. . . all sorts of things. For me it’s whether to let them express or to let them simmer. If it simmers one day it will go “kaboom”. It’s even worse that way. That’s why we find avenues for them to express. We want hear what you say. Like there’s one guy in my church who’s perpetually negative. . . We must allow them to work out their frustrations and not carry it and go round behind your back.31

The lack of control in the church, however, does not necessarily mean that no care needs to be given to the issue. Pastor Homer, however, differs from Pastor Jack and Pastor Ong in that he feels that it is the responsibility of the parents to introduce good Internet practice. He explained that this was his approach because it was how he raised his children. He said that “it’s a question of parents implementing the guards. My children, when they were in school, they could go online 1 h a day. And when they are on, I sit beside them”. That way, he could monitor his children’s doings on the Internet and claims that today he is not worried about his children doing anything inappropriate online. He juxtaposed his approach with a common complaint he received from parents in his church. He said, “A lot of people complain to me that their children are always on the Internet. I say to them, ‘you must control’”. Here we can see the perspective that parents, instead of the church that plays a pivotal role in the formation of Internet habits of the church members. The pastor, as an actor within “organized religion” (in this case the church) still interacts with the “everyday aspect” through the advice given to the parents to influence their children, instead of addressing all the members regarding Internet practices. We can observe

31

All quotes attributed to Pastor Homer are taken from an interview conducted on 12 Sep 2011.

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that Internet education still originates from the church authority and ends up with the Internet user. Internet education is provided for in varying degrees by different churches in Malaysia. Although my sample size for pastors is not relatively large, we are able to ascertain a number of motivations and a working rationale as to why Internet education is increasingly crucial to the institution of the church. The question still remains, however, that with sufficient Internet education by the church, would Calvary Today or and Now Stand have been silenced before its inception as an online presence to express dissent and support for the church? Would alternative forms of exposition and engagement be sought after on a level that is unbeknownst to the church if there were excessive controls imposed by the church? Whether the use of the Internet as a medium of public engagement of issues causes more damage or support to the church remains as a topic of study worth monitoring over the long term. In this chapter, though, pastors and church institutions are extremely cautious with their members’ activities on the Internet. This caution does not necessarily lead to excessive censorship or screening of members’ online activities, but rather it is a caution borne out of their recognition that whatever is expressed on the Internet has a “real” effect on the church. This is true also for the lay members of the church, as Calvary Today, through their efforts, are hoping for their contents to have an effect on the church. The subject of Internet education is then a possible bridge between the two opposing categories of disjuncture/displacement and continuity/complementarity. If pastors find uncontrolled online engagement to be a potential threat to displace conventional authority structures, they can increase regulation and influence over this particular aspect of members’ everyday religious activities and expressions by providing education from the pulpit on best-practices and blog-ethics. Through this process, the threat of open criticism is being transitioned into complementary public expressions of presenting a good image of the church, and being a good Christian testimony, possibly for the sake of the church.

Pastors Are Cyber-Citizens Too After discussing how the Internet could be used to discredit and usurp the authority of the church using a blog, it is natural for pastors to be wary of the potential threats their churches might face. The case study of Calvary Today, coupled with other occurrences of public dissent found on the Internet lend credence to the notion that the Internet provides a strong impetus for lay members to create disjuncture and displacement within Christianity. However, that is only one side of the story. This section seeks to provide some balance by shifting the focus to the pastors and in order to demonstrate the complementary aspects of the relationship between the Internet and the church, and how pastors experience the Internet in a way that is beneficial to their work. It is important to locate everyday Christian practices, particularly in relation to cyber-practices, within the lives of church pastors to create a more nuanced view of

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online religion. Pastors, despite being “experts” who “make a living being religious or thinking and writing about religious ideas” (Ammerman, 2006, p. 5), are also people who create and share personal stories “out of which they live. . . and turn these ‘stories’ into ‘everyday’ action” (McGuire, 2006, p. 187). While these pastors’ vocation as religious leaders involve performing and leading church members formal church rituals, their lives are not merely confined to that church setting. Pastors too have non-working hours in which they pursue other interests. They also have personal understandings and expressions of spirituality. Their rituals also comprise of a “mixture of activities, including ones that are exceptionally and intensely emotional and activities that are common or routine” (Lewis, 2004, p. 156). These “everyday” aspects of a pastors’ lived religion can include the use of the Internet for their personal Christian expression and experience. After discussing how the Internet could be used to discredit and usurp the authority of the church through the use of a blog, it is natural for pastors to be wary of the potential threats their churches might face. The case study of Calvary Today, coupled with other occurrences of public dissent found on the Internet (Helen, my informant featured in the previous chapter, serves as one such example) lend credence to the notion that the Internet provides a strong impetus for lay members to create disjuncture and displacement within Christianity. However, that is only one side of the story. This chapter seeks to provide some balance by providing case studies that demonstrate the complementary aspects of the relationship between the Internet and the church, and how pastors experience the Internet in a way that is beneficial to their work.

The Internet’s Usefulness to Pastors Although pastors are wary of certain aspects and practices made available by the Internet, it does not mean that they are opposed to the Internet per se. More work needs to be done to document and discuss the everyday online practices of pastors (or leaders of other faiths), particularly in relation to their personal spirituality, which may or may not be strongly intertwined with their pastoral vocation. For starters, pastors do use the Internet. As Fischer-Nielsen said of the Danish pastors with whom he conducted a survey, “pastors prepare services with the help of the Internet, and much of their daily contact with parishioners and colleagues is carried out online” (Fischer-Nielsen, 2012, p. 128). Fischer-Nielsen also identified that the Internet is widely used by the pastors, “especially for their work, and the fact that the youngest pastors are also the most frequent users shows that the importance of the Internet in this particular context continues to grow”. The most fundamental question available in his survey is whether the Internet has benefited the pastors, to which across all age groups, approximately 80% of the pastors answered “yes”. His findings concur somewhat with Lorenzo Cantoni’s global survey of 5189 Catholic Priests, where approximately 70% of the priests interviewed responded positively that they have at least found some use of digital technologies improving the way they

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perform their priestly mission (Cantoni, Rapetti, Tardini, Vannini, & Arasa, 2012, p. 142). More specific results include 60% of the priests perceiving that the Internet was “very useful” for facilitating parish activities, and 50% of them found it “very useful” for their preparation of homilies (Cantoni et al., 2012, p. 141). When considering quantitative data, the reverse percentages are also important, with some respondents stating that these new technologies are a nuisance, and that they are forced to use it because everyone else is. Findings reported by Fischer-Nielsen and Cantoni et al. provide a useful juxtaposition of how pastors can approach the Internet. He states that “by entering the media, however, the church also loses control of its message” (Fischer-Nielsen, 2012, p. 128). This has also been established earlier in this book, where I presented case studies of how the Internet provides for new ways of expressing new things pertaining to Christianity that might not be endorsed by the church. However, Fischer-Nielsen also says that this is something that is meant to be adapted to by the pastors. He says that “a fruitful online engagement can be achieved only through conscious awareness of the positive as well as negative consequences of different Internet uses” (Fischer-Nielsen, 2012, p. 128). Both studies usefully featured church pastors in the study of everyday religion by quantitatively identifying their online practices. From it, we can derive further questions. Firstly, the surveys, while providing broad categories, do not provide detailed description of what specific actions are involved in these practices. For example, in Cantoni et al.’s survey, he noted that 52.5% of Catholic priests found the Internet very useful for “spreading the Christian message”. Yet it is not clear what this entails. Do priests in this category blog about the Christian message, advertise their church website, or engage in live chat with the public to propagate their beliefs? Similarly, of the 17.7% of priests who find the Internet useful for praying, how do they pray? With whom do they pray with? To complement these surveys, more definitive and in-depth description of the varieties of actions taken by these ministers need to be presented. What is very clear in both studies, however, is that the Internet is widely used by an increasing number of Christian leaders at a rate that cuts across all age groups. One of the purposes of this chapter is to look at the variety of ways in which the pastors in my research project utilize the Internet. It may have appeared that the pastors I have featured in the preceding chapters are relatively one dimensional and uncompromisingly conservative when it comes to online communication and expression. That does not mean, however, that the pastors do not use the Internet for their own personal ministries and for their own spiritual enrichment. A simple example is that the Internet provides pastors with new information that are advantageous in their knowledge of the Bible. Bible commentaries are collections of literature that aids some pastors in their study and understanding of the Bible. These commentaries can be quite expensive. However, with Christian websites like Bible Gateway, online tools such as Olive Tree, E-Sword, and other Bible study applications, well-known commentaries are either made free or at a significantly reduced price. As Cheong states, “competing online resources can also serve as a source of education” (Cheong, 2012, p. 83), and a pastor’s spiritual authority can further increase through his/her effective utilization of these tools.

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These web tools are not limited to Christian research materials. There are numerous websites that provide pastors with sermon outlines in which they can adapt to their own needs. Sermon Central32 provides an internal search engine named “Sermon Prep and Church Media Search”, in which after typing in the relevant key words for a sermon topic that one is planning, a list of sermons (either in full text or outline format) are displayed on the screen. These search results also feature the sermons’ original author, target audience, and viewer ratings to help users determine the suitability and quality of the material. The Sermon Notebook, authored primarily by a pastor from North Carolina, USA, provides outlines of over a 1000 sermons, stating that “all the sermons and outlines on this site are free for you to use as the Lord leads you”.33 All of these resources could potentially be used by pastors to further refine their preparation for sermons and preaching activities. However, the above are not the only types of websites that might be utilized by the pastors. The pastors who participated in my research use the Internet in different ways that contribute to their personal capacities to further enhance their Christian lives. Just as how it is impossible to separate everyday Christianity from the institution of the church, it is also not possible to entirely separate the pastor’s identity and vocation as a pastor and his personal usage of the Internet. In the following sections, I categorise and discuss the pastors’ type of Internet usage into two groups: Pastors as cyber-authors and pastors as cyber-citizens. Although these two categories can be easily inter-changable and overlapping, what I will focus on is to look at specific activities by pastors to achieve specific goals. For the role of “cyber-authors”, I am primarily interested in how pastors use the Internet to further enhance and augment their Christian ministries, whether or not it is directly related to the church. The emphasis here is on the different ways of giving or providing content. The second category of “cyber citizens” specifically refers to online activities that pastors engage in privately for the purpose of personal spiritual growth, such as making Christian friends online, engaging with other pastors on socialnetworking platforms, etc. This also includes how pastors can actively engage the public regarding Christian issues as gatekeepers. This means that the pastors are not only active participants of online discourses, but play an important role in mediating and moderating these forums. In short, the second category focuses on how pastors receive content and interact with others on the Internet.

Pastors as Cyber-Authors This section of cyber-authors primarily focuses on the authorship of Malaysian pastors in cyberspace and how these practices form a part of the pastors’ personal ministries. Whilst official church websites are an indispensable outlet of information,

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they also contain other materials. Here, three pastors and some of their online Christian expressions are featured: Pastor Ong and his use of the Internet to promote his Christian music: Pastor Homer and his blog featuring his sermons and Christian archaeology; and Pastor Lenny, who shares his entire schedule (personal and otherwise) with his church’s senior pastor and key leaders on Google Calendar. The focus of these three pastors’ online activities is centred on their role as authors. The thrust of their content is less dialogue driven and designed more explicitly for the purpose of producing and providing information for public consumption.

Pastor Ong’s Music Ministry Pastor Ong may have appeared to be very cautious about his church members’ online activities in the earlier parts of this chapter, where he was shown to adopt a conservative approach to dealing with the various issues discussed in the book. For example, he strongly believes in the necessity for Christians to maintain healthy social relationships in the material church, arguing against notions of purely online Christian communities. Part of this belief is fuelled by the rationale that the Internet is too public and an unsafe space for excessive and unbridled self-expression. To curb the dangers of the Internet, he advocated teaching church members on Internet habits, stating that it is “absolutely necessary” to train young people regarding what they expose themselves to and participate in online. Despite all these concerns, however, Pastor Ong also made it very clear that there is room for Christians to utilize the Internet for their own spiritual benefit, and that it need not be completely off-limits. Pastor Ong himself is a frequent user of the Internet and finds himself depending on it to achieve a number of things on a personal level in relation to his faith and church. Apart from being active on his church’s Facebook group, where he provides announcements and chats with some of his church members, he also utilizes the Internet for the purpose of furthering some of his personal Christian goals. One of Pastor Ong’s interest since his youth is in music. While in his early twenties, he served as a worship leader in the church that he was attending at the time. He began composing Christian songs, some of which were used as worship songs in the church. He described that much of his inspiration at the time came from his personal spiritual experiences as well as the development of the church. This means that some of the songs that he composed were written to reflect particular milestones in the church’s history as well. Pastor Ong’s interest in music did not develop further until he became a full-time pastor in the 1990s. He recounted that he felt God birthed in his heart an interest in Christian music. He described this calling as one which involved inspiring new Christian songwriters in Malaysia to use their songs for the purposes of God, promoting higher standards in Christian recordings, and developing the Christian music industry to be a financially sustainable field for those involved in it. To this end, Pastor Ong has produced a number of music albums featuring songs that he has

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written and composed. A small number of his songs are recognized regionally in Asia and have been translated to multiple languages and used in different churches as worship songs. He has also set up a website to provide information and facilitate a growing network of Christian musicians in Malaysia. He has also been teaching extensively in Bible colleges around Malaysia in the area of “worship” and “music”. All of the work pertaining to these musical ventures was not done under the supervision of his church but rather was financed and administered independently. One of the most crucial aspects of being a musician is to be able to share one’s work with others, and this is where the Internet has become Pastor Ong’s tool in disseminating information relating his work, as well as sharing his music with a larger audience. Pastor Ong found that with the advent and popularity of the Internet, he was able to do much more than the 1980s when he started out as a musician. Ok, every writer’s goal. . . when you write music, you want to share it. Back then, if you got a song you want to share to public, the only people you can share it with are your church members. Now you got Facebook and Youtube, you can share. You may not be as successful as a pop-star or whatever, but you can maybe share with your nation, your friends, they can have access to it. The whole goal of music is to communicate inspiration. It's not meant to be written then locked in a closet. In a certain way there's a better chance now than 30 years ago.

There are two aspects of his music that Pastor Ong finds important to share with his audience. The first is the music itself. He uses Youtube to share his music with others, and to an extent, he has managed to achieve this objective. One of his songs has received 41,000 viewers, a respectable number by online standards. The other aspect is the story behind the song. He said that “people want to know why a song was written”, which led to him describing the inspiration behind each song that he produces. He uses this as a means of giving testimony about God as well. These testimonies are found on his music website. Pastor Ong described the website as one that contains everything related to his music ministry as a Christian. A look at the site will reveal a number of key content categories—his testimonies and songs, news and updates about other Malaysian Christian musicians, and write-ups about other activities within the Christian arts scene (such as theatre and literature). The most extensive content however, is found in the sections relating to his personal music. Under the column “My Music”, he features all of his music albums produced to date and allowing for free downloads of some of his songs. On a separate page, “My Testimony”, Pastor Ong provides a brief background into how he became a Christian and what led him into a pastoral role in the church. He then provides a write-up for every song that he has produced to date, describing the events and inspiration behind the songs. One of the songs was inspired by his church’s “cry to God for help” in the founding days of the church and how he has seen the church grow from a membership of 30 people to 700 over a period of 20 years. This theme of relating to God and the church is one of the few prominent and recurring themes in his songs. Another recurring theme is the plight and suffering of others, such as one song he wrote about a church member suffering from a neardeath experience due to a heart disease, and another recounting his admiration for a girl suffering from a mental health disorder singing worship songs in church. The

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third prominent theme relates to his personal spiritual journey. One of the songs features a testimony of him going through a multi-year spell of not writing a song, pastoring a new church on a part time basis, having a fledging and well-paying career as an engineer, and raising three young sons with his wife. He attributed his inability to juggle the many responsibilities to his lack of time to worship God with new songs, and eventually found the inspirational breakthrough through a visiting pastors’ prayer for him, coupled with his decision to quit his secular job to become a full-time pastor. Because of the sizable amount of content featuring some of his life events and experiences, Pastor Ong explained that he did not need “another personal blog to communicate personal things”. However, many of these testimonies are arguably highly personal stories as well, and it is worth questioning how he relates this to what he cautioned (in Chap. 6) that “some private things are meant to be made private. Some people like to tell the whole world. They like some attention” and gave the example of how a young person who posts up sexy pictures of him/herself could jeopardize his future in some way. While Pastor Ong is by no means publicizing half-naked pictures of himself for publicity’s sake, the issue of what should be made private or not requires further thought. After all, by promoting his music and seeking to enlarge his audience, he could be seen as soliciting for “some attention” as well. To this end, Pastor Ong justifies his public testimonies as such: My songs are in public domain, so it’s not private matters. The stories related to the songs are also not private. They are in the public domain. People want to know why a song was written, so I think it’s not a big issue that the story behind the song also becomes public.

The other justification that is implied is that these stories, along with his music, serve as a positive influence in the lives of others. He reflected that “over the years, a lot of people write to me and say ‘I’m blessed by this song’”, thus acknowledging that there is a form of spiritual transaction that can take place through interaction and engagement on the Internet. Apart from his testimonies, the Youtube pages also provide a glimpse into how audiences respond to Pastor Ong’s sharing of the music. In the aforementioned song that generated 41,000 views, many of the viewers have posted comments praising the song and describing what the song meant to them. Examples of comments include “Praise the Lord for writing this beautiful song. Every time I listen to the song my tears wet my eye”; “we have been so blessed with this song, Pastor! Many a time it has uplifted us!”; “Every Sunday we sing this song! Something is happening in the congregation when we sang it; the Spirit of God is very alive in the room”. Although some of the comments refer to the nature of the song rather than the act of posting the song online, it is evident that Pastor Ong’s sharing of the song on Youtube has allowed for a public feedback mechanism that was unavailable before. Apart from the above comments, other viewers posted queries on whether they could share the song with others, ask for the musical chords to learn to play it, and others. Pastor Ong actively engages all of these comments and queries, saying “thank you” to every compliment given, and responding to every query personally.

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Pastor Ong’s effort as an author to create networks and spaces of information pertaining to his music for a wider audience can be clearly seen in the account above. Although he is cautious about individual privacy and security in an online environment, he is not ignorant of the potential that the Internet provides for his personal vision of impacting others with his Christian songs, as well as providing a platform for other Malaysian musicians to share their music with a wider audience as well. It is worth noting that Pastor Ong believed that his vision to promote and cultivate Malaysian Christian music is one that was birthed by God, and so far, his most prominent tool to fulfilling that vision is through authoring a website and sharing his music on the Internet. As Fischer-Nielsen stated earlier, despite challenges, pastors can still be a relevant through “conscious awareness of the positive as well as negative consequences of different Internet uses” (Fischer-Nielsen, 2012, p. 128). In Pastor Ong’s case, whether one agrees with all of his views on the Internet or not, it is clear that he has some awareness of the positive and negative potential of the Internet, and actively engages it to his advantage.

Pastor Homer and His Personal Blog The other aspect of Pastor Ong’s case study above is that through his posting of music online, one can see some effect that it has had on its audience. This suggests that there may be a spiritual transaction that takes place online, where through viewers’ accessing his songs, they are influenced and impacted in different ways. Pastor Homer does something similar in that he provides some of his teaching lessons, sermon points, and updates on Christian archaeology on his blog with the intention of sharing with others. Pastor Homer, who lectures in the area of Old Testament theology in a Bible school in Seremban, explained that despite his advancing years (he is in his sixties), he found the Internet useful to his work. During working hours, he leaves his Facebook account and Skype on, so students can send him messages during the day, after which he can respond to once he is back at his office, such as after classes or meetings. While I was in his office interviewing him, he turned the computer monitor toward me and said “Aha! Here is one student asking me about how to reference his assignment properly,” showing me a Facebook chat window that just popped up on his screen. Pastor Homer did not respond to the student then, presumably because I was there talking to him. He said that, “people know if they FB34 me I’ll be there and I’ll reply immediately. Longer things they will send me an email and write more details and I’ll write a longer reply”. Beyond the daily networking with students during work hours, however, Pastor Homer makes it a point to not be perpetually connected to the Internet, saying that he tries not to go online when he’s at home with his family. One of the other activities

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that he engages in regularly online is his blog, where he writes on a wide array of matters. Mostly, however, he writes about his interest in the Old Testament, posting up little notes from his research on Old Testament theology, interesting facts and findings from latest archaeological developments from around the world, and other related matters. Apart from that, he also writes extensively on Malaysian social issues, saying that “I express my own feelings about it and sometimes. . . it does give me a way of expressing. It’s like a diary which is now made public. Straightaway my blog already tells people where I stand you see”. He expressed that the blog is useful to him in that it helps to think if something that he wants to write is worthwhile writing. Pastor Homer said that his blog, which he has been publishing on since 2003, has an international audience. He attributed this partly to his frequent travels to teach and lecture in other parts of world, where he would network with other Christians. He also stated that he has quite a large number of visitors who stumbled on his blog through Google. Many blogging platforms provide the blogger with tools to analyse their visitor profiles, and using these tools Pastor Homer told that it is common to find readers from Australia, Africa, Taiwan, China and others. He said, “I look at the link and see how they come in, and they use Google and they are searching for a word. One of the biggest hits was the one about ‘tears’.” The search for the term “tears”, explained Pastor Homer, led people to a specific blog post called “Tears in a Bottle”. The blog post was a short write up of a devotion that Pastor Homer had shared with his students during a usual morning devotion prior to classes in the Bible school. I wrote something for a short sermon that I preached. It was about tears and tear-drop bottles. . . It's a very interesting practice that the OT people did. They actually kept their tears so when they cried they had these little bottles which they collected tears and sealed it up. So I preached a sermon based on that.

