On a recent morning in Manhattan, a dozen or so reporters and editors from Beliefnet, a website devoted to religion and spirituality, squeezed into a conference room ready to discuss the news of the day.
“Obama wasn’t as electrifying as I’d forecast,” said Dan Gilgoff, Beliefnet’s political editor, who had just returned from New Hampshire, where the political campaign was in full swing.
“What about Huckabee? Was he preacher-like?” asked Deborah Caldwell, Beliefnet’s managing editor.
“Well, everywhere Huckabee goes, he has Chuck Norris by his side,” Gilgoff replied, referring to the B-movie martial arts star and born-again Christian. The room erupted in laughter.
For Beliefnet, these are busy times. Super Tuesday, which featured two-dozen state primaries and caucuses, was followed hard by Ash Wednesday. In addition to political coverage, Caldwell and her team were juggling features on chronic pain, the top 10 spiritual moments from American Idol and the Beliefnet Film Awards. Someone had also proposed reviving the annual I Hate Lent blog. “A lot of people do hate Lent,” Caldwell agreed.
The morning meeting was a reminder of the ubiquity of religion in American life – from politics to pop culture – and hinted at the currents that are propelling Beliefnet. Each month, more than three million visitors flock to the site, according to ComScan, the media metrics company, making it the most popular religion destination on the internet.
One measure of Beliefnet’s influence is that it managed in this hectic election season to land exclusive interviews with several of the top US presidential candidates, including Mike Huckabee, John McCain, John Edwards and Barack Obama. Edwards talked about the importance of faith after the death of his son. Huckabee disclosed that the Lord gave him wisdom for the Iowa debates. And Obama reiterated that he is not Muslim, and said he prays each night that he is “an instrument of God’s will”. The two candidates who refused Beliefnet – Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani – were among the first to drop out of the race. All this from a site that did not exist a decade ago.
Beliefnet’s clout seems destined to grow. In December, the company was acquired by News Corporation, the media goliath controlled by Rupert Murdoch. The companies did not disclose the price, although it is believed to have been about $40m. The sale caps a remarkable turnaround for an internet start-up that was mired in bankruptcy just a few years ago. Beliefnet was so financially strapped in the wake of the dotcom crash that the handful of employees who were lucky enough to keep their jobs took turns cleaning the company toilets.
Beliefnet, though, is not just a tale of internet resurrection. It also offers a glimpse at how the web is changing the way people practise religion, just as it has transformed dating, sex, politics, media and just about every other aspect of modern life.
The Pew Internet & American Life Report found that nearly two-thirds of internet users have gone online for religious reasons. “Religion occupies a huge amount of the cyber-landscape,” says Susan Harding, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. On that landscape, Beliefnet has emerged as a sort of spiritual Wal-Mart, with everything under one roof, and easily accessible. Predictably, it draws droves of evangelical Christians, who were also the first to take advantage of radio, and then television, when each was considered new media. Yet logging on beside the Evangelicals are Jews, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims and even atheists – who turn out to be outspoken about their belief in unbelief.
There are also religious nomads who may have grown up in one tradition but now borrow from many, and people who consider themselves “spiritual” but not religious. And there are some who might view yoga and a trip to the local organic market as their connection to a higher power. “The site is sprawling, like American religion itself. It kind of goes everywhere,” says Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University and author of the recent book Religious Literacy.
Gustav Niebuhr, director of the Religion and Society Programme at Syracuse University, calls Beliefnet “one of the ultimate expressions of religious pluralism” that was set in motion by the Pilgrims more than 300 years ago. “That’s the beauty of the web,” he says.
Beliefnet was not supposed to be a website. “Originally, I wanted to do a print magazine because that was all I knew how to do,” says Steven Waldman, Beliefnet’s founder and editor-in-chief, at the company’s headquarters on 23rd street, just off a not-so-glitzy stretch of Park Avenue.
If the company is flush with News Corp cash, a casual visitor would never know it. The space is the same one Beliefnet occupied when it was struggling through bankruptcy, and is generally characterised by drab carpets, cubicles and uncovered fluorescent lights. A pair of Webby Awards sit on a desktop, seemingly forgotten amid a pile of religious books.
Waldman, aged 45, is also understated. “He doesn’t fit the mould of what people think of as an internet entrepreneur,” says Eric Hippeau, managing partner at SoftBank Capital, one of Beliefnet’s backers. “He’s not [Facebook’s] Mark Zuckerberg. He’s not a young technologist who just came out of college.”
