First Things on Blogs
Jonathan Last has written a thorough survey of religious blogdom and more at First Things. It's already outdated a bit (8 million blogs? more like 21 million), but it's very good. Excerpts:
According to a 2004 Pew survey, 64 percent of Internet-using Americans–82 million people–say they use the web for religious purposes. They are more likely to be female, white, middle aged, and college educated. Catholics and Jews tend to use the Internet slightly more heavily than Protestants. Half of these users report that they attend church at least once a week. . . .
Unlike the big corporate sites, Godblogs have smaller readerships, ranging anywhere from Fructus Ventris, a blog run by a midwife, which gets about 115 page-views a day, to Amy Welborn's Open Book, which gets nearly twelve thousand. (In the world of Godblogs, more than two thousand page-views a day makes you a fairly heavy hitter.) . . .
(I was interested to see that parenthetical stat. TDE garners 50,000-60,000 page views per month, so it's a "fairly heavy hitter. Of course, whether it qualifies as a "Godblog" is another matter.)
John Mark Reynolds [says], “Most Godblogs in the United States are going to end up being Roman Catholic because most people who are Christian in the United States, in the Nicene Christian sense, are Roman Catholic. . . . And taken as a whole in our culture, it has been harder for traditional theists to get a microphone than for secularists–at least in print. So blogging has been, by and large, better for the right religiously than for the left.” Or, as Father Sibley puts it, “Orthodox blogs get more readership just as Rush Limbaugh gets more listeners than Air America does.”
But the left has its own web presence. Father Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation makes good use of the Internet at CAC Radical Grace, with online bookstores, an electronic version of the center's Meditation Garden, and even a section of Rohr's thoughts that functions like a blog. Mel White's SoulForce, a group dedicated to stopping “spiritual violence” against homosexuals, also has a sophisticated website, as do the Paulists with Busted Halo.
Busted Halo calls itself a site for “seekers,” meaning those interested in finding a spiritual home. But more often than not it is simply a clearinghouse for leftist discontent. After Ronald Reagan died, the site's director emeritus, Father Brett Hoover, wrote, "I couldn't help it. 'Good riddance,' I mumbled, as the news came through that Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States, had died on Saturday, June 5, 2004."
I found the observations about Busted Halo interesting, as well. I used to write for them, having been introduced to Fr. Hoover through a common friend. Hoover wanted a little more "balance" on the site, which basically meant me and another guy on the traditional/orthodox side, the other dozen or so writers on the heterodox. He gave me broad discretion to write whatever I wanted and paid well, but when he left, the interim editor panned one of my drafts because the slant wasn't conventionally leftist. I left, then a little while later saw Hoover's disturbingly-uncharitable words about deceased Reagan. I never went back, even though I thought highly of Hoover up to that bizarro-eulogy.