The text that Pastor Homer was referring to is taken from Psalm 56:8 in the Bible, which says “Thou has kept count of my tossings; put thou my tears in thy bottle! Are they not in thy book?” Using this verse, Pastor Homer wrote on the Jewish culture of storing their tears in little bottles made of animal skin as a remembrance of certain sorrows in life. He then proceeded to provide some other historical and modern uses of tear bottles, used in similar ways as personal memorials of sadness and sorrow. He ends his short study on tear bottles by writing that as Christians, one does not need to keep these “bottles of tears” to express sadness or devotion to God, but rather “Psalm 56:8 reassures us that when we cry, God himself will keep note of our tears (‘my tears in thy bottle’)”. This blog post (and the devotion that it is based on) was written to encourage his students through difficult times in life, that God knows their sufferings. However, the blog post has found a wider audience that just his students, even after several years. Pastor Homer shares that: That post, I think has the most hits. Years later people will be searching there and they would stumble on the blog, and I think that has the most hits. . . for tears. Very interesting. It's something which is text in psalms. . . God remembers our psalms. . . And then from there people stumble in. So in a way it tells me that there are people who are looking for things and information.

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A look at the comments section on the post “Tears in a Bottle” suggests that Pastor Homer is right in his assessment. There are a number of comments that stated that “I love this insight” or something similar. Knowing that blog postings can potentially influence and impact readers has led to Pastor Homer continuing to blog even to this day, even though he has slowed down. In the years from 2003–2010, he wrote up to 200 posts a year, which brings it to an average of more than one post in 2 days. In the years after that however, he has blogged roughly only once a week or so. This does not mean, however, that Pastor Homer has stopped blogging extensively, but rather, he does not want to be caught up with the practice of blogging every day for the sake of it. He said that for him, “a blog is for only when you have something worthwhile to say. So nowadays, if I have nothing to say, I don’t blog, and I don’t feel guilty”. Despite the reduced number of posts, it does not mean that Pastor Homer shuns from providing information to his readers. The most recent posts found on his blog are about the latest discovery of a Jewish ritual bath in the second temple of Jerusalem, and about the dwindling population of the European Samaritan population. The above case studies of both Pastor Ong and Pastor Homer suggest an active approach to provide information to others for audience’s benefit. Much like how Pastor Ong’s songs, through the sharing of them on Youtube, provide for a wider avenue in which people can be “blessed” by the music, Pastor Homer’s blog also allows for some form of spiritual experience to take place through his writings. At the very least, it provides substantial information to his readers in the hopes that their knowledge and understanding of Christianity would further increase.

Pastor Lenny and His “Shared” Google Calendar Account The “everyday” in the above case studies are focused exclusively on how pastors utilize the Internet to provide information to external readers, and can be placed neatly in Cantoni’s aforementioned category of “spreading the message” to others. But that is not the only way in which pastors are engaging the media for their everyday pastoral lives. Pastor Lenny, who argued in favour of the extensive use of the Internet to stay in contact with church members, also uses the Internet as a tool for personal accountability in his pastoral ministry. Using Google Calendar, an online scheduling software provided by Google, Pastor Lenny updates his all of his daily schedule firstly as a means to organize his time, and secondly to provide information to his leaders and pastors to inform them of his daily activities. This is done through Google Calendar’s ability to allow the user to share his/her calendar with others. This means that people whom Pastor Lenny shares his calendar with are fully aware of his daily schedule, including his activities during his personal time. Pastor Lenny, introduced earlier as the pastor who did not work out a conventional office because of the lack of space and finances to set one up at his current church premises, is the pastor who deviated from his peers in his view of the authenticity of online relationships. He argued that for the church that he pastors,

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it was easier and more effective to communicate and build relationships with members through Facebook. Apart from these Facebook activities, he spends much of his time visiting different church members at their workplaces for lunch. All of these appointments are keyed in to his Google Calendar. He justifies the sharing of his schedule as “a kind of accountability. When they see me here with certain people, usually church members, then they know I’m actually working. If nobody knows, I could be sleeping at home”. “They” in this context refers to his senior pastor, who heads the main church (Pastor Lenny pastors a branch church located further away from the main church), as well as the deacons of the church and the leaders in his own church. As explained by Pastor Lenny, the reason why he shares his calendar with his superiors and his peers is because he wanted to be held accountable for his work. Another was that he was trying to implement a model of pastoral transparency. Whilst it is understandable that he would want to share the schedule of his pastoral duties, Pastor Lenny goes further to reveal everything that he plans in the shared calendar: I believe that my own ministry philosophy is to be as transparent as I can be. I think older pastors have this view where they need to be impeccable so they hide everything. I think my personal life also has to be a testimony and example of how I use my time. I make no apologies for going to play futsal, going to the cyber-cafe or things like that. . . I put those up as well. Anything and everything is shared.

The above suggests that Pastor Lenny does not separate his pastoral duties with the other aspects of his life, feeling it is necessary for his accountability network to be aware of his full schedule and whereabouts. He has a particular dislike for pastors who are excessively private for the purpose of appearing faultless to his/her church members, saying that churches are “too afraid of a bad reputation. The pastor must be impeccable like Jesus. . . But no church is! The church needs to be able to be gracious enough to say the pastor messed up, we’re sorry, we’re all sinners, let’s be gracious to one another”. Pastor Lenny believed that through such transparency, realistic expectations of the church can be established and a more genuine relationship between the pastor and his members can be cultivated. Pastor Lenny asserted that this model of sharing his personal calendar with the key leaders of his church has benefited him greatly, and has been encouraging his other leaders to share their calendars with him as well. While Pastor Lenny does not provide products like songs and blog posts to mass audiences for their public consumption, his utilization of Google Calendar is demonstrative of an effort to use the Internet to provide information for the purpose of developing his spiritual authority. This practice resonates with Cheong’s observation that the Internet potentially changes the criteria of religious authority from “formal qualifications or institutional positions to more fluid characteristics” (Cheong, 2012, p. 80). Criteria such as piousness, infallible morality, and formal qualifications may still be dominant markers by which a congregation view their pastors but Pastor Lenny recognizes that with the Internet there are “changes in the modes of authority production” and that, by restructuring his communicative

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practices to emphasize personal transparency and public accountability, he might be able to “spur administrative and operational effectiveness” (Cheong, 2012, p. 80). The practice of transparency and dialogue could yield significant results for a pastor’s credibility and standing within the Christian community. This is because the expectation of pastors as “infallible” characters is difficult to maintain in the milieu of Internet communication. This difficulty was made apparent in a recent church scandal involving a megachurch in Singapore. In June 2012, Reverend Kong Hee, the pastor of the Singaporean mega-church City Harvest Church, was arrested along with other senior members of his church in connection with a criminal breach of trust involving gross mismanagement of church funds (23 million Singapore dollars) and falsifying church financial accounts. Despite the court trial being set for May 2013, a year later, the news of the pastors’ arrest has already spread quickly around the world through the mass media and the Internet. On the day of his arrest, the online social media scene saw a flurry of activity, with many condemning Reverend Kong Hee for his extravagant lifestyle, his sin, and proclaiming God’s judgment on him. There were also those who vehemently defended him, arguing that he was framed and attacked by others. Regardless of whether Kong Hee is guilty as charged or not, it is much easier for the public to doubt a pastor’s moral credibility even by people who are not members of the church. Even a pastor’s academic qualification and institutional position can easily be called into question today. In the weeks following Reverend Kong Hee’s arrest, a Singaporean online news portal, The Real Singapore, published an article questioning Reverend Kong Hee’s academic qualification. The article, entitled “Exposed Kevin Dyson, CHC Advisor Bought His Degree from Australia”,35 stated that the university that he received his doctorate, New Covenant International University and Theological Seminary (NCIU), is a “diploma-mill”. The writer attempted to expose not just Reverend Kong Hee but also an entire network of bogus academic institutions that produced degrees for pastors. The focal point of the article was on Reverend Dr. Kevin Dyson, the founder of NCIU. The writer investigated Reverend Dyson’s stated qualifications and claimed that they were either low profile diploma-mills or completely non-existent. The writer took the trouble to drive to various advertised addresses to determine if a Bible college was indeed located there. The article has since been reposted by a number of other blogs and again, regardless of whether it is true or not, the Internet makes investigations of such matters much easier. To overcome these kinds of revelations that surface on the Internet, religious authorities must adapt to the new environment. Pastor Lenny recognizes the danger of excessive pastoral secrecy and by documenting his everyday activities, be it religious or otherwise, and sharing it with a group of people to monitor, he has Pastor Lenny created an accountability network to ensure that his potential mis-steps

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(if and whenever they arise) are easily identified by others and addressed in a timely manner. It is important to note that he does not only share the calendar with his Senior Pastor but also with individuals whom he pastors in his church such as his key leaders. McGuire states that everyday religion involves enacting and creating stories out of which people live, and how these stories are in turn acted upon (McGuire, 2006, p. 187), and Pastor Lenny provides a unique way of exemplifying this by creating daily schedules which incorporate his how he anticipates his everyday life (related to religion, or not) will be lived out, and shares it with others.

Pastors as Cyber-Citizens Although the pastors discussed above are undoubtedly netizens in that they frequently go online, their primary approach to the Internet is to produce new content for public consumption. In this section, I focus on the interactive efforts of the pastors in their everyday online engagements. What are the everyday online activities performed by pastors on a more personal level? How do pastors utilize the Internet to reinforce their personal spiritual well-being? This could include pastors making friends online, taking advantage of the Internet’s free resources, and others.

Pastor Jack and Online Sermons The wide range of Christian resources online is one of the most cited benefits of the Internet among my informants. Most of them refer to the increased availability of research material for their sermons either through free Bible commentaries or other forms of knowledge based information. But there is more to just gathering relevant information for a pastor’s next sermon. Pastor Jack, for instance, utilizes the Internet as a space for spiritual support due to the lack of available resources in his pastoral capacity. Pastor Jack served as a youth pastor since his mid-twenties in a mega-church in Kuala Lumpur. In 2009, Pastor Jack, together with his wife, ventured to another township in Kuala Lumpur to found a new church. The church identifies itself as non-denominational and currently comprises mainly of students due to the presence of a large public university in the short vicinity. Pioneering a church without external support from other churches and organizations can to be a difficult endeavour. In Pastor Justin’s case, he started the new church with only one member. Although the church has now grown in its membership to around 50 members, Pastor Justin and his wife remain as the only pastors in the church. In such a scenario, Pastor Justin has found himself in need of spiritual support in what is sometimes a rather lonely vocation. Using Twitter, Pastor Jack networks with his Christian friends from around the world, and “follows” influential Christians around the world to read inspiring words that are shared by them.

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I follow influential people. I follow Reinhard Bonnke, Kong Hee. I just see what they are doing. I find it very useful - Twitter. People that I follow, like Phil Pringle; he posts good stuff on the subject of faith on Twitter. He always talks about faith. So sometimes certain words even when I'm preparing a message, I just take a glance at Twitter and it's amazing.

What Pastor Jack is describing here is that Twitter updates by influential Christians around world play a major part in his weekly development of church sermons. Twitter updates are not likely to be heavy on Biblical exposition since it only allows for postings that does not exceed 140 characters. He explained that these short Twitter messages contribute more to his personal spiritual growth through encouragement. Personally and maybe sometimes I’m also thinking about my ministry and the work. Certain things that they post really come out and it speaks to me. I encourage my church also to follow these people because they post good stuff. I’m thinking the same thing. If these so called successful people post good stuff, and we feed on it and benefit. . .

The above is largely the inspiration behind Pastor Jack’s assertion that even though the Internet allows for freedom of expression, it does not mean people should express whatever they want. He argued that Christians need to go beyond the “freedom” of the Internet and use it to encourage others. He said that “I always say if you are not going to put any statement that is going to build up somebody, then don’t put it”. This is largely because Pastor Jack has found online social-media as a source of personal spiritual edification. When I asked Pastor Justin specifically if spiritual experiences can be achieved through the Internet, he took out his Apple iPad from his backpack and began to show me the other ways in which he utilizes the Internet for his personal spiritual enrichment. He quickly loaded up a number of websites of other churches in Malaysia like Acts Church and City Harvest Church, saying that he regularly visited their websites to read their sermon transcripts or listen to their audio podcasts. He also loaded up a number of foreign church websites and explained that he visited these sites for the same reason. After browsing through some of these websites, he launched a software called I-Tunes, a media player that is linked to an Internet store that features media content for downloading (some are paid products while others are free). Once on the I-Tunes store, he searched for prominent Christian speakers like A.R. Bernard, who makes his sermons available for free on this platform and explained “this is the best thing to happen to me. Podcasts. It is free. Normally in churches you have to buy sermon tapes. I have no money so I can’t afford to buy a lot of CDs and all that so this really helps me save a lot money”. What Pastor Jack does, then is to download several sermons from the Internet and listens to them through his Apple I Phone (He also owns an Apple MacBook) whenever he is driving or during his free time. He said that these downloads that are made available for free have helped him tremendously as a pastor. Through these podcasts, “God was speaking a lot of very specific things to me. . . A. R. Bernard. . . Sometimes Joel Osteen. . .” and because different speakers have different strengths, he was able to benefit from them collectively. Pastor Jack’s case study shows that he sees the Internet as a platform where some of his own spiritual needs are met. By acknowledging that “God was speaking a lot

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of specific things” to him, what is evident is that Pastor Jack was deriving spiritual nourishment from outside the church. These experiences translate into benefiting his pastoral work. While Pastor Jack’s personal online ritual involves mostly searching out specific resources for his personal consumption, Pastor Sivin’s online engagements are more socially dynamic in that his online Christian expressions are a result of extensive interaction with others on the Internet. Pastor Sivin said that ever since his introduction to the Internet in the late 1990s, he has been using it to connect with several people around the world. He said that “it contributes to me as a person. I’ve some very good friends whom I got to know online and we’re still in touch”. Although the authenticity of some online friendships are questionable (as discussed in Chap. 4), Pastor Sivin related of two online friendships which have played a significant role in shaping his identity as a pastor. He called these two people his spiritual mentors. The first mentor, whom Pastor Sivin identified as Mr.W, was an elderly Lutheran pastor who befriended Pastor Sivin in 1999. Throughout the duration of their friendship, the only means of communication that they engaged in was through email before the days of Skype where one could see each other face to face online. Pastor Sivin had graduated from a seminary not long ago and was a youth pastor in a Lutheran church in Kuala Lumpur. His time as a youth pastor was not an easy one, with several disagreements arising between him and the church leadership. Discouraged, he turned to the Internet and found Mr.W’s blog. Pastor Sivin wrote to him seeking for specific advice on how to navigate through some tricky issues that he was involved in, and Mr.W promptly replied. Since then, they wrote to each other three to four times a week. Pastor Sivin recalled that “he helped me cope through my Christian life, Christian ministry. . . It was amazing. It was as real as this”. Pastor Sivin said that sharing his problems with a pastor from another country allowed him to be honest about his feelings, and Mr.W was able to give objective views because he did not know anyone in Pastor Sivin’s church. One of the most significant advice given was for Pastor Sivin to start his own church, an advice he subsequently took. It is apparent that despite communicating only through emails; Pastor Sivin found spiritual support. He feels that emails, which are primarily text based, should not be looked upon as a disadvantage and that no spiritual elements could be found in them. If I say no, then the prayers of the Book of Psalms (in the Bible) are not valid. It's text! So what I'm doing now, I think it's no different from what we do from what Biblical writers were doing. So I see no reason to say it's not valid, I believe it is.

After almost a decade of friendship, Mr.W passed away. Shortly after that, through Pastor Sivin’s personal blog, a second online spiritual mentorship was established in 2009. The mentor, a pastor from America and 30 years older than Pastor Sivin, stumbled upon the blog, and contacted him on Facebook to chat. As Pastor Sivin described, “one thing led to another. We meet online at least twice a month if possible, or once a month minimum for 1-h long sessions of mentoring”. Since their first Facebook meeting, they have met on Skype through video calls. He said that although Skype and email dynamics are different from meeting a person in

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real life, “everything that you’d do in a normal face-to face thing, you’d do there”. This includes things like praying for one another. The regularity and nature of their dialogues suggest a genuine two-way spiritual relationship that has been fostered through this online mentoring process despite the absence of the physical touch. Pastor Sivin said during the time of our interview that he would be flying to America to spend the next Thanksgiving festivities (in 2011) with his mentor, thus marking the first time he would be meeting his online spiritual mentor. It would be the first time an online mentorship would translate into an offline meeting, even though they have “seen” each other numerous times through Skype. Apart from these two personal friendships, Pastor Sivin is also highly active on the online social media scene. He has been writing on his personal blog since 2000 and is also active on Facebook and Twitter. He is the founder of Friends in Conversation, a private Facebook group of Christian intellectuals in Malaysia who discuss Malaysian socio-political issues as well as other matters affecting the Christian community (this group is the key case study in the next chapter of this book). He also set up an account with Paper.li,36 a website that lets its users compile their own news stories from other news platforms to create their own version of a newspaper. Pastor Sivin publishes on his news page, The Sivin Kit Daily, every morning. Both the experiences of Pastor Jack and Pastor Sivin attest to the positive influences the Internet has had on their personal spiritual lives. These spiritual experiences are achieved through active engagement with the content that is available online, and with other people in the cyberspace community. Pastor Sivin, in particular, is very attached to the practice of interacting with other people online, saying that “there’s no sense of naivety that you cannot connect with someone outside of Malaysia, I do it all the time”. This view is similar to that of Suvi’s, where she argued for the existence of a greater sense of community through online networking. Nevertheless, Pastor Sivin, like most of the other pastors described in that chapter, is also cautious about the possibility of extending such online relationships into the formation of an online church due to issues of transparency and authenticity. But he but acknowledges that it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. This is demonstrated through his personal practice of making friends online and, his spiritual mentorship through online platforms alone.

Conclusion The Internet contributes both to the “strengthening and weakening of religious authority, offering possibilities for conflict, yet also for understanding and accommodation” (Cheong, 2012, p. 182). It is the purpose of this chapter to show that the Internet can be used in a way that can displace church authority as well as reinforce

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http://paper.li

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it. It is important to recognize that “the simultaneous presence of two interacting forces” within the pastors’ lives. On one hand, they are sceptical about certain aspects of the Internet and strongly discourage excessive expression, whether religious or not. The pastors have also emphasized the necessity to build genuine relationships in the physical church as a primary means for social support. Yet it does not mean the pastors cannot find spiritual gratification through their everyday usage of the Internet, as demonstrated by some of the case studies above. It also does not mean that pastors entirely reject the notion of authentic communities online, as shown in Pastor Sivin’s online spiritual mentorship, which directly affects his growth as a pastor in his own “offline” church. What is evident are the different ways that the Internet can potentially change the way pastors pastor. New modes of credibility, such as transparency, could become the trend for the future church. Some religious leaders, as Cheong notes, are “adjusting their social identity from that of commanders and sages to guides and mediators of knowledge in encounters both online and offline” (Cheong, 2012, p. 181). This shift is most noticeable in Pastor Sivin’s approach to online communities, where he has taken on the role of moderator and facilitator of online discussion groups, provoking members to come up with new ideas, generating new ideas for social issues, among others. This dimension will be discussed more clearly in the next chapter, where we look at how Malaysian socio-political issues are represented in the mainstream media, and how these same issues are negotiated on online social networks, particularly the Facebook group that Pastor Sivin founded and moderates, Friends in Conversation.

Chapter 5

Digital “Surtsey”: Lessons from a New Online Christian Community

The analytical roadmap taken so far is that focus of online Christianity in Malaysia would progressively expand from the individual, to the church institution, and finally to Malaysian society at large. We have journeyed through the first two parts in the past chapters. We have considered the individual uses of the internet for spiritual purposes, how the fluidity of the internet can problematize certain facets of Christian tradition such as church authority and recast the pastor as an everyday user of the internet instead of its conventional association as representatives of the institution. Now, the spotlight shifts to the final category for discussion and analysis—how online platforms are utilized by Malaysian Christians to engage with the wider community of fellow believers, as well as Malaysian society on socio-political matters that affect and impact the Malaysian Christian community. This chapter is a transition between the past chapters, where the emphasis was placed on the individual, and the coming chapters that focus on the engagement of groups of people. The narrative in this chapter serves as an introduction to the subject of an online Christian community in Malaysia. It features a description of a newly set up Facebook group by a small number of like-minded Christians that caters to the Christian community for the purpose of combating what they perceive as the rise of false teachings in Christian circles. As I was added to the group on the day it was formed, the group provided me with the privilege and opportunity to see how an online community is established, and what we can learn about it theoretically and practically. In a review of existing research on online communities, Campbell described three waves of research into online religious communities over the past 2 decades of internet research. What began as ethnographic descriptions of what online communities consist of and how they functioned, progressed to critical research on how users experience online communities and how these different experiences impact the way we understand what communities are, to the more recent wave of research that situate online communities in an online/offline context, considering that we live in an increasingly networked society (Campbell, 2012). The evolution of research on online communities is a logical one, and each phase builds on the preceding one. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_5

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I approach the remaining chapters in a similar manner. This first chapter of the second half of the book begins with an ethnographic description of a new online community, and the purpose of this is to establish some foundation into what we can expect in any online community. With some of the key features established, the following chapters would have some context to further our understanding of the subject at hand. Borrowing from Krotz and Hepp’s notion of “mediatized worlds”, which they describe as “various contexts of present, everyday life are marked by media communication” (2011, p. 146), there exists “structured fragments of life-worlds with a certain binding intersubjective inventory, with specific social practices and cultural thickenings” (2011, p. 146). Krotz and Hepp suggest that these mediatized worlds have three characteristics: Firstly, these groups would have a communication network that is not strictly grounded by territorial limitations. Secondly, these groups vary in scale. There may be large groups, and small groups, yet all the interactions that take place within them would have traces of media engagement and are valid for analysis. And thirdly, mediatized worlds are “nested/interlaced” with each other, and that social worlds intersect with one another and does not exist in isolation. This final point is not dissimilar to the overall points that have been shown in the previous chapters. The point of Krotz and Hepp’s approach to mediatized worlds is to help us appreciate that the media is an inescapable reality in the way individuals and communities interact today, and it is important to describe these interactions without prejudice and along with all its intricacies. This chapter is an attempt to contribute to the repository of narratives of Christian media life-worlds. The following case study can be considered, as mentioned earlier, a bridge between two contexts of research, or as a standalone observation and discussion of a new online community.