Tall and lean, Waldman speaks in a quiet, deliberate manner, and if his hair were a bit longer, he might be described as vaguely Christ-like. During our meeting, he methodically rolls and unrolls a length of green silk on his desk. I assume it is some sort of eastern prayer cloth used in meditation rituals; it turns out to be nothing more than a discarded piece of fabric and a nervous tic. Waldman was an editor at US News & World Report, the weekly news magazine, in the 1990s when he began to think about launching a religious magazine. It was an article of faith among editors there that slapping a religious subject on the cover (“Do Angels Exist?”; “Who Was Jesus?”) tended to spike newsstand sales.
“The spiritual landscape is radically different to what it was 20 or 40 years ago,” he says, laying out three key changes that have benefited Beliefnet. The first was a boom in the market for religious media – a trend borne out by a visit to any big book store. The second was a greater willingness among people to change or adjust their religion to something other than what they practised while growing up. The third, and perhaps most dramatic, was demographic. “The main thing driving this spirituality boom is the ageing of the baby boomers. If you plot when people tend in their lifecycle to be most interested in spirituality, it’s a very predictable path,” Waldman says. He sketches a graph on a scrap of paper that shows spirituality increasing on a diagonal slope as people confront illness, the death of parents and – ultimately – their own passing.
Though not terribly religious himself, Waldman encountered spiritual questions as he grew older. One milestone was his marriage, as a Reform Jew, to a Presbyterian. Another was having children. “We were trying to figure out what to do with them and how to raise them,” he recalls.
In 1998, he began approaching potential investors with a plan for a magazine about religion that would help people explore issues of faith. But it was near the height of the internet boom, and Waldman tended to get the same response each time he knocked on a venture capitalist’s door: “Good luck with that. If you ever turn it into a website, give us a call.” Eventually, Waldman took the advice to heart. With $26m from a group of venture capital firms, he launched Beliefnet.com in 1999.
While Waldman was flexible about the project’s business plan, there was one point from which he would not retreat: the site’s multi-faith approach. The conventional wisdom was that any religious publication would have to focus on a particular sect in order to have a coherent voice and attract an audience. Jews, for example, would probably not want to read too much about Evangelicals each month, and vice versa.
But Waldman argued that that logic, while true for a print magazine, did not extend to the internet. “On a website, people can inherently customise their own experience … People can go to their own area,” he explains. Consider ESPN.com, which draws millions of sports fans of every stripe – be they ardent supporters of the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees, Arsenal or Manchester United. The internet allows the visitor to read only about his or her team, or about every team and even different leagues.
As it turned out, the multi-faith approach also made good business sense: it allowed corporations to talk to spiritually minded people without appearing to endorse any one religion.
Early on, at least, Beliefnet committed the same sins as other first-generation websites, essentially replicating traditional print journalism on the web. It also focused heavily on current events. Elizabeth Sams, a co-founder, called it “a Newsweek on religion”.
Gradually, though, the editors began to take advantage of the new medium’s possibilities. One innovation was the Prayer Library, which offers visitors hundreds of different blessings, each tuned to different occasions and traditions, and easily searched and sorted. Another was the Belief-O-Matic, which matches people to religions according to their answers to a 20-question quiz. (Although I was raised a Jew, I discovered I might be better off as a Universal Unitarian). Beliefnet also began to do “push” marketing by sending out millions of daily inspirational e-mails offering what Waldman refers to as “daily spiritual nourishment”. It is a commodity especially appealing to the site’s main audience – women over 35.
Beliefnet’s soul, however, is its boisterous discussion groups, blogs and social networking features, which loudly reject the old saw that it is not polite to discuss religion. A recent visit featured people comparing views on the afterlife and the existence of angels, debating whether Christians should force their views on others, studying the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, and even unravelling the mysteries of asexuality and “furries” (individuals who like to dress up as animals).
Just as the internet’s anonymity seems to have freed people to pursue their strangest and most embarrassing sexual curiosities, it also allows them to speak with great candour about religion – questioning beliefs, sharing doubts they might not ever air in church and sometimes displaying prejudice.
One discussion group, entitled Christians Exploring Other Spiritualities, featured a lively crowd, including a daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher who had begun attending drum circles, an unhappy, church-going mother of two who has taken to tarot cards and a host of other “seekers”. “Hi. I’m new here – and still learning how to do this,” writes one. “It’s been great reading what everyone has written! I find it encouraging!”
In this way, Beliefnet and other websites may be loosening organised religion’s grip on faith and handing it over to members of the congregation, just as bloggers sometime upstage the evening news. Syracuse University’s Gustav Niebuhr believes that, contrary to popular perception, Americans are not more religious today than they were in the past – they’re just far more willing to be open about it. “These days, religion is not the purely private subject that people once thought of it as,” he says.