Case Study: The End-Time Watchmen On April 1, 2015, a new Facebook group was set up. The very first post on The End-Time Watchmen1 read: “Widespread end time false teaching calls for discernment. To overcome deception, we need to be like the Bereans—scrutinise every teaching against God’s Word (Acts 17:11)”. This was followed by a series of photographs of the seven founders, who also served as administrators of the group, meeting in a room.2 The photographs served to introduce the founders to

1

Not the group’s real name. All group and individual identities have been anonymized. I was later shown these photographs during my interview with one of the founding members of the group, Pastor Simon, who explained to me that it was photographs of the first meeting between the founders in order to establish the Facebook group. Many of them had not met in person prior to that. More will be described in the later section. 2

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the group. The administrators of the group actively added individuals from their network, and on the first day the group had over a thousand members.3 The initial response of the group was overwhelmingly positive, at least by the people who posted on the wall of the group. The first day almost exclusively saw messages of support for the new group, stating their thanks to the pastor who set it up—Pastor Simon—for his effort and initiative in raising awareness of false teachings in Christianity, and their hopes that the group would succeed in its purpose. I was among those added on the first day it was established, and I recognized that this group was a “Surtsey” opportunity for research. Surtsey, a small volcanic island off the coast of Iceland, was not an island until 1963, when a volcanic eruption lead to the accumulation of rocky material that breached the surface of the ocean. When the volcanic activity subsided, scientists saw this newborn island as an opportunity to observe how life-forms would colonize it. It was declared a nature reserve and very few people are allowed to land on it in order to observe any possible ecological development. The subsequent years saw the gradual introduction of new species to the island, beginning with low lying plants and mosses, to taller trees, and eventually, insects, birds, and seals. The significance of such observations allowed scientists a unique vantage point into how a community of living-beings developed into a particular ecosystem, furthering knowledge particularly in the fields of biological and botanical sciences. The End-Time Watchmen is by no means as significant a phenomenon as the island of Surtsey, but the opportunity to study the formation of a new online religious community was inspired by the same intrigue in the organic and undisturbed formation of something very new. I have been interested in the fields of online religion in Malaysia for some time, and in the broader scope of internet studies, one of the early and still ongoing debates of how people interacted online is whether an online platform, such as a forum, Facebook group, or gaming server, can be considered a community. While theoretically there are sound arguments on both sides of the aisle, The End-Time Watchmen served as an ethnographic site that could further our understanding on how people came together, interacted, and potentially become part of a religious “community” on the internet. I mentioned earlier that I was added to the group. This was done without my initiative, but rather, I was part of a mass invite due to being part of an extended network of Christian associates of mine. Shortly after my initial observations, I sought permission from the group administrator, Pastor Simon, to observe the site for research purposes over 6 months, which yielded a substantial amount of data due to the high activity on the group. Apart from observing the group’s activity from the beginning, I was also able to interview two of the seven founders/administrators of the group in order to further present this narrative. This group will be featured twice in this book. In this chapter, I will describe my observations of the group’s formation and early days, how its purpose is established, and how the members of group

3 People with Facebook accounts can either be added directly or invited into Facebook groups. In the case of this group, people were added directly.

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engaged with one another. I also look at how elements of culture, authority, and ideological preferences are established over time in an organic manner, and how these are characteristics of not just online communities, but communities in general. Finally, the chapter closes with a reflection on the value of seeking to understand online communities, particularly religious ones. Two chapters along the way from here, the End-Time Watchmen will be featured again, with a focus on how its group members engaged with one another within the discourse of the major political rally, Bersih 4, that took place in the streets of Kuala Lumpur in August 2015.

Purpose of the Group As described in the previous section, the first post on the group stated the group’s purpose. In that post, one can surmise that the main element is the subject of the “end-time”. The end times, in Christian tradition, generally refers to the return of Jesus Christ to Earth for the final restoration and salvation of humanity from its sinful nature that began during the events of Genesis,4 and this ushering into a new paradise would also signal the end of humanity’s current narrative as we know it. Most of the key Biblical passages relating to this “end” can be found in the last book of the Bible, Revelations, and while there are different interpretations as to when Jesus Christ would return, the period prior to Jesus’ return is known in many Christian circles as the “end times”—which consist of a series of signs that point to the impending return of Jesus. Apart from natural phenomena and socio-political events that have been alluded to, one such sign is the emergence of “false teachers”—people who claim to be Christian prophets, but are in fact people who draw Christians away from Jesus’ true teachings. It is on this premise that the End-Time Watchmen make the claim that there is a “widespread end-time false teaching”, and like the Bereans—recorded in the Bible as a group of people who studied the Bible diligently, the group aims to be a platform where people can weed out the false teachings in order to ensure Christians are not deceived by false teachers and prophets.

The First Few Days However, while the purpose was clear in that one post, how the group of over a thousand members interpreted the social mechanisms of that post was very different.

4 In Christian tradition, Genesis is the first book of the Bible. A key narrative in the opening chapters describe the creation of the first humans, Adam and Eve. Their violation of God’s instructions, and their subsequent banishment from the Garden of Eden, is generally understood as the moment humanity lost its innocence.

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The first day was uneventful apart from the congratulatory messages and brief statement of purpose. The second day saw some activity, where some members posted scriptures or views to affirm the group’s purpose to combat false teachings and some methods on how. Significant to the second day was Pastor Simon’s post that repeated the group’s purpose and a framework for communication: The group exists to combat Pulpit Crime of false and unbiblical preaching/teaching by means of counter-checking with God’s Word in the Holy Scriptures. We will not hesitate to quote word-by-word or point-by-point as to expose lies, deception and misleads of any known preachers, pastors, evangelists, teachers and self-appointed apostles. We welcome any comment in good spirit as our purpose is merely to defend, and be faithful steward of biblical truth. Likewise, we will make necessary comments on any of your posting in this group should we detect any biblical errors and unsound doctrines. We take this opportunity to encourage everyone to be cautious in a time such as these. May our Father God be praised evermore who has been fully revealed in His Son Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit shall empower us to be courageous and diligent in our endeavor. Amen.

A member of the group, Ling, expanded on what Pastor Simon posted in the comments section. It read: We are not intimidated by any teacher, no matter how well-known, illustrious, or respectable he or she may be. We do not say to ourselves or others, “Coming from this great man of God, it must be right.” That’s being presumptuous.

These posts served as an early indicator of what was acceptable for members to do. Pastor Simon’s post was the first official regulation, and it provided a wide berth in scope. Ling’s post was the first attempt by a group member to interpret and apply that regulation, suggesting that no one, including famous religious leaders, would be spared from scrutiny. While other topics would eventually generate lively debate, it is the etiquette of communication that generated the most heated argument in the first 2 weeks. It did not take very long for new members to begin posting topics that they felt strongly about. Over the course of the few days the Facebook group saw much activity, with all sorts of posts put up: Notes of encouragement, greetings of Good Friday and Easter, questions about whether Good Friday and Easter is Biblical, “prophetic” words by certain members, and more. This led to the second regulation to be posted by Pastor Simon in an attempt to limit the topics: Since the public group was launched a week ago, response has been good and I literally had received very encouraging feedback from our church members. Nevertheless, as the group’s name suggests, we would like to streamline the genre of articles/write-up to be posted here. We exist to challenge, expose and correct unbiblical teaching/preaching with the sole purpose to defend the truth revealed in the Holy Scripture. We welcome ONLY postings that relate to the matter mentioned. We encourage healthy discussion, sharing and even a good dose of debate if necessary. Nothing personal. Just for mutual good of everyone to learn together. Bless you all.

Apart from the off-topic posts that Pastor Simon was likely referring to above, some topics saw lively discussion and repeat posts. The first wave of popular topics associated with end-time false teachings include the prosperity gospel, “once saved

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always saved”5 and homosexuality. The subject of prosperity gospel, and its related topics, such as “hyper-grace”, was the most widely covered topic in the first 2 weeks. But this thread is interesting for another reason. On day six, one of the founders of the group, Bob, was the first to highlight the dangers of prosperity gospel and attaching a link to a Huffington Post report of the backlash towards Victoria Osteen’s sermon that Christianity is not about Jesus, but about one’s own self.6 This marked the first time a subject was brought up along with the naming of a “false teacher”. This sparked off a recurring debate within the administrators, and later would come to head with a member leaving the group over whether false teachers should be named in the exposing of false teachers, or not. The issue of naming-and-shaming became a point of conflict over the next few days, appearing in several posts. Even Pastor Simon took issue with it. He had posted and commented on posts relating to preachers who have been accused of propagating the “prosperity gospel”, and in so doing referred to people like Joel Osteen (husband of Victoria Osteen), Benny Hinn, Joseph Prince, Bill Johnson, and others, by name. Some have openly questioned his need to name false teachers, preferring instead that the group focuses on the false teachings that are circulating in society. On April 9 (the ninth day), two things worth noting happened. Firstly, a document was uploaded by Cam, one of the administrators. The document outlined the group’s policy on appropriate content for the group. Much of the content is an update of Pastor Simon’s previous posts, plus some guidelines on referencing and plagiarism, and code of conduct in how to engage with other members in the group. One of the guidelines states that: When identifying false teachings, it is preferred that names of the individuals involved and specific churches NOT be referred to. The focus should be on false teachings and other issues. Discretion to name individuals or churches is allowed where a particular article cannot be written without naming names.

On that day itself, Pastor Simon posted an article about a hoax relating to Joel Osteen, saying that while he disagreed with Joel Osteen on several matters, spreading false rumours about a person is not the way and that the End-Time Watchmen are “in every way against such practice and attempt”. Jackson commented on this post, saying “That’s why it’s always better to focus on exposing the false teaching. When false teaching is exposed, the false teacher will also be exposed. But if the false teacher is attacked, it can backfire and consolidate the false teaching even more, in defense of the false teacher”. This guideline sparked an outburst by one member who openly questioned the administrators with a series of posts over the next 3 days. In response to the guideline, David, posted a message with the title “Is It Right For A Christian To Expose False Prophets And False Teaching?”, and referred to Biblical verses where

There is some debate in Christian circles regarding whether a Christian can “lose” his salvation after converting to Christianity, or that passage to heaven is a guaranteed. 6 Christians Respond To Victoria Osteen’s Claim: ‘When We Obey God..We’re Doing It For Ourself’ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/victoria-osteen-reactions_n_5759860 5

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evil people were named. This post received very few likes and no comments. On the twelfth day, when another member, Keisha, posted a short statement “recognize prophets by their fruits”. This was followed with an exchange: David: “Who are you referring to? You must mention their names in order to make an effective exposé. Biblically speaking, that would be exercising wisdom. Keisha: ETW has a policy not to mention names unless necessitated. Moreover, I am not targeting anyone, just a general warning for believers to be aware. First of all every systems has a rule, in the same way ETW also has a rule not to mention name..so I think you and me should respect that system. David: I don’t agree with that part of ETW’s policy. Will you agree and obey a policy that is not biblical? (I’m referring to this section of ETW’s policy). Keisha: The main point here is that ETW is administered by some people, who created this group with certain things in mind, and as long as we are in ETW, we must respect their policy, as obeying authority is also biblical. David: Even if the authority is clearly wrong?

This exchange was followed by two separate posts by David, one stating that “Men in high places, pastors of large churches, and those with great radio or TV audiences, are supposedly above criticism. Whatever they may do or say, no matter how contrary to the Bible it may be, is supposedly all right. Nothing could be further from the truth”, and another poster later that stated, “Many mistakenly believe that it is wrong to expose error and to name the guilty teachers; but they are wrong according to the Bible”. These posts all received little comment, and none from the administrators publicly, because behind the scenes, the administrators were deliberating the issue. According to Pastor Simon, the group was already divided on the issue of “naming-and-shaming”—leading to the compromise resolution that says that it is preferred that names are not used in discussing false teachings. The group was also unhappy at Dave’s repeated open questioning of the group’s policy, questioning who invited him, and even considered removing him for distracting the group from its actual purpose. They never reached a decision on that matter, and never had to, because by the end of the twelfth day, after his series of posts described above, Dave left the Facebook group.

Official and Preferred Ideology Dave’s posts did not generate much feedback publicly. It is possible that the general readership of the group did not pay too much attention to that issue, but as described above, it did receive the attention of the administrators and it was widely deliberated. The post serves as the first public and extended disagreement over how this online community should function—something which the administrators admitted that they underestimated. In the group, the repeated call by Pastor Simon to focus on types of

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issues, followed by the eventual publishing of an official guideline, was a result of the realization that a free-for-all approach to running a group with so many members became too chaotic and complicated. Cam explained it as such: I guess we may have been a bit naïve at the start because some people were a little crazy. And so we did have to draw up some guidelines as you’ve mentioned it before. So that helped a bit so we could just point to the guidelines so everyone is on the same page. Then I suppose there are people with kind of off the wall ideas. You know, listening to aliens and all that sort of thing. . .7

Cam said that the group had to remove members before for subjects that were either off-colour, outright un-Christian, illegal, or inappropriate, for the purpose of ensuring that the group remained a safe space for its members. However, the decision to remove people was not taken lightly, and only in extreme and clear-cut cases was it done. Cam said that: I think there were some demonic content. We definitely got rid of those. There were some sexual predators, so we obviously got rid of those straight away. So we. . . as long as it was a safe place. If somebody is said to be seeking and were from a particular religion we still keep them on, because they may be seeking, they were asking questions about Christianity for proper reasons. So, it’s really the last resort to remove someone. There have been a very small number of people who came on and were actually devil worshippers and basically saying things against God. Basically blasphemy. So we’re not really allowing that to go on.8

However, beyond the obvious cases stated by Cam above, both Pastor Simon and Cam recognize the difficulty in managing the diversity of theological views on all sorts of issues. In fact, Pastor Simon said that even among the administrators, they have had serious disagreements that sometimes bothered on being personal and unproductive. When it comes to theology, we all cannot be in agreement with everything. Some are cessationists. Some are still very much charismatic. . . Doctrinally-wise, doctrinally. All six of us are different. So sometimes you hit me, I will hit him. And then Sam will come in. . . this was one of the reasons I withdrew. To be honest with you. It doesn’t look good. Because we are the administrators and I openly told them, I said when it come to this secondary issue, you should give face for us to believe whatever we believe.9

Pastor Sam said that some of these arguments extended beyond their private communication to the Facebook group, where the endless back and forth became too personal. At one point, a member posted that Pastor Simon was an “agent of Satan” for his line of questioning of the charismatic movement. As a result, Pastor Simon, frustrated at his inability to manage the tempers and relentless arguing within and beyond the group, removed himself as administrator temporarily. Cam had a different view on this, stating that there are ideologies that all of them are in agreement with, and it also forms a type of preferred doctrine. He says:

7

Cam. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, October 16, 2016. Cam. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, October 16, 2016. 9 Pastor Simon. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, March 19, 2016. 8

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We do not have an apostolic creed, certainly the negative ones, we. . . would attack just as they came about. You know, prosperity doctrine; hyper grace; once saved always saved; dominionism; all these things we are in total agreement with. Facebook I think is a really good platform for that. It allows people to argue and it’s good to argue, sometimes people. . . I think if somebody is deceived by a false doctrine but they genuinely want to get to the truth, then so. . . if you can point to Bible passages and correct interpretation methods with someone, that they. . . they would be willing to at least consider alternatives.10

Cam’s statement is informative on two levels. The first is that it is a direct explanation of the process of the group’s decision making mechanisms, and in this regard, it is straightforward. Beyond that, his words can be interpreted to suggest that there are issues that are preferred. The comments comes from a position that there are others who are unbelievers, or others who are deceived, and it is up these others to consider the alternatives, and the committee’s alignment in certain issues is demonstrative that they are the authority on these subjects. It is a common feature for communities to develop cultural and ideological preferences where authority can further establish itself. In short, members of the group can promote, discuss, and debate ideas—but the last word is likely to align with the administrators’ core positions, even if there are no formal statements of beliefs published anywhere in the group.

Discussion The overarching purpose of this chapter is to transition from the individual narratives in the previous chapters to group narratives. Another transition is while the previous chapters focused on the blog, this chapter features the social networking platform of Facebook as the central site of activity and engagement. These two transitions are to a certain extent tied to each other because of the differing affordances of the two internet platforms. While the blog allowed for comments and interaction between author and visitor, it is still mainly an author-centric platform. A social networking site like Facebook expands on the interactive functionalities significantly because it creates a platform where people can inhabit and share a space for the purpose of interacting with one another beyond their personal networks, and as such is more conducive for the formation of active and large-scale online communities. One such group is the End-Time Watchmen, as described above. The description of the group’s first 2 weeks, along with the behind-the-scenes insights by two of the group’s administrators is crucial in our understanding of how this community works, and what kind of impact does this community have on our understanding of online religious communities, particularly in the Malaysian context. While there was some discussion about mediatized worlds in the first instance in the chapter, I proceeded to describing the group’s identity and activity without offering much else in terms of academic expectations. This is intentional because 10

Cam. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, October 16, 2016.

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it is an attempt to reconstruct a sense of how I experienced the daily changes to the group, and how key events unfolded in sequence. The initial immersion in this group lacked context due to the sudden addition of my membership, but I decided that this was advantageous to the research. Latour rightly warned us that there is a danger of attempting to over-contextualize or over-theorize the data in advance because it may create false impressions of the data. In this instance, it has allowed the various actors in the End-Time Watchmen to emerge as the primary narrators of their own story. This lack of background and context was eventually supplemented by my interactions with Pastor Simon and Cam, also actors within this discourse. It is my hope that the presentation of the entire case study captures a fragment of the intrigue and organic development of the group. With that said, the following are some points for discussion that are worth raising due to its relevance to the later discussions in the book, as well as its contribution to the discussion on the subject of online communities in general.

What is a “Malaysian” Group? The purpose of the first observation is primarily to reframe how we identify the demographics of online communities. The question is simple: Can the End-Time Watchmen be classified as a Malaysian Christian online community. The “Christian” part of the equation is simple and straightforward—the entirety of the content of the group are Christian topics. But whether it is “Malaysian” or not is less obvious. What constitutes “Malaysian-ness”? This is a question that I have deliberately avoided so far. What is a Malaysian blog? Is this really a Malaysian Facebook group? How is this Malaysian group unique from other groups? In what ways do they exhibit Malaysian-ness? While much has been written in previous chapters about how socio-political elements in Malaysia can be linked to how Christian content is presented online, there has been no claim as to what constitutes a Malaysian blog apart from the criteria that the blogger is a Malaysian person. There is a reason for that, and the End-Time Watchmen is a useful space to address this: A Malaysian person or group does not need to assert Malaysian-ness and discuss Malaysian issues to be Malaysian. Many of the participants featured in this book are Malaysians, and their actions may not necessarily be related to Malaysia per se. The two Facebook groups featured in this book, the End-Time Watchmen, and Friends in Conversation in the next chapter, primarily discuss Christian theology and doctrine in their everyday activity, because these are subjects that are within the domain of Christians and not any nationality. While later in the book there will be an extensive case study on the two groups’ engagement with Malaysian politics, particularly the Bersih 4 protests that took place in Malaysia, this section is intentionally described to show that Malaysian-ness is not an identifier that needs pointing out apart from the fact that most of the members are Malaysians discussing and debating theological issues. This breadth of topics discussed is demonstrative of what Malaysian bloggers and social-media users are doing online in relation to their

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faith, and broadly aligns with how this book has been framing it so far. Sometimes it is personal, sometimes it involves the church at large or locally, and sometimes it is about the country.

An Online or Offline Community? The second point for discussion is that, much like the bloggers in the past chapters, the boundary between the online and offline is fluid and functions simultaneously, even in a group setting. This, over time, develops into a form of relationship building that eventually plays an important role in the administration of the group. The seven founding members of the group initially met each other separately on other Facebook pages. As Cam explained, “we were all contributing already to Facebook pages. There was one that my wife and I were contributing to which was set up by my wife. We just kept bumping into each other and started talking at greater length”. The focal point of the founding group was Pastor Simon, who after striking a friendship with like-minded Christians on these other Facebook groups, decided to meet up with some of them personally. He invited Jackson, who later be among the seven founders, to speak at his church over the weekend. As Jackson was based in Singapore, he travelled to Kuala Lumpur where Pastor Simon was. Pastor Simon used Jackson’s time in Kuala Lumpur as an opportunity to organize a casual chit-chat with a few more friends that he had met online. Furthermore, upon learning of the upcoming gathering, decided to travel from Melbourne, Australia, to join the group. Pastor Simon told me that apart from one of them whom he has previously met once in a different church setting, he had not met the other five members of the group in an offline setting. The remaining members had all only interacted with one another on Facebook. Pastor Simon confessed that the purpose of the gathering was for him to get to know these people in person even though they all shared a common interest in an online setting. Both Pastor Simon and Cam attest that it was a good meeting. The initial get together led to the setting up of a private chat platform called “Teh Tarik”, where they had private discussions regarding the administration of the new site. Pastor Simon described the initial motivations as such: We all have the same passion, we know we have to combine our voices. We just want to combine our voice and tackle on matters of faith through Facebook. Not anything else. In fact, we had big ambitions. We were talking about forming a forum and all that, where we can form panels and invite speakers and people can ask questions and all that. But we just decided to kickstart with Facebook first.11

This initial phase of the group, prior to the formation of the End-Time Watchmen highlights a number of points. Firstly, all the members became networked with one another through the internet. This friendship was developed along the lines of 11

Pastor Simon. Interview by author. Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, March 19, 2016.

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common interests, and reached a point where they were willing to embark on a new project together, and that venture warranted an offline gathering to further get to know one another. This shows that the initial communication that developed online had a genuine spiritual impact on these seven individuals that resulted in a collective spiritual venture. Secondly, the online/offline relationship cultivated by the founding members is shows that the notion of a group, or community, cannot be confined to whether it is an “online” or “offline” community, but should be described as what Krotz and Hepp describes as a mediatized world—a group dynamic that organically grew through the inevitable use of the media in their everyday lives.

Authority, Rules and Social Norms Developed Over Time The free approach to the running the group was thought of as a good idea, but after a week or so, we saw a gradual emergence of community rules, from regulations on the types of topics that can be posted, to how members should communicate, to how topics should be presented, and ultimately, a formal policy paper was established. This is not uncommon—while the internet has been lauded for its seemingly endless possibilities of engaging and expressing one’s self, whenever groups of people formally gather—games, forums, networks, etc. it is inevitable that rules and social norms are enacted to ensure an orderly flow of events. Another interesting development is that over time, it became clear that Pastor Simon was the leader of the group, or at least the public face of the group. In the field of online religion, one of the often raised concerns by religious leaders is that the internet would erode the power of traditional institutions. While there has been evidence to support that. It is also increasingly proven that religious leaders, in this case pastors, are adapting to the internet and are also at the forefront of leading independent social media groups. The other group that is featured in the book, Friends in Conversation, is also founded and moderated by a pastor. In the case of the End-Time Watchmen, Pastor Simon’s views on issues are often presented as the “last word”, and he also serves as the primary disseminator of administrative issues, such as rules, regulations, changing of the group status, so on and so forth. This is not to say that his leadership did not face resistance. Some of his views have been rejected by group members, and at one point he was even labelled as the anti-Christ. Also, this emergence of authority is not limited to just people of power, but also doctrinal preference. While all views can be discussed and shared, the final arbiter of right/wrong ultimately lies with the founders of the group. One key example of how preferred teaching is peddled will be described in greater detail in a later chapter on the Bersih 4 political rally in Kuala Lumpur, where Pastor Simon strongly condemned the street protest, and was met with agreement with several members. The one or two dissenting commenters were systematically “corrected” for their erroneous views.

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Conclusion A concluding observation that I offer is that like Surtsey, for a Facebook group to thrive, it needed inhabitants, and these inhabitants would over time, establish some form of hierarchy to ensure a certain time of order. As mentioned above, most of the initial members were added to the group by the administrators. The first “colony” was introduced to the leaders of the group and the purpose of the group. Because the scope of the purpose was so wide with very little regulation, it means that there was a freedom for content to emerge organically. In a lot of ways, the characteristics of an online community is not so different from what we understand of communities in general: Like-minded people are gathered and settle into different social sub-groups, authority is established in that there are leaders and people who are considered wise and/or knowledgeable, socially acceptable norms develop over time, disagreements happen and people come and go, and there are also a lot of silent members who do little apart from lurk and observe. These social dynamics, along with the theological elements, over time become a form of cultural identity that is unique to the group. This mirroring of online and offline communities, however, is not just restricted to how groups of people settle into particular patterns of organization but extends to patterns of communication as well. Over time, what I observed is the migration of existing popular topics from the offline to the online, and the same zeal in engaging them. Active members started posting content regarding their pet topics. Eventually, it was also evident that the propagating of these topics was not for the purpose of engagement, but assertion. An example of this is a member named Paul, who posted seven updates about his opposition to the doctrine of “Once Saved Always Saved” within the first 3 months of the group and linking his blog to these posts (which contains longer expositions on the topic). All these posts carried the tone of warning, that this particular doctrine is unscriptural, and supporters of this argument have no basis in their belief. An example of such a post is as such, posted in the group on 2 July by Paul: ONCE SAVED, ALWAYS SAVED (OSAS)? If we believe in OSAS and that we do not have to work out our faith, then we will have to cut off the following verses from our Bible: 1.Work out your faith with fear and trembling: Philippians 2:12-13, 2.Keep striving: Philippians 3:12-14, 3.Run the race with discipline:1 Corinthians 9:24-27, 4.Bear fruits that befit repentance; don’t rest on your spiritual laurels: Luke 3:8, 5.Narrow and difficult is the way that leads to life: Matthew 7: 13-14, 6.Holiness requires effort; confirm your election: 2 Peter 1: 5-8, 10

In the first months, this subject would draw heated debate. Posts about the “Once Saved Always Saved” doctrine would generate anything between ten to a hundred replies. The above post in particular, had six hundred and sixty comments, with several back and forth. There is no need to delve into what the specifics of the comments, except to say that it became clear over time that no one changed their minds on the subject, or at least it was not evident in the online engagement. An apt comment near the end of this comments thread read “wow this tug of war is still going on. Spiritual blindness can’t be removed with a mere discourse”. This

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particular commenter’s pessimism is not without merit, and this is true not only for Paul’s above posting, but for all the posts that I observed. On Paul’s part, the priority of his everyday activity on the End-Time Watchmen was to assert his belief, not so much to engage. This, of course, would invite responses in the same vein. This is unsurprising. There is research to show that the online and offline are inseparable realms, and that the online is often a space where pre-existing beliefs are reasserted. While the internet provides for new ways and new information, people tend to go online to look for content that they already agree with. The question, of course, is why would anyone post content on a site designed to facilitate engagement, if there was no intention to engage in the first place? In another study that I had conducted previously on a Facebook page that attempted to foster inter-religious dialogue, I proposed the concept of “hate-browsing” to describe a similar phenomenon. I describe “hate-browsers” as people who have a “zealous belief in their own views, and that within this zealotry, lies a certain militancy. . . to actively and regularly participate in various platforms in order to project their authority over any given issue” (Tan, 2019, p. 83). In the study, I characterized the hate-browsers as people who browse the site “for the sole purpose of being able to express their hatred for it”. This was represented in the study by people who resort to communication methods that include profanity, blame, name-calling, and other harsh forms of personal attacks. In the End-Time Watchmen, elements of profanity and namecalling were non-existent, yet the strong and repeated propagation and opposition of particular pet topics by the same pool of members, suggest to me that zealous belief in one’s own views and the projection of authority of these subjects are prominently displayed. What results is neither changing of positions, not improved understanding of differing doctrinal or theological views, but a series of affirmations of pre-existing beliefs. This evaluation is true not only of regular group members, but of the administrators as well. This will be more prominently played out in the discussion in Chap. 7, where systematic probing of members with dissenting views serve as a mode of ideological training in the group. For now, I return to Krotz and Hepp’s ideas on mediatization. Their suggested socio-constructivist approach to studying media life-worlds can potentially yield new types of data. Zeiler describes this approach as paying attention to “everyday communication practices and the changing communicative construction of culture and society” (Zeiler, 2019, p. 8), and that it is possible to analyze media environments by focusing on “actors in their mediatized worlds” (ibid). All of the above are common features of a community, not just an online community. And by further studying how these religious communities engage with each other and with the country at large, we can learn a lot about online religion in Malaysia. Descriptions of new groups like the End-Time Watchmen—how it is formed, how they interact, and develop its communal identity, could potentially serve as archetypes of online religious communities.

Chapter 6

Engaging Malaysia: A Grassroots Approach to Inter/Intra-Religious Communication

So far, we have seen how Christianity online is deployed in various spheres of influence. The case studies presented in the previous chapters demonstrated the various contexts that some Malaysian Christian bloggers and how their online practices contribute to their overall Christian religious experiences. These are Christians who use the Internet for their personal spiritual expression and the sphere of influence is largely personal, relating to family, friends, and other personal networks. The discussion then expanded to include Malaysian online Christianity within a larger sphere of influence—that of the church. Various issues and perspectives provided by both regular church members and pastors, along with an on-going case study of a highly visible and public church dispute, give rise to new questions pertaining to how the Internet could potentially change the dynamics of the church authority and communication practices. This led to a discussion regarding the awareness and the necessity of churches to negotiate the role of the Internet in Christianity. In that vein, I discussed how some pastors are already utilizing the Internet in their personal capacity to further augment their pastoral ministries to varying degrees. This chapter will further expand the exploration into a broader sphere of influence, that of the national socio-political arena. Christianity in Malaysia, despite being a minority religion, is not unaccustomed to being exposed to the sociopolitical spotlight in Malaysia. Prior to 2018, under the 60-year rule by the Barisan Nasional political coalition, the media was tightly controlled through state ownership of media entities and through strict regulation. Many of these controls involve regulating religious content. As such, the Internet has been utilized by some Malaysian Christians as a key medium to disseminate information and raise awareness regarding socio-political issues affecting the Christian community. Partly due to this, there has been an increase in Christian individuals participating in grassroots level socio-political discourse online. This chapter will begin with a discussion on the oftentimes complicated relationship between religion and politics and how it is played out in the Malaysian media in both online and offline environments. These issues, apart from demonstrating how online religion is negotiated in the mainstream environment, also provides the © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_6

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context for the next section in this chapter, where I look at examples of the various ways in which Christian individuals contribute to the socio-political narratives in Malaysia through the use of their blogs and social-networking platforms. The case study of the Facebook group, Friends in Conversation, serves as the focal point of this chapter. Friends in Conversation is an online discussion group formed by Pastor Sivin partly to provide a platform for Christians to discuss socio-political issues in Malaysia. The group is a vibrant community and one such discussion directly resulted in a publication of a book discussing the role of Christians in Malaysian politics. The key goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how Malaysian socio-political issues can permeate through to cyberspace, and how online activities of certain Christian individuals and groups can also translate into the offline realm and serve as an impetus for new narratives and discourses to be formed and negotiated. As a preview, the next chapter will compare the End Time Watchmen (the Facebook group introduced in the previous chapter), and Friends in Conversation, in their group’s respective treatment and engagement with Bersih 4, a major political rally in 2013.

The Information Gap in Malaysian Christianity and Socio-Political Discourse In Malaysia, religion is closely intertwined with society and its politics, on an individual and organizational level. The book has thus far shown some of the interactions between Christianity as expressed through the Internet and other individuals and belief systems. On the socio-political front, it is no different, although such interactions may take different forms. Mathew Mathews identifies three different state-ecclesiastical models of religious-political relationships which serve as a useful starting point for discussion (Matthews, 2009, p. 184). The first model is the theocratic model where church and state are integrated and political authority asynchronous with religious authority. The second model is the one that is popularly known as the “separation of church and state” model, where religious authority and political authority “make no attempt to control each other” (Matthews, 2009, p. 184). The United States of America serves as a common reference point for this model, with the separation of powers explicitly enshrined in the constitution of the United States. The third model is what Mathews describes as an “accommodating relationship”, which is situated in the continuum between the above two “ideals”, or ideological extremities, and looks at how both state and church are constantly interacting and negotiating to serve their interests. The third model is most pertinent because it allows the discussion of how religion, politics, and social issues can interact with each other. In the case of the United States, the concept of separation of church and state may be administratively applicable, but beyond that, religion has a direct impact on politics and social issues in America in everyday circumstances. For example, since 2008, as a presidential candidate and throughout his first term in office, Barack Obama has faced persistent rumours that he is actually a Muslim (Hollander, 2010, p. 55). The persistent curiosity toward his

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religious affiliation, particularly amongst politically conservative groups demonstrates that a political candidate’s religious affiliation potentially plays a part in the political process. Rachel Kraus, in a paper describing the language used by lobbyists, politicians, and political agencies in the United States of America, notes that these various institutions bring “religious perspective to the political arena” frequently, oftentimes engaging in the discussion of the Christian agenda (Kraus, 2009, p. 119). Another way of looking at it is to say that there is no actual separation of “church” and “state”, but there exist different ways of expressing the relationship between the two to the public. The study of interactions between Christianity and other political entities are not confined to the Western world. Francis Lim and Julius Bautista give due attention to the subject of Christian involvement in the respective national politics in Asia. They raise the important need to identify and recognize the various forms of local agency in the expression of the Christian faith. Although Western civilization has played a major role in introducing Christianity to Asia, particularly during the imperialistic regimes of European nations throughout the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, Christianity has undergone localization, and today the “experience of being Christian in Asia, in light of the faith’s ‘global orientation’, has engendered new and diverse forms of interaction among its adherents” (Bautista & Lim, 2009, p. 1). In Malaysia, the aspect of “localization” that this chapter is particularly interested in is the cultural and religious interaction between Christianity and other religions, particularly Islam. The result of these state-church relationships, regardless of how it is represented to society, is not necessarily an equal one. In his book, The Armies of God: A Study in Militant Christianity, Iain Buchanan relates in detail how various Christian activities, be it charity (teaching, providing healthcare), or Christian conferences and events are deceptive in nature with the intention of Christianizing the world. He makes a point that: all political systems, even avowedly secular ones, are defined to some extent by religious ideology. In any society, religious tradition influences everything else—it shapes economic, social, and political attitudes and institutions, it shapes how people respond to outsiders, to those stronger or weaker than themselves, to those with different traditions (Buchanan, 2010, p. 17).

Buchanan also continues by saying that “in an unequal world, however, some are better able than others to protect their great symbols”.” (Buchanan, 2010, p. 17). To follow this train of thought, I would argue that much of the world is “unequal”, and in Malaysia, this inequality is certainly at play, as will be seen through the interreligious disputes featured in the following sections.

Representations of Christian Issues in Mainstream Malaysian Media In Malaysia, various religious groups’ attempts to protect their “great symbols”, as Buchanan puts it, are far reaching. The government of the day has systematically,

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through the use of legislation and policies attempted a colonization of physical space, historical space, and semantic space. Particular to this discourse is the Islamization of Malaysia. These issues include a long standing difficulty for non-Muslim religious groups to acquire religious land for construction of temples and churches (physical space), banning numerous Malays language words (semantic space) from being used by non-Muslim religions—most recently and notably “Allah”, literally translated as God. The government effort to frame and control the above narratives is partly achieved through government control of most mainstream traditional media such as the newspapers and television channels. Newspapers such as The Star, and The New Straits Times, can easily be identified with a strong pro-government slant, with alternative perspectives and opposition news kept to a minimum. Opposition parties are not exempt from imposing their views either. Being unable to make an impact in traditional media, online news portals have sprouted out in the last decade as the primary mouthpiece of opposition political agenda. Although online news outlets such as Malaysiakini, Malaysia Insider, and The Nutgraph,1 state their ambition to provide objective news (this is not unlike traditional media), the content these platforms lean toward the other end of the political spectrum. Although such a scenario appears to present itself as a society with a more balanced political discourse taking place in the country, I argue that an informational gap exists between both ends of the political spectrum—that of the grassroots agenda. The intense and frequent political wrangling of both political coalitions has led to a reduction of healthy representation of various communities that might be directly affected by these discourses that arise in the public sphere. In fact, in the context of religious content, there already exist regulations that curb any effort to generate content or perspectives that might arise from any particular religious groups outside of Islam. This is due to the Communications and Multimedia Act, passed in 1998, which serve as the regulatory framework for much of the nation’s communications and multimedia sector.2 Within the Act itself, there is a part entitled “Social Regulations”, and within it, in Chap. 2, is the Content Code, which is a set of statutory “guidelines and procedures for good practice and standards of content disseminated to audiences by service providers in the communications and multimedia industry in Malaysia”. The Content Code states that the aim of the code is to encourage self-regulation within the communications industry, and that both service providers and consumers are to adhere to the content regulations stated within the code. In Part 4 of the Content Code, it is made explicitly clear that no propagation of any religions other than Islam is permitted, and that no form of content that is insulting toward any religion can be permitted to air. This can be easily observed on

1

The Malaysia Insider and the Nutgraph have both stopped publication. The Communications and Multimedia Commission primarily regulates the broadcasting, internet, advertising, industries. It notably omits regulating the print industry, which is regulated under the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984, and the film industry. 2

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Malaysian terrestrial broadcast, where there are no talk-shows, debate forums, and limited documentary coverage on non-Islamic religions. There are, however, programmes that discuss and propagate Islam. The above regulation has effectively closed off a channel of religious expression in Malaysia. Although, as mentioned, this regulation applies specifically to the television and radio industries, the linkages between old and new media are tightly intertwined in the socio-political discourse. It is also in the issue of religious programming that my proposition that certain religious voices are not well represented in both traditional and new media.

Case Study: Valentine’s Day, 2011 Two events that transpired in the years 2011 and 2012 serve as case studies of how certain Christian voices were under-represented in issues that directly affected them. For this case study, I refer to a form of inter-religious dialogue that took place during Valentine’s Day in 2011. In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, a number of parties and organizations issued press statements to encourage Muslims in Malaysia to not participate in Valentine’s Day festivities on moral and religious grounds. The Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim), a government division, underwent a full-fledged public relations campaign to dissuade Muslims (Habibu, 2011a). In a much-publicized public national television broadcast program, Ustazah Siti Nor Bahyah, a representative of the youth wing of an opposition group, the Pan Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS), also made a fiery attempt to convince Malaysian Muslims against celebrating Valentine’s Day. In the broadcast, she presented her case of why observing Valentine’s Day is equivalent to supporting the Christians due to a number of what she claimed as historical facts. While her assertions on historical matters were unverified and debatable, it was less the facts that irritated the Christian community, but rather her scathing accusation of Christians as an immoral people. The following is one of the more heavily criticized sections of her program: Maksiat, disco, couple-couple bersunyi sunyian, inilah tradisi masyarakat yang beragama Kristian. (azhadnet, 2011) Translation: Immoral acts, such as going to the disco; couples going off quietly and privately, these are the traditions of the Christian society.

The Christian community did not receive the above statement well. However, there was little public avenue in the broadcasting arena for them to respond or engage in due debate. The Internet proved useful in this regard. The video clip, uploaded on Youtube, went viral and was widely re-posted on major social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc), receiving negative comments from both Muslims and Non-Muslims (most comments were made by Christians and other Non-Muslims). Within a day, the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) issued a strongly worded press release condemning the broadcast and urging Malaysians to be more open to dialogue. This release was hardly picked up by any institutional media outlets, both in print and broadcast. It was however, widely

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circulated virally, among Christian networks through email, social networking sites, and other online channels. A response criticizing the PAS Youth and Jakim did come eventually, albeit from rather unexpected sources. While major non-Muslim political parties like the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), Democratic Action Party Socialist Youth (DAPSY), and Gerakan Youth issued statements condemning the contents of the broadcast (Habibu, 2011b), the majority party component of Malaysia’s ruling coalition, United Malay Nationals Organisations (UMNO), also took notable turns in the mainstream press condemning the broadcast, and stating it was fine to celebrate Valentine’s Day since there was nothing wrong to express love toward loved ones. Here one can see the irony that Christians and non-Muslims required Muslim representatives and non-religious political parties to engage in religious contestations on their behalf. Members of UMNO who made statements regarding this matter were not accused to be propagating non-Islamic religions despite their public support for Valentine’s Day. This alone proves the point that both spectrums of media institutions did little to provide a voice for the Christian groups’ response to these issues. Ustazah Siti Nor Bahyah, or the producers of the program, despite receiving flak for the insensitive remarks, were never charged for “[conveying] attacks upon any race or religion or is likely to create any disharmony”, as stated in the Content Code. Valentine’s Day, in this case, is a religious affair turned political, but the extent of the debate began and end with semantics alone.

The Malaysian Christian-State Conspiracy, 2012 Apart from the issue of Valentine’s Day, one can further discuss the dynamics of Christian representation in political discourse in both old and new media platforms in the issue of the alleged Malaysian Christian conspiracy to change Malaysia into a Christian nation. On the 6th of May 2012, Utusan Malaysia, the largest Malay language newspaper in the country, ran a headline “Kristian Agama Rasmi?”, which translates to “Christianity the Official Religion?”. The full article, entitled “Malaysia Negara Kristian?” (Malaysia a Christian Nation?) accused Jeff Ooi, an opposition parliamentarian from the state of Penang, for hosting a meeting with pastors to discuss plans for changing Malaysia’s official religion to Christianity.3 The information presented in the article were sourced entirely from blog entries from two separate personal blogs. The reporters included this information in the article itself: Majlis pertemuan paderi-paderi berkenaan dan ikrar menjadikan Kristian sebagai agama rasmi Persekutuan didedahkan oleh dua laman blog hari ini iaitu ‘bigdog’ di http:// bigdogdotcom.wordpress.com/ menerusi entri bertajuk “Making Christianity the official religion? Dan blog Marahku di http://marahku.blogspot.com.

3

https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/163493

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Translation: The meeting with the pastors and their pledge to change Malaysia’s official religion to Christianity was exposed by two blogs today. The first is by the blogger ‘bigdog’ on http://bigdogdotcom.wordpress.com/, under the entry “Making Christianity the Official Religion?”, and the other is on the blog Marahku, at http://marahku.blogspot.com.

The news article reported that Jeff Ooi attended the closed-door meeting with the pastors as a guest. The meeting, held in a hotel in Penang, was attended by more than a hundred pastors. The report also stated that during the dinner, roughly 35 of the pastors formed a circle, joined hands, and agreed to change Malaysia’s official religion to Christianity, and also declared their intention of installing a Christian Prime Minister in the country.4 Upon the revelation of these events, the news article proceeded to report Jeff Ooi’s denial that such a pledge was taken, and that he was merely a guest there. The article also quoted the blogs extensively, particularly their comments about how the Democratic Action Party (DAP), which Ooi is a member of, were engaging very sensitive and dangerous issues in the country. The most startling aspect of this case thus far is that two largely unverifiable blog posts constituted credible facts and formed the basis of a front-page story in a traditional news platform. There is certainly room to incorporate online citizen journalism into everyday news reporting, but credibility is not the primary interest here. Christianity is featured prominently in a national issue while being represented by two non-Christian, pro-UMNO bloggers (whose involvement in the “meeting” remain mysterious to date), and a politician from DAP. The ripple effect stemming from the two blog posts are far reaching, and this could prove significant in the study of the potential impact of blogging religious content on society. Because of Utusan Malaysia’s reports, other newspapers picked up the story, and politicians from both the government and the opposition reacted to the news report. A day after the news story was run, deputy inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar stated that the police would be “investigating allegations over a religious issue by two local bloggers published in a local newspaper today”.5 By that time, Zakhir Mohamed, the blogs had already removed the controversial postings. Negative response to the news story spawned quickly by various parties, with the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM), National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF), and numerous catholic priests publicly condemning the article as false and malicious, with the intent of creating division in the country.6 Political figures from both ends of the spectrum also responded, with Minister in the Prime Minister’s department, Koh Tsu Koon stating that “even if one or two individuals may have made remarks which can be misconstrued, they should not be taken as representing the official stand of Christian organisations” (Malaysiakini, 2011), and that if the

4 Since the formation of Malaya/Malaysia up till 2018, the Prime Minister has always been a MalayMuslim individual from the United Malays National Organiztion (UMNO), the leading political party of the ruling coalition. 5 “Police to probe bloggers’ allegation, says deputy IGP”. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/ 163517 6 “Archbishop slams ‘irresponsible’ reporting”. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/163536

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report is baseless, “the government should take necessary action against the bloggers and Utusan Malaysia”. However, that same day, the Home Minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, reiterated that police investigations are ongoing to ascertain the accuracy of the news report. Several key events proved to be the turning point in the quickly escalating situation. Firstly, two UMNO assemblypersons from the state of Penang stated that they do not believe the Utusan Malaysia report to be true. This provided the DAP the political room to file an official complaint entitled “stern action against the false and malicious reporting by Utusan Malaysia on the purported conspiracy between DAP and Christian pastors in Penang to establish a Christian state and to appoint a Christian Prime Minister”.7 Secondly, the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak, met national Christian leaders in a closed door meeting a week after the news story was first published to discuss the issue. Little details about what transpired in the meeting was shared to the public, but the Christian leaders commented to the media that the meetings were fruitful and that the police would investigate the issue thoroughly. Hours later, the Home Ministry issued a letter of reprimand to Utusan Malaysia, with the letter reprimanding the newspapers publishing news that infuriated readers. A separate online daily, Malaysiakini, noted that a letter of reprimand, however, was merely a “slap on the wrist” and did not constitute the conclusion of the issue. The next 2 weeks, from the period of May 13 to June 142,011, saw the Christian conspiracy issue continue to escalate. The Deputy Inspector General stated that there were new reports regarding the incident, and that it was investigated under the Sedition Act.8 Home Minister Hishamuddin Hashim later claimed that there the investigation began yielding some evidence that indicated that there were “some basis” to Utusan Malaysia’s report.9 As an immediate result of that, 8 pastors who were present at the gathering in Penang were called in for police questioning.10 This was followed in the subsequent days by police questionings of the bloggers and the Utusan Malaysia journalists, with the Information Communication and Culture Ministry getting involved as well.11 The end of intense investigations and political debate ended when the Home Ministry confirmed in October (5 months after the news was first published) that there was “no evidence to support the claims of a conspiracy by Christian groups to make the religion the official religion of Malaysia”.12 Since then, the occasional news report of new claims of such Christian conspiracy still surfaces.

7

https://dapmalaysia.org/english/2011/may11/lge/lge1276.htm “Police receive new account of ‘Christian conspiracy’”. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/ 164057 9 “Home minister: ‘Some basis’ to Utusan’s report“. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/164070 10 “Police quiz 8 pastors over Christian conspiracy”. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/164120 11 “Police to probe bloggers’ allegation, says deputy IGP” http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/ 163517 12 “Ministry finds no evidence of ‘Christian conspiracy’”. http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/ 178834 8

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Although Bigdogdotcom and Marahku are not “Christian” blogs, or “religious” blogs, their blog posts that touched on the issue of Christianity managed to spark 5 months of national inter-religious discourse involving two government ministries, the police, national Christian and Islamic bodies, prominent news coverage by every Malaysian newspaper, and various political figures. There are several possible factors behind the fallout resulting from Utusan Malaysia’s news report. Firstly, as already described in previous chapters, matters pertaining to Islam and Christianity has always been somewhat tense and one sided, especially when played out in the political arena. Secondly, Christians are increasingly under the impression that these issues are raised for the more purpose of giving UMNO the opportunity to portray themselves as pro-Malay and pro-Islam. This is possible partly because Utusan Malaysia is owned by UMNO, and has been criticized for unverified reports slandering the opposition parties. In January 2013, opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim won a defamation lawsuit against Utusan Malaysia, which misconstrued his words to suggest that he was in favour of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement in Malaysia in one of their reports (Zurairi, 2013). During the trial, the Utusan Malaysia editor stated that “If newspapers have to go through the full process of ascertaining the truth, the details, they wouldn’t be able to report the next day,” and that the media industry does not have the “luxury of time” to verify their facts (Lim & Toh, 2013). Furthermore, both the blogs cited by the journalists in the Christian conspiracy article are notably pro-UMNO articles, which was unverified (and proven to be false by the Home Ministry). A report by the Malaysian Insider titled “Christians Used as ‘Pawns’ for Votes, say Church Leaders”, stated that Council of Churches Malaysia (CCM) vicepresident Reverend Thomas Phillips said that “Christians are generally feeling that there is kind of a Christian-bashing going on,” and that “they (those propagating the Christian-bashing) are thinking that it will unite the Muslims together, but I don’t think any Malaysians buy it. It’s a political game”. Despite this, the impact and influence these Christian representatives have had on the inter-religious discourse in Malaysia pales in comparison to what two political blogs have done, further indicating their severe lack of visibility and voice in the public arena.

A Grassroots Approach to Engaging Socio-Political Issues in Malaysia Beyond the official news channels and institutional press releases and coverage, it is worth exploring the use of cyberspace in a more personal context. In the previous chapters we have seen how various Christian Individuals have utilized the Internet to impact their personal spirituality and the institution of the church. It is also pertinent to see how Christians respond to these various national issues that affect the Christian community in Malaysia. If in the previous chapter we ask the question of whether Christians care very much about anything other than their own interests,

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here we explore whether current government politics play a part in provoking online religion, and whether Christians play an active role in engaging in socio-political activism or discourse. As Franklin Gamwell notes in discussing the Christian “vocation”, “our concern is how Christian faith relates to membership in the political community (Gamwell, 2005, p. 3). Given that all Christians are citizens, does their calling to a life of faith include a common calling to political activity and, if so, toward what ends? In this formulation, ‘political activity’ means the deliberate attempt to influence or help shape political rule and thereby, to determine the consequences of political order for all affected by it. Although the context of Gamwell’s work primarily relates to how American individuals can engage in politics in various social issues in many channels, through lobbying, voting, and court processes, he does not provide data on specific online movements. We have seen how news portals online that cover religious issues in the nation sparked a variety of comments by readers, though not a lot of the comments were religious in nature. Much of the comments were not civil, with name calling and foul language a regular feature. There are points worth noting. One is to say that we can see a form of religious discourse taking place, even if it is difficult to ascertain the readers’ profiles—at least people are “talking” about religion. Another is to suggest that the Internet is less a space of exchange of ideas, but more a place for expressing one’s opinion without any interest in dialogue. Nevertheless, I wish to continue with the discussion of how online Christianity in Malaysia can also play a part in informing members of “missing news” and engaging with socio-political issues. In short, how has religious discourse developed amongst Christian bloggers and social network users in Malaysia? To begin, the pertinent question is whether, on an individual level, Christian bloggers actually express their views regarding socio-political content in Malaysia. To begin with an overview, I draw attention to the following table of my 24 research informants and a summary of what I have observed on their respective blogs and websites in relation to socio-political content. In this table I list down any notable socio-political content types that are observable and provide a rating of how frequent socio-political content appear on the blog. The rating serves as a guideline of whether socio-political content appears on a “high” frequency—at least one in every three to four postings, “medium”—one in every five to ten postings, and “low”—limited to the occasional reflection, or some banners and images. (see Table 6.1). It is indicative that socio-political commentary on Christian blogs does not feature prominently amongst my participants. While it is quite possible that there is a lack of interest in local politics among my informants, it is not always true. Pastor Homer, for example, related a story for limiting political commentary on his blog. His blog, Lessons from the Old Testament, features short articles relating mainly to, as the title of his blog suggests, the Old Testament of the Bible. This could be sermonettes, expositions, reflections, or news updates of any discovery of Old Testament era artefacts. Also, on the blog, however, are some banners and icons that carry political themes, such as two banners lobbying for the abolition of the Internal Security Act (an act granting the police to arrest anyone without warrant), and another demanding

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Table 6.1 Socio-political content on the blogs/websites of research informants from April to December 2011 Age No. Pseudonym Gender range Socio-political content in authored website 1 Darren M 30–40 Some 2 Indah F 20–30 Nothing in the content deals with socio-political issues. Two pictures on the sidebar provide vague inferences 3 Eve F 20–30 None—No immediately observable political content 4 Jane F & M 50–60 Occasional “prophecy” relating to national events. An example of this is prior to “Bersih” protest 5 Anne F 17–20 None—No immediately observable political content 6 Stark F 30–40 Stark regularly blogs about various sociopolitical issues around the world, such as Christian persecution in Libya, Egypt, etc. The blog has a specific tag on Malaysian issues, but in recent months there has been little updates here 7 Alfred M 30–40 Alfred took an interest in writing about Malaysian politics in 2011, and often relates these issues to Christian doctrine and philosophies 8 Jennifer F 20–30 None—No immediately observable political content 9 Nate M 20–30 One or two posts relating to recent political protests in Malaysia 10 Suvi F 20–30 None—No immediately observable political content 11 Alpha M 30–40 None—No immediately observable political content 12 Helen F 30–40 None—No immediately observable political content 13 Felicia F 20–30 None—No immediately observable political content 14 Ps. Sivin M 50–60 Friends in Conversation: This is a Facebook group started by Sivin to encourage theological discussion amongst Malaysian Christians—but it has also allowed socio-political content to be openly discussed 15 Pastor Jack M 40–50 The church website is also a church blog, which he writes on and administrates 16 Pastor Ong M 40–50 Authors a website on Christian music. Administrates a Facebook group for a Bible school to provide updates 17 Pastor M 30–40 Does not own a blog Steven

Frequency Medium None

None Low

None Medium

High

None Low None None None None High

None None

None (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Age No. Pseudonym Gender range Socio-political content in authored website 18 Pastor M 50–60 Unlike Indah above, Pastor Homer has much Homer more straightforward banners—Abolishing the Internal Security Act, etc. Has in the past reflected on political issues in Malaysia, but apart from that, I would categorize it as “Low” 19 Pastor M 50–60 None—No immediately observable political Stanley content 20 Pastor M 30–40 None—No immediately observable political Lenny content 21 Ps Sam M 60–70 Founder and administrator of a Facebook group called the End Time Watchmen. It has minimal political content, but saw a flurry of updates during the Bersih 4 street protests 22 Cam M 50–60 Founder and administrator of a Facebook group called the End Time Watchmen. It has minimal political content, but saw a flurry of updates during the Bersih 4 street protests

Frequency Low

None None Low

Low

a more democratic Malaysia. Pastor Homer claimed that such expressions are enough for a reader to know his positions on these issues.13 While that serves as a preliminary political engagement, he also explained that me that he avoided attending protests and rallies, mostly notably the “Bersih” rallies,14 and posting more explicit political commentary. This is because he has a daughter who is attending college on a government scholarship. Pastor Homer did not want to risk being targeted as an opposition supporter and jeopardizing his daughter’s education funding. Regardless of the validity of his concern, he has notably reduced his visibility in public arenas when it comes to political issues, and this includes cyberspace. This however, does not mean that Pastor Homer completely shuns political engagement. In the interview he said: My church also organized a polling agent counting training and one church member wasn't very happy that we got a guy from the opposition to conduct it. He insisted that the church cannot be seen in politics. So in the end we said, Ok, for the sake of those who cannot find it comfortable, we will hold the training outside the church. So we held it outside the church. There were 30 people who came for the training. No problem.

13

Interview with Pastor Homer on 12 September, 2011. Bersih—which literally means “clean” is also the common name for the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections in Malaysia. Comprised of civil society organizations and political parties, the coalition has repeatedly demanded for electoral reform in Malaysia (Bersih: www.bersih.org). It has notably organized three rallies in Kuala Lumpur, held in 2006, 2010 and 2012, named Bersih, Bersih 2.0, Bersih 3.0 respectively. These rallies have drawn large crowds, with the most recent rally, Bersih 3.0, with organizers claiming that roughly 300,000 protesters showing up. 14

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Pastor Homer then sees the Internet as temporarily unsafe. He said that maybe he will be more vocal on his blog after his daughter completes her tertiary education. He prefers to use the church that he pastors as a platform for providing avenues of political engagement and discourse. To date, he has organized a training session for his church members to become polling agents, inviting a worker from the opposition party, Pakatan Rakyat, to conduct the training. He has also implemented a physical church forum, nicknamed the “Chat Room”. The Chat Room holds meetings twice a month after Sunday church services, and Pastor Homer facilitates a discussion with his members on current issues, such as the Bersih rallies, the aforementioned “Allah” controversy, and other matters pertaining to the church. These meetings serve as a means for Pastor Homer to engage the community with both internal and external issues, and to raise awareness, both for him and the church, on current issues. While Pastor Homer’s actions certainly have potential to provide information and discourse in the Christian community, they do not resolve the issue of an existing information gap in cyberspace itself. In the previous section, I have looked at how the various issues affecting Christians on the socio-political front are represented differently in the offline and online avenues of information. Within the various Christian communities in Malaysia, especially those who have access to the Internet, there is also a need to further encourage Christian socio-political discourse online on a grassroots level. This is the reason why a Christian website dedicated to publishing articles relating to socio-political issues in Malaysia, The Micah Mandate, was set up in 2008, shortly after the 12th general elections in Malaysia. In the Malaysian 2008 General Elections, the opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat, gained a significant portion of the votes and parliamentary seats and for the first time since the formation of Malaysia, gained administrative control over five out of the thirteen states in the country (Lee, 2010, p. 47). Pakatan Rakyat also managed to garner enough seats in the Malaysian parliament to prevent the ruling party, Barisan Nasional, from the coveted two-thirds majority, a parliamentary advantage which they have enjoyed for decades as it allowed the government to pass legislation with little obstruction. Many reasons have been documented for the major losses of the ruling coalition, such as a growing resentment towards then Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi, growing dissent among ethnic minorities in Malaysia, the visibility of two major protests, the effectiveness of online media in disseminating opposition information to overcome mainstream media bias (Lee, 2010; Tan & Zawawi, 2008). Although Christianity makes up roughly 10% of the country’s population, a sizable concentration of this bloc is located in the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. The Christian population in West Malaysia is largely a dispersed one, with some exceptions. In one particular urban district, Subang Jaya, the state assemblyman, Datuk Lee Hwa Beng, unexpectedly lost a parliamentary contest to a much lesser known opposition candidate. Shortly after the results were announced, he conceded defeat. Lee, a Christian, wrote on his blog that he lost because “Christian leaders whom he had previously worked with campaigned against him inside and outside the church” (Lim, 2008), hinting at a form of betrayal by the sizable Christian voting bloc in Subang Jaya. Lee’s statement is interesting in that he

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directly acknowledged the influence of Christians in the district on the election result. Elsewhere, the opposition gains presented a new problem for the now suddenly in-power Pakatan Rakyat, who for the first time (outside of Kelantan and Terrenganu) needed to appoint Chief Ministers for Penang, Perak, and Selangor. In the state of Perak, Pastor Sivin said that there was a small but noticeable grassroots call by Christians to appoint a Christian Chief Minister even though it was constitutionally impossible to do so. It was this lack of political information that that prompted Pastor Sivin and some of his contemporaries to establish The Micah Mandate to educate the Christian community regarding socio-political issues. He explains the prompting as such: I recall the specific incident where there were these sms-es15 going around by these Christians where they wanted a particular person to be the Chief Minister of Perak, and said we should pray for him because he's a Christian. Actually, it is impossible because constitutionally it is impossible and it reflected the Christian's naivety with regards to the issue. That triggered us to say we need to have a website to at least educate our own people, have some perspective. We just can't go around doing this thing (asking for a Christian Chief Minister when it was technically impossible at the time). And a lot of Christians don't understand the implications of this use of media and how fast it travels, and the danger of this triumphalist kind of Christian thinking.16

According to the above explanation by Pastor Sivin, it appears that the motivating factor for the setting up of The Micah Mandate is primarily to provide credible information to other Christians. According to the write-up on the website, The Micah Mandate is a “Christian based public-advocacy that seeks a transformation of our nation through acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly (Micah 6:8: Holy Bible)”,17 and that the site encourages “a citizen-based brand of journalism whereby individuals and groups of individuals of all walks of life will find space to express their views and concerns and be engaged in a dialogue with others” (ibid). The “about us” page also outlines the group’s beliefs regarding their principles as Christians, and their compliance with the existing national laws, and encourages personal transformation, which would lead to national transformation. On the main page of the website, the featured visual is a large picture of a cartoon endorsing “Bersih 3.0” in its aftermath. The “Bersih” movement features prominently in this discussion due to its currency, even though it is not an issue that is directly impacting the Christian community. This is because various Christian groups have fully endorsed and supported the protest. The mantra of the website is also clearly visible in both the English and Malay language. The Micah Mandate states on their website that they welcome unsolicited articles to be considered for publication on the website. In terms of authorship, there are two main groups of contributors. The first is through submissions by interested writers and are for the most part, original articles. The second are existing articles that are

15

Short Messaging System (SMS) are text messages sent through mobile telephones. Interview with Pastor Sivin on 19 October, 2011. Pastor Sivin opted to not use a pseudonym. 17 Micah Mandate 2012, http://www.themicahmandate.org 16

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re-posted by the administrators of the website. These could be sourced from anywhere—other blogs, news portals, organizations, etc. Due credit is always given in such re-postings. To easily differentiate the two, one only has to look at the author of the blog post. If it is a re-post, the article is always posted by “Administrator”, followed by a “by [original author]” heading. If it is a submission, the article will feature the author’s name at the first instance. The articles themselves attest to the goals stated earlier above. The articles, as of June 2012, include “Reconciliation and the Bittersweet Truth”, a re-post of Kee Thuan Chye’s critical thoughts on the reconciliation efforts between the two opposing coalitions in Malaysian politics; “Increased Traffic Fines”, by TK Tan, questioning the rationale behind the recent government policy to increase traffic fines, “Jurisdictional Confusion” by JK John, in which he picks up the recent arrest of a bookstore manager by Islamic authorities, and “Wither English, Wither Nation”, an article by Thomas Fann lamenting the decreasing standard of English in Malaysia and how it directly correlates to the social, economic and political decline in the country. There would appear to be a diverse range of topics, with health issues also discussed, along with Christian encouragement in politically difficult times. But a website is not necessarily valued by what is posted, but also by what is read and commented. The Micah Mandate lists on its sidebar a number of “most popular” blog posts. Under Wordpress widgets setting,18 the “most popular” widget displays the blog posts with the most number of unique clicks, which represents roughly the number of readers a particular post has. So, this serves as an indicator of what readers potentially value in this blog. Based on this then, the most popular articles as at June 2012 displayed on The Micah Mandate are “Bersih 2.0—Would Jesus have Marched?” (19 comments); “PAS real target of JAIS raid: DUMC Disposable Collateral Damage” (11 comments); “Spare a Thought for Policemen” (7 comments); “Worse than Murtad is Political Apostasy” (6 comments), “PETITION: To Support and Thank Datuk Ambiga” (6 comments). Not all the articles are necessarily “Christian” in their approach, as Pastor Sivin explains. The website would re-post non-Christian perspective on some issues, and have posted articles from the likes of Marina Mahathir, the daughter of the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, to encourage critical thinking. Pastor Sivin says that “in some sense usually when we put it out we might not agree with everything in detail, but it is something a Christian should read”. To summarize, a majority of the other blog posts generated few or no comments at all, and it is quite telling that the most read articles are those directly pertaining to political issues in the country. However, is the website effective in achieving what the website sets out to do? Of the two goals that I highlighted earlier, the blog certainly allows “individuals and groups of individuals of all walks of life will find space to express their views and concerns and be engaged in a dialogue with others”.

18 Having blogged and maintained a number of sites using the Wordpress platform, I am familiar with websites and blogs that run on a Wordpress platform.

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The dialogue, however, is minimal, raising questions of its overall effectiveness in its larger goal to be a platform that encourages personal and national transformation. Pastor Sivin readily acknowledges the limitations of The Micah Mandate, preferring that larger Christian bodies such as the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) and the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF) “make their statements more accessible to the public. This provides a point of reference for the Christian community and also a point of contact for the wider society”. Although Pastor Sivin did not elaborate much on this point, it can be interpreted from the statement that there is a need for an official “point of reference” in which Christians can rally around for a particular issue to expect any form of socio-political impact, rather than have a myriad view generating only some discussion. That is not to say that the existing discourse in The Micah Mandate is of no value—it has already outlived Good Times despite its backing by the NECF to provide news on current issues and maintaining the website. Good Times never picked up traction to be considered a credible source of news alongside other established portals such as Malaysiakini, Malaysia Insider, and The Nutgraph, and. I suspect this has largely to do with the “positive” attitude of the website, with much of the feature articles focusing on Good Times and good values that are being practiced in various parts of Malaysian society. Perhaps The Micah Mandate suffers from the same shortcoming in its lack of critical views of the church and state, regardless of whether it is warranted or not. I make this comment because two of the highly critical websites that I have observed, the personal blog of Helen K and Calvary Today found in previous chapters of this book, have drawn higher readerships despite their visibly lower standards of web design, resources, issues coverage, and to some extent, writing proficiency. This is certainly an avenue for further research in the future.

Friends in Conversation Another discourse that is going on in cyberspace with regards to Malaysian Christianity is a network of Christians called Friends in Conversation, also set up by Pastor Sivin. While The Micah Mandate serves as a “refined” website in that many of the articles are posted as “final” products awaiting comments for discussion, a Facebook group that Pastor Sivin also set up presents an environment where “discussion” itself takes center stage. The Facebook group, called Friends in Conversation serves as another reference point in how Christianity online can be moderated into an engaging platform for mature and intellectual discussions on issues relating to society or the country at large. The story of Friends in Conversation also provides a framework of study for the ongoing online/offline interactivity, influence, and expression due to a number of reasons which shall be explored later in this section.

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Friends in Conversation’s main aim as a Facebook group19 is, as the group description reads, “to provide a safe space for dangerous conversations”. As with the case of The Micah Mandate, as well as Good Times and the other online news media, the necessity to provide platforms for engagement and discussion plays an integral role in the social maintenance of Friends in Conversation. What makes Friends in Conversation different, however, is that the “process” and “discussion” is the primary expression of belief, not the finished article. Due to the nature of Facebook postings, the “wall” of the Friends in Conversation group page serves as an open forum where any of the 130 members of the group can begin a discussion about anything at all that is related to Christianity, including highly controversial topics, hence “dangerous conversations”. The group is defined as a “safe space” for such topics because of its stringent privacy settings. The group is set to “invisible”, a Facebook setting that hides the group and its activities from the public eye, and only through invitations by the small number of administrators can a new member be added to participate in the discussion. These border controls allow the readers and writers in the group to have a sense of security that the contents of the site will not be under scrutiny by external parties. The small community in Friends in Conversation, 132 as of 2 August 2012, is a good place to begin exploring how the Internet can be used to “locate others with whom to form like-minded enclaves of belief” (Howard, 2011, p. 17). Howard provides a thick description of two websites that dealt specific with Christian end-times apocalyptic networks online and how these networks have extensive influences through their email exchanges, forum and website interactions, and book publications. It parallels to some extent with the Friends in Conversation community in some of its approaches. The key difference, however, is that the networks that Howard provides require a belief in the impending end of days according to an interpretation of the Bible. In Friends in Conversation, the members’ only obligation of “belief” is less a Biblical or doctrinal one, but a belief in the writing and posting etiquette of the Facebook group.20 Pastor Sivin and the other administrators make it quite clear that personal attacks are not allowed, but the diverse views and perspectives are welcome with little critical screening. Pastor Sivin explained: For the core group of the Friends in Conversation group, there is interest to interact with philosophical perspectives, e.g. the use of Zizek and theological perspectives. There is also a political science and social science interest. . . This might be a reflection of the personal interests of the Friends in Conversation core group more than the other people participating in the Facebook group for example.

19

Facebook provides a function for individuals to create groups or networks either for public or private communication. 20 This is not uncommon in cyberspace. Various forums online have “forum rules” with similar (and sometimes more specific) dos-and-don’ts for members of the forum.

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Friends in Conversation also maintains a public blog.21 If the Facebook group serves as “the process” of discussion, the blog serves as a snapshot of what was discussed. The contents of the blog is significantly filtered from the raw format of discussion that takes place in the Facebook group, and only a small number of people have access to post new content on it. The Friends in Conversation blog bears a closer resemblance to The Micah Mandate in that finished articles are posted. From my observation however, Friends in Conversation blog does not have as high a readership as The Micah Mandate, nor does it have the same vibrancy as the group itself. It is not as frequently updated, and it is at best, a preview booklet of what goes on “behind the scenes” in the Facebook group. Thus, it may seem easy to categorize the Friends in Conversation network and their numerically small membership into what Howard describes as people who merely “cordon off their beliefs from criticism and enact discourse that portrays any resistance from the outside as proof both of their alienation and their righteousness” (Howard, 2011, p. 18). The public blog serves as an example that despite the “cordoning off” and “alienation” of the private network, there exist a public avenue that provides room for further engagement or discussion from outsiders with the network. It must be also considered that the engagement level, in terms of the comments generated, on the blog is significantly less than what goes on in the private Facebook group. This is not unlike several “Christian” websites, such as The Micah Mandate, described above. The blog is, however, not the only means in which the Friends in Conversation network has expressed some of their Christian discussions. In the year 2011, some members of Friends in Conversation collaborated to publish a book called The Bible and the Ballot, directly using content that stemmed from discussions that took place within the Friends in Conversation network. The edited volume by Joshua Woo and Tan Soo-Inn exclusively focuses on the political discussions in the Malaysian context. In the book’s introduction, Joshua Woo says “how do we relate Christianity with political engagement in Malaysia today? This is the answer that we, as a part of the community of believers, are trying to answer in this book (Woo & Tan, 2011, p. xi)”. To answer that question, the book features chapters like “Voting as a Christian Duty”, “Prayer and Political Consideration”, “Naming Names: Can Preachers Tell You Whom to Vote For”, and others. It also contains a foreword written by Reverend Datuk Ng Moon Hing, the Anglican Bishop of Malaysia and chairman of the Christian Federation of Malaysia at the time to lend credibility to the book. One of my research informants, Pastor Sivin, is a contributor of the book. Pastor Sivin explained that “the online discussion in the Friends in Conversation Group provided the impetus for a book such as The Bible and the Ballot because of the perceived uncritical comments on religion and politics, and Christianity and politics in particular in the Malaysian context.” To emphasize the point that the online content served as the point of conception of the book, one of the contributors, Alwyn Lau, explained to me in an informal chat that “the book came into existence 21

http://www.friendsinconversation.wordpress.com

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only because of the prior articles we had all written online. The Bible and the Ballot was not a case of, ‘hey can you please contribute an article on this topic?’, but came about because Joshua Woo collated a few of our online pieces, asked our permission to publish under Soo-Inn’s set-up, we all agreed to touch-up the essays”. Another excerpt in the introduction of the book demonstrates the importance of the Friends in Conversation network in the conception and production of the book. This compilation of articles has been produced within the context of a circle of friends who share a common concern over national issues and the importance of Christian engagement on those issues. Although all of us are Malaysians, some of us are located in Malaysia, some in Singapore, and one in Norway. We come from different traditions and denominations of the Christian faith, but are connected through Friends in Conversation, a network spearheaded by Rev Sivin Kit from Bangsar Lutheran Church, where we discuss relevant issues that concern Christian discipleship in the contemporary world (Woo & Tan, 2011, p. 3).

While this is a clear example to emerge from my fieldwork regarding how the online and offline are simultaneously interacting with one another, the level of engagement does not end here. The book has generated a modest readership, with a number of reviews available online. These reviews serve as second wave of discussion to take place, not just on the Friends in Conversation Facebook group and blog, but on some of the writers’ personal blogs and other websites as well. On an institutional level, the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF) of Malaysia posted an official review of the book on the website, something which Pastor Sivin says is “important” because “they seek to represent the voice for the Protestant evangelicals in Malaysia”. Although the website provided no room for comments or discussion, the review serves as a preliminary an indication that an engagement was taking place. One of the articles mentioned in the review was Alwyn Lau’s article, Naming Names: Can Preachers Tell You Whom to Vote For, in which he argues that preachers have the right tell their congregation for whom to vote, the NECF states that “Such views are bound to ignite debate. NECF, for one, subscribes to the theological position of American theologian Carl FH Henry that the Bible has no mandate for the institutional Church to use the name of Christ in endorsing election candidates, laws or policies”.22 However, it said that “it is worth some scrutiny for any Christian eager to take the discussion on engaging the public sphere further”. Another blog that reviewed Lau’s essay is The Agora, a Christian blog that similarly takes an interest in socio-political matters affecting Christianity in Malaysia. Here the author largely opposes Lau’s content in the article. An excerpt is as follows: As Christian leaders, we should not shy away from our responsibility to be engaged at various levels. But it does caution us to humility and not to be too quick to take sides from the pulpit (Chang, 2012).

22 http://www.necf.org.my/newsmaster.cfm?&menuid¼43&action¼view&retrieveid¼1403, accessed April 22, 2013.

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Lau, in turn, responds to the author of the The Agora, whom he identifies as “David” in his blog. In a blog post, entitled “Pulpit as Mini-Genevas”, Lau includes some rather personal remarks. Perhaps this is the reason his response is posted on his personal blog rather than the Facebook group. Lau says on his blog that: I wish first of all to note that his (David’s) own position (at least as presented in the blog) is as ambiguous as a Premier League phantom goal and, like referees who allow them, should be given a sounding off. What is David's position on whether or not preachers can take sides during sermons? Shockingly, for a John-Piper-esque person who's always talking about truth, logic and certainty, David exudes almost none on this issue (Lau, 2012). As I see it, writers like David embody the spirit of wanting to "have their cake and eat it, too". They want to convince people to vote for so-and-so but they also wish to reserve the right to tell people they SHOULD NOT be telling people to vote for so-and-so. He's like someone who makes a show of wanting to touch the center yet will always refuse to hit the spot, preferring to circle around it aimlessly, because hitting the center-spot then deprives them of the joy of telling people they cannot touch the center-spot. He calls it non-partisanship; others would call it hypocrisy?

The above is a straightforward exchange between two bloggers which carries a tinge of a heated debate. Other bloggers, instead of engaging in a direct exchange, use the opportunity of reviewing the book online as a means of telling their own story. The author of the blog called Writing Off the Wall wrote an extended review called “Bible, Ballot and Bersih: Cultivating a Democratic Way of Life” in which the writer, Hwa Yue-Yi, who praised the book’s handling of the testy relationship between Christianity and politics, saying it makes “a measured, multifaceted, unflinchingly visible, and pleasantly formatted contribution to the discourse on these issues” (Hwa, 2012). Hwa’s blog post did not end with just the compliments, but she went on to state her gripe with the book, which mainly deals with representation. She says “just one gripe: of the six essayists, five are Chinese and all are men.” This critique is important in her review as in the same blog-post, she proceeded to fill the gap that she highlighted with her own story of political involvement as a graduate student in Malaysia, attending two protests, Bersih 2.0 and Bersih 3.0, and her reflections on those events. She concludes near the end that “both Malaysianness and Christianity are far too exciting to confine to pews and protests” (ibid.). Hwa’s story is proof of an ongoing evolution of the discussions that take place within the Friends in Conversation network. If Friends in Conversation serves as a platform for “dangerous” issues to be discussed in part to fill a gap in the existing Christian and Malaysian discussion, Hwa’s blog post fills a gap that exist within the Bible and the Ballot, that of gender representation. This is done through her addition of the story. Her blog post has since been re-posted in the network, the Wordpress blog, and some of the book authors’ personal blogs, further establishing the linkages between external readers and the network.

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Internal Mechanisms with Friends in Conversation The intents and actions of Friends in Conversation, particularly in the public domain, are not limited to engaging non-Christian discourses on a national level alone. A turn of events in January 2013 regarding the on-going Allah issue saw Friends in Conversation direct one of their public comments at a Christian minister who threatened the government with aggressive action should the rights of Christians not be heard. On January 14, 2013, Bishop Robert Judah Paul, a representative of the Pentecostal Churches of Malaysia appeared on the news portal Free Malaysia Today to condemn Perkasa chief Ibrahim Ali’s call to burn Malay Bibles containing the word “Allah”. Whilst condemning Ibrahim Ali is not unusual by any quarters within the Christian ranks, Bishop Paul’s comments were framed more aggressively than usual, stating that “burning the Bible is equivalent to burning churches and the churches have every right to bring it to the highest authority” (Prasena, 2013), and that “Christians will take to the street if our voices are not heard legally. Ibrahim and whoever are behind him are very narrow minded and are not looking at the bigger picture” (ibid). His comments came as a surprise because prior to this Bishop Paul, and the organization that he represents, had not been featured prominently as a representative of the Christian community in the local media. Moreover, its aggressive tone was different from previous statements made by other Christian representatives from CFM and NECF, which while firmly denouncing Ibrahim Ali’s actions, usually contained a call for reconciliation and peace in the country as well. Bishop Paul’s comments drew the attention, and some disagreement, of Friends in Conversation immediately. Pastor Sivin, together with a number of members in their group, expressed their preference for a peaceful dialogue rather than the threat of street protests, as proposed by Bishop Paul, which they felt would lead to increased hostilities. A number of the members worked together to draft an open letter to Bishop Paul to indicate to him that not all Christians in Malaysia feels the same way as he does. After drafting the letter, Pastor Sivin uploaded the document on to the Friends in Conversation Facebook page and petitioned for those willing to have their names appear on it to post in the comments their name and affiliation. Those who participate would then be included as part of the signatories of the open letter. The document underwent a number of minor edits after receiving comments from some of the members in the group. It was finally sent to Free Malaysia Today, the same portal that published Bishop Paul’s comments. The final letter was signed by twenty-two people, out of which six of them were pastors. This effort was described by Pastor Sivin in his online petition as a means to model an internal Christian critique, as well as to avoid having other parties spin the story unfavorably and misrepresenting the Malaysian Christian community at large. The ability of Friends in Conversation to mobilize this internal Christian critique once again demonstrates how a Facebook network can effectively stamp their presence and voice in the national dialogue of national socio-political issues. The everyday engagement that takes place within the group certainly played a part in building a system of trust amongst its members to “dare” to critique the church, or

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other Christians. Not all members participated in the letter, but not much disagreement regarding the effort surfaced either. This could be due to the like-mindedness, or the liberties granted within the group. Neither CFM or NECF made public calls to Bishop Paul to not issue public threats. Whether this was done privately is not known, but Friends in Conversation’s model of providing an alternative voice for the Christians again raises the question of whether public disagreements are permissible within the Christian community. Although Pastor Sivin expressed cautions in exposing church problems in the public sphere in the previous chapter, it seems his initiative to draft and publish the open letter to Bishop Paul is both an “internal Christian critique” (as he claimed) on a public news platform. The inconsistency in approach is shrouded by the necessity to “avoid having other parties spin the story unfavorably and misrepresenting the Malaysian Christian community at large”. According to Pastor Sivin in Chap. 6, he explained that it is how one perceives the church that determines the course of action—whether they are friends, family, or institution. In this particular case of Bishop Paul, it is plausible to conclude that Pastor Sivin considered Bishop Paul and the Pentecostal Churches of Malaysia as a non-family entity.

Conclusion A few points can be derived in the case of Friends in Conversation and the Malaysian online Malaysian inter-religious discourse. Firstly, we can see an ongoing dialogue being consistently demonstrated on the online platform. As explained in previous chapters, the Internet can serve as a space for new ways of expressing one’s beliefs, but also runs the risk of replicating that which is old. With the Friends in Conversation network on Facebook, it is evident that a healthy form of inclusiveness is being practiced. This inclusiveness is specific to the issues that are discussed. There have been instances where some members began to post anti-Islamic content, which Pastor Sivin describes as “borderline fundamentalist”, but the discussion continued anyway in the spirit of providing a safe space to discuss any and all issues. That being said, the issues are not completely without limitations. The topics, from my observation, lean toward conservative viewpoints, with recent discussions on how same-sex parenting yields worse results than heterosexual parenting, and a posting of how an atheist converted to Catholicism, demonstrating the still conservative positions the group takes. Perhaps currently there is no member who feels the need to provide alternative perspectives in some of these “hot button” Christian issues. However, as is the case of both the individual expressions and institutional expressions described in earlier chapters, there remain old boundaries, in this case “taboo subjects” that are replicated in the online. Due to the unofficial membership criteria, it is not surprising that there are no non-Christians in the group, although there are non-Christian articles being posted up for discussion. However, it would be interesting to see a greater diversity of Christians with differing schools of thought would participate and contribute to the network, not just in the political issues, but in the social and moral issues as well.

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The second point is the clear interaction and simultaneous movements between the online and offline. The “original” members of the Friends in Conversation met in an offline environment in a community called “Emergent Malaysia”, soon translating into the Friends in Conversation network on Facebook, which in turns expresses itself through a blog, and a material book which has generated some discussion online, particularly among Christian bloggers. Pastor Sivin also intimated that one of the chapters in the book has been translated into the Malay language to be distributed for free in the East Malaysian states, Sabah and Sarawak, where most Christians are located in non-English speaking localities. The purpose of the distribution is done “with the hope to influence voting patterns in upcoming elections. This seems to me to be a more direct and explicit impact that I can see,” explained Pastor Sivin. Although at the time of writing the 13th General Election has yet to take place, it would be interesting to find out more about the distribution efforts of the book chapter and its impact on “voting patterns” in future research. At this present time, the “potential”, or at the very least, the “effort” and “process” of initiating some sort of grassroots influence birthed through online discussions serves as an important milestone in the context of online Christianity and its relationship with grassroots socio-political engagement. Also discussed in the earlier section of this chapter is the need for more non-Muslim representation in the Malaysian mass media. The relationship between politics and religion can sometimes be misconstrued as a platform for only certain quarters of individuals, but it is in fact an oft neglected component of “everyday religion”. Bautista and Lim argue that “it is vital that the state be treated as an integral component in understanding the place and persistence of religious belief in the region” and that it is through the “focus on the relationship between states and churches” where more productive lessons can be learnt regarding how Christians negotiate their religious beliefs in various nations (Bautista & Lim, 2009). Although one might not constantly think of it, national issues pertaining to Christianity in Malaysia will eventually affect how one expresses their faith. For example, if the ban on the word “Allah” amongst non-Muslims is implemented, the basic Christian everyday ritual of praying and reading the Bible will undergo significant textual change, particularly amongst the Malay-speaking Christians in Malaysia. The “Christian state” political drama that ensued from two blog posts has resulted in heightened and ongoing sensitivity regarding the issue of religious conversion in Malaysia, straining inter-religious relationships. Whilst efforts have been made by numerous parties from both ends of the religious and political spectrum to dialogue and provide information and critical discourse regarding the various issues in the nation, the repeated cycle of political hostilities appear to render these efforts moot for the time being. Whether grassroots-driven networks and websites such as Friends in Conversation and The Micah Mandate can eventually impact the sociopolitical discourse or engage more meaningfully in areas of inter/intra religious discourses in the country remains largely unproven in its infancy. As demonstrated in the case of Good Times, Christian content and perspective alone are not necessarily enough to engage an increasingly cyber-literate audience in Malaysia.

Chapter 7

Reproducing Ideology: Christians, Facebook Groups, and the Bersih 4 Protests in Malaysia

It is clear by now that while the internet is lauded as a free space, it is not necessarily free. Freedom is not an inherent characteristic of the technology, but rather an affordance. Affordances, or more specifically technological affordances, views technologies as artifacts that ‘may be both shaped by and shaping of the practices humans use in interaction with, around and through them” (Hutchby, 2001, p. 444). Furthermore, as Conole and Dyke states, “an affordance of the technology does not simply refer to the intended use but also to the unintended consequences” (Conole & Dyke, 2016, p. 301). All of this suggests that while the technology, in its inception, has intended uses, and predicted possibilities, the eventual adoption of the technology, especially on a mass scale, will see unexpected and oftentimes creative uses of it. However, on the flip side, there are also affordances, or possible uses of a technology, that are not fully tapped into, or embraced by users. In the case of the internet, the freedom to express and engage new ideas would be one such affordance that still face challenges in online communities. To the extent that the internet is an ever expanding repository of information, there is certainly a freedom to access new knowledge, there is also freedom to engage with the wider community in the world in new ways. It is free from geographical boundaries, allowing for new forms of trade and relationships to take place, and when an avatar or nickname is involved, the fluidity in how identities are re-interpreted by users can potentially provide a space where social boundaries like race, religion, can be broken. Much of these, however, are ideals. Absolute social freedom on the internet is theoretically possible, but realistically and practically, impossible. It has been shown in the book so far, there is a duality to the introduction of internet practices into Malaysian Christianity. While there are unique experiential narratives that have emerged on individual and institutional levels, users are still undoubtedly tethered to pre-existing beliefs and socio-cultural expectations. This duality is an important facet of internet studies, and one that cannot be ignored. As Gatson notes, while the internet has allowed new forms of communication to take place, people are still “materially and ideologically embedded in truncated networks © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_7

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with less-than-permeable boundaries” (Gatson, 2011, p. 232). This embedded ideology stems not from the technology, but from the human user. Yeoh makes this distinction between the technology and the people who use technology by stating that “media and communicational technologies are also technologies of the self as they perpetuate old “truths” or help bring about emergent “truths” through an ensemble of textual and visual discourses”(Yeoh, 2010). As such, it is likely that we transfer social practices that we are already familiar with online, or create new boundaries that help us make sense of the world of cyberspace. This duality of internet use is evident in existing research on the impact of online communication. In the case of political engagement online, which is the subject of this chapter, arguments have been made for both the limiting and emancipatory approaches to internet practices, with Wheeler and Mintz arguing that the internet is playing a major role in developing a more engaged and aware citizenship in certain countries in the middle east (Wheeler & Mintz, 2012, p. 284), or Hill and Hughes’ findings that there is “very little data to support the supposition that the Internet changes people’s minds politically” (Hill & Hughes, 1998, p. 183) and that people tend to go online to seek out information that reinforces their pre-existing ideological beliefs, and “not to be transformed”. There is probably truth on both sides of the debate, but for now, the position that I take is that while the internet is free, people are not The transmission of individual and societal values, or truths, inevitably finds its way on to the internet. It is in this interplay between freedom and convention where I begin my line of inquiry on the subject of an online religious community. Does the internet allow for a more democratic form of social engagement? Are social hierarchies really flatter than in strictly “offline” communities? How is authority redefined in an online setting? How are ideological values and cultural practices imparted to members—and is such social mores, whether formal or informal, demonstrative of a form of boundary setting in an online community? These questions are applied to a type of community that is well known to be highly systemized and organized: a religious community. My secondary research interest has been on Malaysian Christianity, and in the broader literature of online religion—the rise of the internet has raised a lot of discussion on the decentralization of religious authority (no longer pulpit centered), the materiality of relationships, the authenticity of spiritual experiences, and the democratization of religious knowledge. In short, does the internet allow for a new form of religious community that is completely unlike conventional religious structures? The analysis will demonstrate that while freedom of expression is enshrined in the respective communities, it is not evidence of the internet being without boundaries, authority, and bias. This is evidenced by the different mechanisms that surface in crucial times to impress upon members core ideological values of the group. The following sections are organized into three parts. The first part will provide a background into the case study of Bersih 4, a 2-day street rally where participants demanded for electoral reforms held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2015. The second part will be a recap of the two Facebook groups discussed in the previous

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two chapters, and a comparison of how both groups engaged with their members in the month preceding the rally. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the data presented in relation to the broader theoretical ideas discussed in this book.

Bersih 4 Bersih, translated from the Malay word, means “clean”. In 2007, the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections organized a street rally in Kuala Lumpur to demand for electoral reform in the country clean and fair elections.1 The term Bersih was used represent the protestors’ hope for change in the way elections are organized and administered. Public perception of the Malaysian Electoral Commission at the time was that elections were not independently administered, and that the ruling coalition of the time, Barisan Nasional, who had been in power since independence in 1957,2 controlled electoral processes through corrupt practices. The first Bersih rally drew a crowd of between around 30,000 protestors.3 The rally has been credited as one of the factors in increasing support of the opposition parties in the 2008 elections, dubbed the “Malaysian Tsunami”, where they made significant gains on both state and parliamentary elections. Since that election, four more rallies took place, with the last one, Bersih 5, held in 2016. The Bersih rallies have not always gone smoothly. Clashes between protestors and the police force took place in the first three rallies in 2007, 2011, and 2012. Emergency police was deployed on the first three occasions, and attempts were made to clamp down the protest, leading to accusations of police violence. The government response to these rallies, however, only further strengthened the resolve of the protestors. The subject of this chapter, Bersih 4, held in 2015, was perhaps the most ambitious for two reasons: Firstly, it was the first time the organizers attempted a 2-day street rally, hoping to generate sustained attention to the cause. Secondly, it was held in the days preceding 31 August, 2015—the Malaysian National Day, and outside Stadium Merdeka, the site where the Federation of Malaya was declared as a sovereign state free from British colonial rule. This gave symbolic value to the cause of demanding for reform of how democracy is practiced in Malaysia. These factors gave rise to some concern that violence may break out again. However, Bersih

1

For a comprehensive background on how the Bersih movement began, visit www.bersih.org In 1957, the Alliance Party won Malaya’s first elections. They continued in their position of power after the formation of Malaysia in 1963 with the inclusion of Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore (who became an independent state in 1965). After the ethnic riots of 1969, the Alliance Party was dissolved and a larger coalition, Barisan Nasional, was formed, and continued to govern Malaysia up until 2018. Although, technically, two separate coalitions governed Malaysia between 1957 till 2018, the three major political parties of United Malays National Organization (UMNO), Malayan/ Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), and the Malayan/Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) were the core parties throughout. 3 This figure is according to the organizers of Bersih. The official police report states 10,000. 2

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4 turned out quite differently. There was no police violence, with a neutral zone enacted between the protesters and the police force outside Stadium Merdeka. Signs were put at the barrier by the organizers of Bersih reminding protestors to not cross the barrier. This zone was not breached over the 2 days, and the official National Day parade proceeded without incident on the 31st of August, 2015. When it comes to the Bersih rallies and the Malaysian Christian community, there was ongoing chatter on a grassroots level on whether it is the Christian thing to participate in street protests, or to encourage some level of civil disobedience. Some of this debate will be seen in the case studies later. During one of my visits to a church in Ipoh prior to Bersih 2.0 in 2014, I chanced upon a conversation between a member and a church leader, with the member asking why no statements of support have been issued by the national bodies in Malaysia, such as the Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM) and the National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF). The anecdotal reason that I gleaned was that it was important for churches to be above these street rallies, and positively impact the country in other ways. There were concerns that the protests were hijacked by opposition parties for the purposes of overthrowing the government, something the church should not wantonly involve herself in. I have also attended church services where pastors would encourage their members from the pulpit to attend Bersih rallies. When it came to Bersih 4, three churches in Kuala Lumpur, The Cathedral of St John in Bukit Nanas, Church of St Anthony in Jalan Pudu and Church of Our Lady of Fatima in Brickfields, opened their doors for protesters to rest and converge during the entire duration of the rally,4 and their actions received media attention. It goes without saying that the reverse is also important—there were many other churches of different denominations that did not open for protestors. Simply by surveying these obvious networks of communication, we can see that the Christian community have multiple perspectives about participating in protests. A lot of these conflicting sentiments surface in everyday engagement instead of over formal channels or media statements. To further understand the dynamics of how these ideological approaches to street rallies are negotiated, I return to the two Facebook groups featured in previous chapters to observe how the subject of Bersih 4 was discussed in the preceding month. The two groups observed, the End Time Watchmen (introduced in the previous chapter), and Friends in Conversation, generated enough content on the subject to learn a little bit about the different views of Christians towards protests, but more important, how these ideas are negotiated, enforced, or dismissed, in a Christian online community. Through the favouring or opposition towards political activism in these groups, of the ideas presented in the previous chapters are expanded upon—like how freedom is actually limited in some ways, and that there are clear preferences for some ideas, and how these preferences are communicated and managed amongst its members. These in turn provide insight into the broader discussion of the dynamics of online communities, its perceived freedom of expression, and how authority is established.

4

https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/309882

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Case Study: Friends in Conversation, the End-Time Watchmen, and Bersih 4 The first group is Friends in Conversation. In its description, it states that the group aims to “provide a safe space for dangerous conversations”. In line with this, the necessity to provide platforms for engagement and discussion plays an integral role in the social maintenance of Friends in Conversation. What makes Friends in Conversation unique is that the process and discussion on the Facebook group is the primary expression of belief. Due to the nature of Facebook postings, the “wall” of Friends in Conversation’s group page serves as an open forum where any of the 130 members of the group can begin a discussion about anything at all that is related to Christianity, including highly controversial topics—hence “dangerous conversations”. The group is defined as a “safe space” for such topics partly because of its stringent privacy settings. The group is set to “invisible”, a setting that hides the group and all its activities from the public eye, and only through invitations by the small circle of administrators can a new member be added to participate in the discussion. This stringent approach to membership provide a sense of security that the contents of the site will not be under scrutiny by external parties. If we take the argument that the Internet can be used to “locate others with whom to form like-minded enclaves of belief” (Howard, 2011, p. 17), then Friends in Conversation’s obligation of belief is not a doctrinal one, but an ethical one in that everyone shares the same values in the writing and posting etiquette of the Facebook group. The founding member of the group, Pastor Sivin, makes it absolutely clear that personal attacks are not allowed, but the diverse views and perspectives are welcome with little critical screening. Topics discussed are varied as promised. Popular themes for discussion are Arminian vs Calvinism, homosexuality, etc. Most of these topics generate lively discussion among the members. To briefly re-introduce the End-Time Watchmen, it is also a Facebook group set up by an interdenominational and international group of Christians who decided to set up a group to bring awareness to the subject of false Christian teachings. Both groups have some similarities and differences. Both are Christian groups that are interested in some form of discourse on matters, be it theological or social, related to Christianity. Both believe that Facebook serves as a viable platform for robust discussion. Both groups are active, with several comments and posts put up by several people. Interestingly, both groups are founded by pastors, the traditional figure of authority in the church. Further to that, both these pastors are not only founders, but are also regarded as key figures in the everyday discourse.

Engaging Bersih 4 Online While a majority of the posts in both groups dealt with a variety of issues related directly to doctrinal matters, every now and then, local issues that affect the nation

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brings about a sustained flurry of discussion on the Facebook wall. For example, in Friends in Conversation, which has been around for much longer, the lead up to the Malaysian general elections in 2013 generated a series of heated debates, such as whether a pastor should be able to use the pulpit to tell members of his/her church who to vote for, the role of Christians in participating in protests, attending vigils, and how submission to government can and should be observed even in times of deep distrust of government. During these events, I observe that despite the increased level of group activity and participation, the “freedom of expression” promoted by both groups increasingly becomes overshadowed by the emergence of preferred ideologies of the group in order to informally assert the group’s preferred position on a particular issue. These positions are usually espoused and enforced either by the leader(s) of the group, or by key respected members of the group. To further explore this phenomenon, I will use the Facebook engagement on both groups during the events of Bersih 4 that was described in the earlier section. Both groups saw increased activity (postings, comments) in the lead-up to the street rally, and while it is immediately observable that both groups informally approach the issue very differently—Friends in Conversation heavily promoted participation in the street rally, while the End-Time Watchmen generally discouraged it, there are similarities in how these views were protected, and dissenters were systematically managed and corrected.

Friends in Conversation and Bersih 4 As a general summary of activity, in the month preceding and a week after Bersih 4, Friends in Conversation saw a total of 18 posts published. 14 of those posts came before the street rally, and 4 after. The eighteen posts were authored by three members of the groups, and all the posts except one were written to support the protest movement, and/or encourage members to participate in it. The content of these posts take on a certain flavour, with very little direct Christian perspective. Rather, all the posts engage directly with the political discourse that they seek to affect—the government of the time. As you can see in the following chart, all the posts criticize issues such as the lack of independence for the courts, corruption in the government (particularly in relation to the 1MDB scandal that is now widely publicized globally), lack of transparency5 even though a Christian was the Minister for Transparency at the time. Apart from criticising the government, there were also posts revisiting the past Bersih rallies, particularly Bersih 2.0, and explanations of how these were all important milestones in

5 Paul Low was at the time the Minister for Transparency in the Barisan Nasional-led government. He faced criticism from some in the Christian community, who questioned his integrity as a Christian in associating himself with a Prime Minister who was perceived to be corrupt, and whether he would have the ability to reform the government from within.

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Malaysia’s journey and struggle towards a more transparent and democratic society. All of these posts did not engage the “Christian” perspective directly in that there was no invocation of Biblical passages and verses that supported the Christian’s responsibility to protest against injustice, or no rally call for Christians to step up, or theological arguments of any kind. This does not mean that these posts are not Christian in nature. The content is situated within a Malaysian Christian Facebook group, and is intended for a predominantly Christian audience for their consumption and engagement (Table 7.1). In terms of the level of engagement, all the posts generated a range of 2–5 likes. Many of the posts did not receive comments and feedback, and only one post saw ten comments. It was a post considering the role of the at-the-time former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who attended the Bersih 4 rally, and a general round of skepticism by the members who voiced their concern that much of what they were protesting about originated during his tenure in office some time ago. However, apart from these, the level of engagement by the members apart from the three who posted status updates on the wall of the group was relatively low. The question is—Is the level of engagement low because of the lack of interest in the subject, or because the group was predominantly in agreement with the protest narrative espoused by the posters. If so, are there those who held different views and were anti-protest? If yes, why did they not engage? Unfortunately in the case of Friends in Conversation, the answers to these questions are at best, educated guesses. The other group in this discussion, The End Time Watchmen, may shed some light on these matters.

The End-Time Watchmen and Bersih 4 The End-Time Watchmen, also engaged heavily on the subject of street protests in the run up to Bersih 4. Similar to Friends in Conversation, the End-Time Watchmen generally does not discuss issues that are specific to Malaysia. However, due to the broad coverage and public awareness of the protests, the issue generated significant attention from the group leaders and members alike. In total, there were 11 posts that dealt with Bersih 4. 8 posts before the rally and 3 after. All of the posts were authored by Pastor Simon, the founder and de-facto leader of the End-Time Watchmen committee. All of the posts served to discourage members from participating in the protests, and Pastor Simon attempted to include scripture and spiritual reasoning behind why he was against the participation of Bersih 4. Unlike Friends in Conversation, however, most of the posts generated some level of engagement, with at least 10 comments on 5 of these posts. One post in particular lead to an extended discussion totalling up to 79 comments. The exchange on this post was particularly heated, and resulted in two members leaving the group. The following chart gives a breakdown of the topics and level of engagement (Table 7.2).

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Table 7.1 Breakdown of Facebook posts on the subject of Bersih 4 in Friends in Conversation

1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17

In favour/against participation of Subject matter Bersih 4 An open letter calling for then Minister for transpar- For ency, Paul Low, to quit Criticism of 1MDB, a state-owned strategic develFor opment company was a focal point of corruption allegations made toward then Prime Minister, Najib Razak Criticism of Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission For (MACC) Criticism of government cabinet not adequately For dealing with information that the Prime Minister allegedly received RM2.6 billion as a political donation into his private account Another open letter for Minister of transparency to For quit Pros and Cons of participating in a Bersih rally Neutral An article highlighting the impact of past Bersih For rallies The Bersih Strategy—what the rallies are meant to For achieve Response to a politician’s accusation towards Bersih For Bersih participants ¼ Good citizens For Responding to Deputy Home Minister, Nur Jazlan For Mohamed’s claim that the police have always been tolerant in past Bersih rallies Re-post of above article For Responding to a blog post suggest that Christians are For behind the protests, and are small bullies in the movement Mahathir and Bersih? Evaluating former Prime For Minister’s role in attending Bersih rally How Bersih need not be analyzed through ethnic lens For Bersih 4 reveals who the less intelligent politicians For are Reflections are the rally For

Likes Comments 2 2 2

0

1

0

4

0

2

0

2 3

0 0

5

0

2 4 4

0 0 2

5 5

0 8

2

10

3 2

2 1

1

0

The Post with 79 Comments Of particular interest is the post that generated 79 comments. Pastor Simon posted a topic, “Why I do not support Bersih”, which in the context of all eleven of his postings, is the one with the clearest indication of his personal views towards the Bersih rally. In this flagship status update, Pastor Simon claimed that “many go there for fun with no real purpose”, and made the claim that many go there to have picnics,

Bersih 4

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Table 7.2 Breakdown of Facebook posts on the subject of Bersih 4 in the End-Time Watchmen Topic/subject matter Is protest Biblical? Christians not at the front lines of protest—a post arguing that Christians are not the organizers of Bersih, for a reason 3 “Is Protest a Biblical Perspective”? 4 Bersih or “Kotor”a Rally? 5 I am not for Bersih—Pastor Simon’s reasons for why he opposes participation in the rally 6 Street rallies are misdirected zeal 7 “Slave Talk” 8 Explanation of biblical gathering of people, which is not in the form of street rallies like Bersih 4 9 Human views/heavenly thought—a post suggesting that while the rally may seem right in human eyes, it may not necessarily be God’s intention 10 A prayer for Malaysia 11 A Humble Plea—Pastor Simon attempting to close the topic by urging respect for all members with different views 1 2

In favour/against Query Against

Likes Comments 18 11 8 6

Query Against Against

11 8 16

14 11 79

Against 5 Only in comments 12 Against 12

0 16 1

Against

Prayer Reconciliation

8

0

19 26

9 7

“Kotor” is the Malay word for dirty, used in this context as a contrast to the Bersih rally, with “Bersih” being clean in the same language

a

have fun, take photos, and have a good time rather than participate in more meaningful ways in nation building. He ended the post with the assertion that Christians who do not go are probably doing something more spirituality productive than those who do. He goes on to say that “The protest/demonstration is like a VIRTUAL GAME or a JOKE to many would-be participants to the extreme neglect of the dangers and chaos it would cause”. He ended the post with a Bible verses from Psalm 30:10-12 “Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me: Lord, be thou my helper. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness; To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.” This post met with immediate questioning from a member, Siu, who argued that “those who are going for Bersih 4 are doing a serious and important thing. they are standing up for justice and righteousness in our nation”. This dispute sparked off a chain of comments debating the merits and Biblical perspective of protesting, with supporters and opposers both invoking Biblical examples for support. Mid-way through the thread, Ms Siu’s response is indicative at how convoluted the argument had become. She referred to Pastor Samuel and the others who opposed the Bersih rallies as people who unnecessarily complicated the intentions of the protestors: You guys or over-thinking and over-complicating things again. It's actually really simple. Bersih stands for free and fair elections. Should I as a Christian stand for free and fair elections? Of course I should. It is good, and right, and just. Therefore, as a Christian, I will stand with Bersih, in principle. Even if i can't or won't be there in body.

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While several commenters contributed to the post, the primary thread of argument was between eight members who disagreed with Pastor Simon’s post and position on the matter, and three other administrators who disagreed with the street rallies. The tension continued to escalate, with Cedric, a supporter of the Bersih movement, calling out the group administrators for being rude to those to disagree with them: Since this is about end time. . . I wonder if being sarcastic is of Christ?. . . Didn't the word of God taught us not to let corrupt word proceed out of our mouth that we may impart grace to the hearers eph 4:29? This is a closed group. It is OK to come out front and speak. If we disagree we share our reasoning why we disagree. . .

The administrators did not shift in their position, and they also did not offer a concession that left the members with the room to follow their own convictions. Jackson, one of the administrators, stated that the intentions of the Bersih movement has never been clear, and more importantly, Jesus never protested in such a manner to achieve any political goals during His time on earth. Pastor Simon initially replied directly to several of the comments, justifying his position, but after the prolonged exchange, posted a comment saying that “I believe my human instinct and natural responses to issues are surely not God’s way and the wise way”. That last statement infers that while participating in the rally may seem like the right thing to do, it was not God’s way of affecting political change. Referring to Cedric’s comment above, he was questioned regarding that, with a member asking if he was offended by the sarcasm of others, and that he should be mindful that Jesus employed sarcasm in the Bible. Cedric, disagreeing with the general tone of engagement at this point, bluntly stated that “best I leave this group”.

Discussion: Authority in an Online Community The main thrust of this chapter is to highlight that on a fundamental level, situating the two Facebook groups in the context of the Bersih 4 rally provides us with a straightforward opportunity to observe how some Malaysian Christians discuss socio-political issues in Malaysia. The scale of the rally stoked passionate conversation among many members, particularly in the End-Time Watchmen. These engagements contribute to our ongoing journey of seeing how in these “mediatized worlds”, everyday religion online happens, and are increasingly becoming part of individual spiritual activity. On a deeper level, the observation of the engagement has allowed us to evaluate the group dynamics further and consider their theoretical implications. Two key ideas emerge. Firstly, in both case studies, there is a re-assertion of traditional spiritual authority, where pastors, or other church leaders, continues to be the dominant gatekeeper of group ideologies. Secondly, as a continuation from previous chapters, we can also observe how even in groups that officially encourage open and free discourse on Christian issues, preferred ideologies exist, and are imposed and managed at different times.

Discussion: Authority in an Online Community

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Pastors are Social-Media Leaders Too One of the initial concerns about the emergence of online religion is its impact on church authority. Campbell observes that the “chief concern voiced by many traditional religious organizations, which are often characterised by firm institutional hierarchies, is that the Internet will lure people away from local churches and temple in favour of completely online religious experiences” (Campbell, 2010, p. 87). However, we’ve seen that pastors too are online citizens and are increasingly utilizing social media to engage with their audience, and that “religious leaders of various faiths can utilize multiple digital platforms and practice forms of strategic communication to elicit cross-level interactions with their adherents to build their organizational life” (Cheong, 2019, p. 107). This is evident in many ways in this chapter. Apart from the fact that religious institutions invest heavily in having a presence on the internet, there are religious leaders who actively approach social media as their spheres of influence. Both Friends in Conversation and the End-Time Watchmen have an undeniably strong pastoral influence. Friends in Conversation was founded by Pastor Sivin, who has been influential in the social-media scene in Malaysia, while the effort to establish the End-Time Watchmen was initiated and led by Pastor Simon. In the case of Friends in Conversation, the mode of engagement does see a more decentralized approach to posts and types of content, with Pastor Sivin only posting content occasionally. The End-Time Watchmen, in contrast, sees a lot of engagement from Pastor Simon. He actively plays a part in End-Time Watchmen in “constructing and cultivating mediated news, information, goods and services that circulate vigorously”, and that Cheong is right that “power is still connected to religious leadership” (Cheong, 2019, p. 115). Often, as is the case for Bersih 4, he was the sole, or final authority on the subject with very little resistance. So, while these platforms allow for contestations of power by various members, the traditional perception of spiritual authority, to a certain extent, still lies with conventional religious leaders. We can see some new voices, but the traditional role of the “pastor” echoes strongly throughout.

Management of Core Values Working in tandem with the establishing of individual identity is the management of the group when it comes to core values. In the previous discussion on the End-Time Watchmen, the notion that online communities have preferred ideologies was discussed, and is evidently demonstrated in the above case study. When it came to Bersih 4, prominent members of both groups were active in pressing home their point, with Friends in Conversation strongly supporting the participation of the street rally, and the End-Time Watchmen opposing it. When it comes to online communication styles, I borrow from Baum’s (2012) categorisations of “preaching to the choir” and “converting the flock”. Applying this

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concept in his study of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, he states that Obama’s online engagement was tailored to reinforce the message to his own base of support, thus preaching to the choice; while on other platforms, such as talk shows and other news engagements, his messaging was designed to convert the flock and persuade and convince others to shift their support to him. The context of Baum’s writing is based on political blogs, to which he says “functions primarily as an arena for partisan and ideological self-selection” (Baum, 2012, p. 192). As an update, I posit that in online communities where levels of interaction between members, who are all content creators, groups may be forced into a position where they are inadvertently and simultaneously preaching to the choir and converting to the flock. This is demonstrated through Pastor Simon’s series of posts discouraging members from attending the rally. These posts receive “likes”, and comments supporting his views, but faced dissent among some members as well. The “choir”, in this scenario, required no further response since their agreement pose no problems to the preferred ideological position of the administrators (or Pastor Simon, at least), While the “flock” of dissenters, were systematically corrected by multiple administrators up to the point where they felt that there was no further value in engaging the group, and subsequently leaving. It is also worth noting that amidst the accusation of sarcasm and personal attacks in the above case of Cedric’s dialogue with the group, no member came to his defense. In summary, it was a form of silencing dissent, promoting group ideology, and deferring to pastoral authority

Conclusion Dawson and Cowan state that while the internet mediates innovative forms of expression, “life in cyberspace is not quite as unusual a place as sometimes predicted. Life in cyberspace is in continuity with so-called real life, and this holds true for religion as well” (Dawson & Cowan, 2004, p. 1). When it comes to particular issues, the leaders’ preferred ideology surfaces when it matters. The matter of a street protest is current, has physical implications, and may potentially affect action. The need to address this particular issue prompted a campaign either for or against the protest in order to preach to the choir—affirming the like-minded, or converting the flock—encouraging more people to attend the rally, or engaging with members to assert the dominant position. Despite the promise of free speech, the freedom to participate/not participate was not evident in both discourses—rather the assumption that everyone in the group must be on the same page. This is a form of ideological reproduction. The reproduction of pastoral authority, and the systemic construction of a group’s core ideological belief, lends to the idea that freedom of speech, like in the offline world, has its limits.

Chapter 8

Conclusion: Locating the Offline in the Online and Vice-Versa in Malaysian Christianity

The aim of this book was to find out how the Internet has been utilized by Malaysian Christians to express their faith. To that end, this book has presented a considerably wide array of Christian practices and expressions on the Internet. Initially, my experience and expectation of “online religion” was limited to visiting church websites and searching for Christian bloggers who wrote a lot about church or their Christian life. But over the course of conducting fieldwork and writing the book, I have come to realize that there is more to online religion than what is visually apparent. It became clear to me very early on that every religious website has the potential to be authored, accessed, and experienced by people, and that these interactions could all potentially play a role in a person’s spiritual identity. This created an approach to online religion that necessitates the observation of the offline because the observable data is not limited to the computer screen, but also in the everyday life of my informants. In short, online religion is everyday religion. The fieldwork process has allowed me to observe the many ways in which some Malaysian Christians’ incorporate the Internet into their everyday rituals and Christian expressions. Blogging and other forms of online social-networking serve as good examples of how contemplating and worshiping can be done in “an expressive, embodied fashion” (Talafierro, 2004, p. 245). Although what is seen on a computer screen are digital pixels, it is still representative of the embodiment of the different people who are accessing the Internet to author and achieve certain goals, be it to share their beliefs, contend with the church on various issues, or voice dissent toward unfavorable government policies. This was done through paying attention to the offline contexts in which online expressions are created. Both are, as argued numerous times throughout the book, inter-related and equally real in its representation of any case study or event.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0_8

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Deconstructing the Online/Offline Boundary in Online Religion About how individuals consider online activities such as blogging Christian content an aspect of their everyday expressions of Christianity, several case studies were presented to show how online rituals contribute significantly to my informants’ continuous configuration of their Christian identities. One of my informants, Alfred, called his blogging habits “the thing that helps me with getting along in life and helps me negotiate everyday”. This is not unlike Alpha, who describes his dependence on blogging “in the same sense that I depend on electricity and telephone. It’s part and parcel of the daily life, the Internet is not a separate thing”. This, along with the other examples in the book, suggests that cyber-expressions of spirituality are deeply embedded in the lives of these bloggers. These expressions, as I argued has a dual role in reinforcing (internal) and expressing (external) the identity and belief of a believer. These developments resonate with the theory of mediatized religion, where it is increasingly difficult to discuss religion without discussing media (Zeiler, 2019). Therefore one must pay close attention to the intricate relationship between cyberspace and its users, particularly in the context of everyday religion and Christianity. Through the case studies looked at, it is evident that cyberspace is not merely a repository of information; neither is it just a virtual environment in which individuals can become whoever they want to be. Rather, the Internet is linked to the personal and evolving reality of individuals, and thus cannot be considered purely “virtual”. If the result of blogging or participating in other social networks intrinsically adds value to an individual’s Christian identity, then there must be a certain authenticity in the practice of blogging or participating in a social network group. The experiential authenticity of these non-material environments and platforms is keenly debated both in academia and the church. The point to consider is that if social actors experience emotion, change, friendships, among others, then there must be some tangible reality within the online network. Meredith McGuire is right in that “expressive activities in which spiritual meanings and understandings are embedded in and accomplished through the body” (McGuire, 2006, p. 188). The exact nature of online authenticity is admittedly difficult to pinpoint. The difference in opinion lies in how one defines a “community” or a “spiritual experience”. Rather than endlessly discussing whether an “online community” is a real community or not, more analytical thinking could be spent in making sense of what and how different aspects of online practices are directly associated with the felt-reality of the users sociologically, spiritually, and psychologically. To that end, my book has tracked closely a network of actors, whether online or offline, to see how a Christian individual’s self-identity is framed, which in turn provides a broader picture on why certain online expressions are authored the way they are. This process is inspired by ANT, where a researcher should carefully identify the nodes in which a broader and more inclusive narrative of actors and

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actants can be presented. This is especially evident in the case study of Stark in Chap. 3, where an examination of her family’s circumstances is clearly linked to the manner she approaches the act of blogging in her life. Looking through the detailed narrative of Stark’s life, one can also begin to fathom the impact of the blog on her family. Said differently, the reality of her blog, despite its digital make-up, is material to Stark’s life. The reality of cyberspace is also true for church pastors. In the particular case of Pastor Sivin (discussed in Chap. 4), he has genuine online friendships which contribute to his spiritual life in a significant way. The analytical point that I have consistently made throughout the book is to recognize that the Internet is predominantly still authored by people. Although I also make the case that online material and artefacts are in fact actors in their own right despite being non-human and can affect other networks and actors without their original authors the primary subject of my study is still the human person. In every sphere of influence and platform that I have discussed in this book, I show not only how the Internet allows for new practices to surface and change the way Christianity has been practiced, but also how old practices and boundaries are recreated and reinforced online by individuals, churches, and the government. The internet is free, people are not. I referred to the notion of Donna Haraway’s social cyborg (Haraway, 1990) and its binary make-up of flesh and machine on a number of occasions, noting the paradox that for any individual to try new things, it has to be in relation to the old. For instance, despite Stark’s freedom to write her Christian testimony about her and her family, the fear of talking about God to her parents remains true even online, resulting in her never daring to show the blog to her parents. Similarly, we see this same paradox in the case of the blog Calvary Today. In its attempts to subvert the authority of Calvary Church by exposing the secrets of the church leaders and demanding for a transparent approach, their blog is still shrouded in secrecy, anonymity, and censorship. These dualities are crucial because it forces us to consider the internet in new (or old, depending on how one looks at it) ways. We can study expression on the internet as a fountain of new content, revealing something new about society and culture, or as a mirror, as internet content reflects the lived reality of our lives in a public manner.

Everyday Religion Within Organized Religion Two key arguments mooted in this book are that the conventional binary of online/ offline and everyday/organized religion are restrictive perspectives of both the Internet and religion. As the previous section demonstrates, it is incomplete to study the online without considering it in relation to the offline and vice-versa. By attributing equal value to both the online and offline, we can begin to see how an individual is shaped by a larger network of intersecting components. Apart from the online/offline binary, another inseparable component I identified was that in the field of everyday religion, one must study both the formal and personal religious rituals and practices associated with the particular religion. This

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means that in the case of Christianity, one cannot leave the church on the sidelines like a guest actor, an enemy, or merely “acknowledge” their contribution to the everyday practices of church members. Instead, it is important to incorporate the study of how churches respond to the rise of Internet usage by its members, and how members use the Internet as a means to engage in new forms of communication with the church. Related to the above is the inseparability of church pastors and his/her members. This book has featured both lay-Christians and pastors on a recurring basis, because pastors too experience “everyday religion”. It is likely that due to their official capacity as a leader of any given church, their everyday usage and experience of the Internet are different from most of their church members. It is equally important to identify their perspectives and practices in relation to that of their members. By providing complementary and opposing perspectives, we can begin to identify the fault lines of the online-offline debate of authenticity and authority.

Future Directions, Limitations, and Parting Thoughts There are a number of limitations in my research project. This book in many ways does not represent all Malaysian Christians, and some of the limitations provide for interesting possibilities for future research in Malaysian online Christianity/religion. Firstly, the demographics of my informants indicate that most of them are based either in Kuala Lumpur, or in nearby urban areas. While this has been a workable sample which has generated interesting stories, one should not presume that all urban areas in Malaysia are the same. Also, the urban context automatically disregards the sub-urban and non-urban Christians in Malaysia, who might not be fluent in English (as all of my participants are). Also, what do Malaysian Christians with limited Internet access do when they have the opportunity to go online? Due to the limitations of time and resources, these areas of interest were not explored. Secondly, all the informants who participated in this research project are ethnic Chinese. This was not done intentionally as ethnicity was not a criterion in my recruiting of participants. However, I do recognize that other ethnic groups, would present different conversion and experiential narratives that would add depth and diversity into my study. Apart from the geographical, ethnic and linguistic limitations, there are also limitations to how inter-religious affairs are represented in this book. Although I discuss some online inter-religious affairs in this book, there remains much to be described and discussed with regard to how other religious groups in Malaysia adapt to online environments. Christianity is not the only religion that has national issues to contend with, and online inter-religious interactions do not solely revolve around Christianity and Islam. Further research into areas such as “online Islam” or “online Buddhism”, for example, can serve to contribute to a more representative view of online religion in Malaysia.

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In the introduction of this book I emphasized the importance of recording the dynamics of interaction between Christianity and the Internet. This is because Christianity is not a stagnant religion. Since its inception roughly 2000 years ago Christianity has interacted with new societies, technologies, and challenges in tandem with the world’s cultural and technological modernization. As an example, the early church recorded in the Bible involved members moving from house to house for Christian gatherings of worship and socializing. Localized conflicts, should they arise, were resolved by appointed leaders of particular communities.1 The larger conflicts pertaining to the expanding Christian world (issues such as doctrinal application and conversion of non-Jews—themes not too unfamiliar to the modern world) would be dealt with by the Council of Jerusalem. Today, with the advent of the Internet, moving from “house to house” could potentially mean going from one blog to another blog or one forum to another, depending on how one interprets “house” and what purpose it serves. While the church leadership still has considerable clout and authority in managing its own affairs, less and less mishaps are left forgotten or swept under the carpet. Disagreements are finding its way to the public domain of the Internet, either through coverage by the mass media or by personal blogs and forum posts. Issues are no longer limited to a top-down approach. On the other hand, pastors are not necessarily left behind, as they are also fully capable of learning to lead their members in new ways, and use the Internet to their advantage to consolidate their authority. Internationally, Christians have been jumping on the technology bandwagon, with the first fully Virtual Reality (VR) church established in the United States recently2; churches adopting bitcoin offerings, crowdfunding their ministry through Patreon, and more. It is not necessary to presume that Malaysian Christianity in 2019 must evolve in the direction of video-casts, online 3D churches, and virtual pilgrimages,3 rather the broader point is to look out where online interactions are happening. Currently, the Malaysian religious cyberspace is burgeoning with activity. While the use of blogs are on the downtrend, activities are sprouting out from an individual level where more and more people (pastors included) are turning to other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other spaces for new social links and additional resources, to the national level, where informal online communities are learning the ropes to making their voice heard on the national arena. Another significant development in Malaysia is the post-Barisan Nasional context in Malaysia. The general elections in 2018 saw the ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional (BN),4 lose power for the first time in 61 years. The opposition coalition, Pakatan

1

See the Book of Acts in the Bible. https://www.vrchurch.org/ 3 Damansara Utama Methodist Church is one of the first churches in Malaysia to provide live feeds of its church services. 4 From 1957 to 1973, the coalition was known as the Alliance Party, comprising United Malay National Organization, Malayan Chinese Association, and the Malayan Indian Congress. A new coalition was set up and expanded in 1973 with these three political parties as the core parties. 2

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Harapan’s (PH)5 rise to power was the first change in Malaysia’s government since independence in 1957. The electoral victory by the opposition was unprecedented, but not without warning. In 2008, for the first time since 1969, the opposition parties managed to win control of 5 states out of 13, and broke two-thirds parliamentary monopoly, stripping the government of the ability to amend the constitution easily. This was followed by the elections in 2013, where the ruling coalition stayed in power with enough seats in parliament, but had lost the popular vote with only 49% of support. The opposition parties, led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, continued the momentum to claim victory in 2018. The socio-political environment since then has been unpredictable. Firstly, Malaysians are looking forward to a liberalized media industry that is free from government control and propaganda. While no large-scale reforms in this area has taken place to date, there has at least been no reports of government intervention in news reporting. Whether this new media environment will allow more non-Muslim content to be featured in mainstream media, and whether social-media can facilitate and foster a more robust dialogue between communities in Malaysia remain to be seen. Secondly, while race and religion has, quite unusually, taken a backseat to the corruption scandal associated with Prime Minister Najib Razak and 1MDb during the campaign period,6 it does not mean race and religion does not matter in Malaysia anymore. While there was an air of optimism immediately after the change of government that a more inclusive, tolerant, and harmonious society will emerge, it did not take long for certain quarters to mark their political territories by galvanizing the conservative segment of the Malay-Muslim community. A massive protest opposing the ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) took place in, with concerns that it would threaten the special status of the Malay community as enshrined in the constitution. The new government was also pressured into withdrawing from ratifying the Rome Statute, an international court of last resort to try crimes involving genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression, in part due to the sentiment that the statue threatens the position of the Sultans in Malaysia. How these sentiments impact inter-racial/religious relations are crucial for Malaysia’s future, and the internet may be the most data-rich avenue to assess grassroot sentiments and engagement. A Facebook group, Projek Dialog, that attempts to stimulate multicultural debate and engagements, and has 25,000 members to date, is one such example and an avenue for further research. Their boldness in engaging various religious issues in the country has drawn both praise and ire from the Facebook community. The offline impact of these online Christian endeavors continues to intrigue me. While this book has made the case that on an individual level, people’s lives

5

Pakatan Harapan comprises Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), the Democratic Action Party (DAP), Amanah, and Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM). 6 1MDB—1Malaysia Development Berhad is a government-run strategic development company that has been accused of channeling money to the private account of Prime Minister Najib Razak.

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can change through their online spiritual activities, this is harder to gauge on an institutional level. The issues surrounding Calvary Church has quietened, and the blogs that engaged those matters are no longer active now. However, at micro levels, there are tangible consequences that we can build upon. The book published by the members of Friends in Conversation, “The Bible and the Ballot” serves as an important milestone when identifying productive online Christian communities in Malaysia. I anticipate that there is much to come with regard to new and creative ways in which Christians in Malaysia express their spirituality on the Internet. By this I do not necessarily mean just new social-networking platforms or an increase in Christian bloggers. It could also mean important issues being played out on the mainstream and alternative media, more global friendships to be established through existing Christian online networks, and distance learning in Bible schools. Christianity has proven that it has a longevity that has spanned, survived, and repeatedly reinvented itself over a very long period. If people continue to experience new things in new ways and allow Christian communities to engage each other in spiritually meaningful ways, it is within reason to conclude that online Christianity will continue to develop and play a significant role in defining Christianity for the foreseeable future. The possibilities are endless at present.

References

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Index

A Actants/actors, 27, 38, 54, 174–176 Actor-network theory (ANT), 16, 21, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 42–43, 54, 78, 174 actor-network, 16, 21, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 54, 78, 174 nodes, 174 tracing, 36 Affordance/affords/affordances, 1, 2, 15, 51, 119, 131, 161 Agora, 14, 155, 156 Allah, issue, 14, 18, 140, 149, 157, 159 Ammerman, N., 28, 29, 32, 107 Anonymous/anonymity, 2, 25, 42, 59, 73, 83, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 97, 175 Authenticity/authentic, 2, 4–7, 11, 17, 37, 39, 40, 66, 69, 115, 120–122, 162, 174, 176 Authority, 1–4, 11, 16, 17, 19, 37, 81, 83–123, 126, 131, 134–138, 157, 162, 164, 165, 170–172, 175–177

B Barisan Nasional (BN), 13, 137, 149, 163, 177 Baum, M., 171, 172 Bersih 4/Bersih, 18, 19, 126, 134, 138, 149, 162–171 Bible and the Ballot, 154, 156, 179 Bible Gateway, 108 Bordered/boundary/boundaries, 1, 6, 7, 17, 21– 26, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 46, 51, 56, 57, 63, 66, 69–77, 84, 86, 97, 98, 103, 104, 133, 158, 161, 162, 174–175 Bourdieu, P., 34, 35 Brasher, B., 4, 7, 25, 61

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 M. Y. Tan, Malaysian Christians Online, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2833-0

C Callon, M., 42 Calvary church, 86–90, 92–97, 99, 102, 175, 179 Calvary Today, 83, 84, 86, 88–99, 102, 106, 107, 152, 175 Campbell, H.A., 2–4, 11, 37, 85, 123, 171 Charismatic, 53, 56, 57, 130 Cheong, P.H., 4, 9, 10, 37, 85, 86, 99, 101, 103, 108, 116, 117, 121, 122, 171 Christian Federation of Malaysia (CFM), 14, 87, 141, 143, 152, 154, 157, 158, 164 Christian Fellowship (CF), 52, 56, 69, 71, 74 Citizen journalism, 9, 25, 143 Communications and Multimedia Act, 140 Community/online community, 4, 10, 11, 13– 15, 17–19, 21, 22, 26, 28, 34, 37, 39, 49, 59–64, 67–69, 85, 87, 99, 101, 117, 121, 123–138, 141, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152– 154, 157–159, 161, 162, 164, 170–172, 174, 178 Conversion, 12, 14, 17, 52–55, 70, 71, 73, 77, 84, 159, 176, 177 Cowan, D., 3, 7, 84, 172 Crossley, N., 31, 33 Cyborg/cyborg theory/Donna Haraway/ cyborgian, 70, 75, 84, 86, 98, 175

D Dawson, L.L., 7, 84, 172 Disagreement/dissent/disagreements, 10, 17, 19, 58, 69, 85, 87–88, 99–102, 105–107, 120, 129, 130, 135, 149, 157, 158, 172, 173, 177 Durkheim, É., 33

187

188 E Emergent church, 74 End-Time Watchmen, 17, 46, 124–134, 136, 165–167, 170, 171 Engelke, M., 30 E-Sword, 108 Ethnography/online ethnography, 2, 38–43, 48 Evangelical, 5, 6, 10, 29, 45, 53, 57, 62 Everyday religion/everyday Christianity/ everyday religious practices, 11, 16, 17, 21–49, 51, 56, 60, 103, 106, 109, 159, 170, 173–175 Experience/experiences, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9–11, 14–17, 21, 22, 25, 27–30, 32, 33, 36–38, 40–42, 47, 48, 51–81, 83, 100, 103, 106, 107, 111, 112, 120, 121, 123, 137, 139, 171, 173, 174, 176, 179

F Facebook, 3, 8–11, 13, 17–19, 22, 27, 41, 43–48, 62, 64, 66–68, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 116, 120–125, 127, 129–133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 152–159, 161–172, 177, 178 Facebook Messenger, 41 Farrell, J., 5 Fellowship of Evangelical Students (FES), 52 Fernback, J., 23, 25, 98 Foucault, M., 76 Friends in Conversation, 9, 18, 121, 122, 132, 134, 138, 152–159, 164–167, 171, 179 Fung, A., 26, 27

G Google Talk, 41 Grey Matter Research, 7, 8

H Habitus, 7, 34, 35 See also Bourdieu Haraway, D., see Cyborg Helland, C., 2, 4–6, 8, 11, 37, 61, 63 Hepp, A., 124, 134, 136 Hierarchy/hierarchies/hierarichal, 3, 4, 16, 37, 84, 91, 97, 98, 135, 162, 171 Hine, C., 39 Hinn, B., 128 Howard, R.G., 6, 11, 30, 153, 154, 165 Huffington Post, 128 Hunt, S., 34 Hutchings, T., 2

Index I Identities/identity, 2, 4, 5, 7, 16–19, 34, 37, 41, 51–81, 83, 84, 89, 94, 95, 109, 120, 122, 131, 135, 136, 161, 171, 173, 174 Identity formation, 28 Interactive/interactivity, 3, 5, 6, 8, 15, 22, 24, 25, 40, 51, 59, 61, 62, 70, 95, 98, 118, 131, 152 Internet access, see Internet penetration rate Internet penetration rate, 13 Internet World Stats, 13

J Johnson, B., 128 Jones, S., 23, 24, 84

K King, E.F., 5, 28 Kozinets, R.V., 40, 41 Krotz, F., 124, 134, 136

L Latour, B., 27, 35, 36, 42, 43, 78, 132 Lee, J., 5, 12, 13 Lina Joy, 12 Lövheim, M., 4, 7, 37, 84

M MacWilliams, M.W., 70 Malaysia Insider, 140, 152 Malaysiakini, 140, 143, 144, 152 Malaysian Christianity, 18, 86, 91, 139–145, 152, 161, 162, 173–179 Malaysia Today, 14, 154, 157 Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), 21, 22, 25, 39 Material/materiality, 2, 11, 21–28, 33, 39, 41, 55, 64, 75, 83, 109, 110, 118, 125, 159, 162, 174, 175 McGuire, M., 28, 32, 33, 62, 107, 118, 174 McLuhan, M., 15 Mediatization/mediatized, 124, 131, 134, 136, 170, 174 Mega-church/mega-churches, 7, 83, 117, 118 Micah Mandate, 14, 149–154, 159 Mitev, N., 36

N National Evangelical Christian Fellowship (NECF), 87, 143, 152, 155, 157, 158, 164

Index New Creation Church, 100 Now Stand, 83, 88, 92–99, 106 The Nutgraph, 140, 152

O Olive Tree, 108 Online religious communities, 2, 19, 123, 125, 131, 136, 162 Online/offline, 6, 7, 11, 21, 22, 25, 36–38, 40, 61, 73, 85, 123, 134, 152, 174–175 Orgad, S., 40 Osteen, J., 119, 128

P Pakatan Harapan (PH), 177, 178 Pakatan Rakyat, 149, 150 Pastor/pastors, 8, 15–17, 38, 41, 45–49, 57, 58, 62–66, 69, 74, 79, 83–122 Pope John Paul II, 3 Prince, J., 100, 128 Projek Dialog, 178

R Radde-Antweiller, K., 4, 37 Reality/realities/lived realities, 4, 22, 24, 30, 39, 70, 75, 76, 124, 174, 175 Relationship/relationships/online relationship/ online relationships, 1, 4, 5, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22, 26, 28–30, 33, 35, 36, 38–40, 51, 59, 61–66, 69, 71, 73, 74, 79, 83, 85, 86, 106, 107, 115, 116, 121, 122, 133, 134, 137, 139, 156, 159, 161, 162 Revelations, 117, 126, 143 Ritual/rituals/ritualistic, 2, 4, 6, 11, 15, 16, 21, 29–34, 37, 63, 64, 103, 107, 115, 159, 175

189 Spiritual experience/spiritual experiences, 3, 4, 6, 10, 16, 30, 33, 37, 61, 70, 71, 85, 110, 115, 119, 121, 162, 174 Stone, A.R., 23, 26 Surtsey, 123–136

T Tan, J.-E., 9, 12, 13, 86, 89, 98, 99, 149 Technologically deterministic/determinism, 3 Technorati, 98 Television evangelism, 2 Testimony/testimonies, 3, 9, 11, 32, 67, 71, 72, 80, 81, 106, 111, 112, 116, 175 Tomlinson, M., 30 Tumblr, 67–69 Twitter, 3, 8, 11, 45, 67, 118, 119, 121, 141, 177 2008 General Elections, 13, 149

U Utusan Malaysia, 142–145

V Valentine’s Day, 12, 141–142 Vasseleu, C., 22, 24 Vatican, 3 Virtual reality (VR), 2, 16, 22, 177

W Whatsapp, 41, 48 Wikileaks, 14, 25 Winzeler, R., 31 Won Buddhist, 5 Woo, J., 154, 155

Y Young, G., 2, 6 S Skype, 23, 41, 48, 64, 113, 120, 121 Social network/social networking, 1–3, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 21, 45, 67, 122, 131, 141, 142, 146, 174

Z Zawawi Ibrahim, 86 Zeiler, X., 136, 174