Even for their years of experience in all matters religious, the Beliefnet editors say they never cease to be surprised by the diversity of views expressed on the site. One recent example was an online survey the site published last month that showed that Evangelical voters were more concerned with the economy, the environment and ending torture than preventing gay marriage or abortion or even fighting Islamic radicalism. “Just when you think you’ve nailed the caricature of a certain religious group, you find out you’re wrong,” says Waldman. “Evangelical Christianity is so much more nuanced and diverse than the public and the press and politicians thought.”
It turns out that the vast majority of people visiting Beliefnet tend to get along well, even when debating such a combustible topic as religion. In a typical year, fewer than a dozen people are suspended or barred from the site, according to Rebecca Phillips, vice-president for social networking. And Beliefnet has its rules. While visitors are allowed to say whatever they want about another faith, they cannot resort to personal insults. The site is monitored by three full-time staffers, as well as about 70 volunteer discussion leaders.
This sort of harmony may reflect, as Waldman believes, that this generation of Americans is more comfortable than previous ones living in a diverse world. It is probably also due to some clever website architecture. From the beginning, Waldman established safe harbours on the site where people of particular faiths could mingle, and others where debate was encouraged. A Christian fundamentalist visiting Beliefnet never has to come into contact with a homosexual Christian or a devout Scientologist if he or she chooses not to.
In fact, much of the Beliefnet flock seems less interested in religious doctrine than grappling with more earthly matters such as drug addiction, the death of loved ones and loneliness. Their souls are laid bare in Beliefnet’s prayer circles, which are the internet equivalent of one churchgoer in need asking another to pray for him. One woman sought support after the death of her cat, and received hundreds of responses, many urging her to “BELIEVE!”, reminding her that “God loves everyone” or simply sharing their own stories.
While religious scholars marvel at the conversations and outpourings the internet enables, some express misgivings. “There is an ideology embedded in this – the idea that we can all get along,” says Mark Silk, a professor of religion at Trinity College, Connecticut, in a tone that makes clear he finds the notion naive.
Another criticism of Beliefnet is that it mingles so many beliefs and traditions it renders them meaningless. Its features allow visitors to pick and choose, as if at a spiritual buffet, rather than accepting the formal meal of organised religion – which is where many practitioners argue people find true nourishment.
“The great religions have tackled great problems and come up with great solutions to them. They’re challenging. They’re hard,” says Boston University’s Stephen Prothero. “The kind of stuff Americans gravitate toward now is not so challenging, not so hard. It aims at things like happiness instead of salvation and enlightenment. In that sense, [Beliefnet is] watered down.”
Waldman disputes the notion that Beliefnet is creating a “faith melting pot” or leading people to embrace a lowest-common denominator religion. “Our mission is not faith-blending,” he says. “Our mission is helping people meet their spiritual needs as they define them.”
Such debates nearly became irrelevant in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Beliefnet’s audience had grown to about one million visitors a month by then. Traffic surged as people joined prayer circles and turned to the site to learn more about Islam. Yet Beliefnet could not defy the laws of the stock market, which began to sour on internet start-ups in early 2000 and then collapsed after September 11. Soon, Beliefnet’s investors were pulling back. One Friday in March 2002, the entire staff of 69 was fired. “Like everyone else, our investors were telling us not to worry about revenue or Ebitda, just to build an audience,” Waldman says. “Then the bubble burst.”
The natural thing would have been for Waldman and his partners – like thousands of other humbled internet entrepreneurs – to call it a day and beg for their old jobs back. Instead, with the company in bankruptcy, they proposed an unusual restructuring plan in which employees who wanted to continue would take deep cuts to their salaries – in some cases working for minimum wage – and receive the difference in stock.
A handful of employees stayed on. They ended up selling the company furniture and cancelling the cleaning service. “People thought we were delusional – that we couldn’t let go,” Waldman recalled. “Or they would say, ‘well, it’s part of the grief process. He has to go through this.’”
But there were legitimate reasons for optimism. For one, the site had attracted a devoted audience and established a brand. More importantly, it was beginning to attract advertisers – particularly makers of diet supplements and vitamins. These performance-based advertisers only pay when people click on their message – something not possible with television or newspaper advertising. As such, they did not seem to care whether Beliefnet was broke as long as it delivered the clicks.
Waldman and his team focused relentlessly on performance-based ads and on understanding all the factors that made consumers more likely to click on them – from placement on the site to editorial content. They abandoned unprofitable projects, such as an online religious store.
By October 2002, Beliefnet had emerged from Chapter 13 bankruptcy with a staff of 12, and was generating positive cash flow. Soon they were attracting interest from Hollywood studios, who had taken notice of the power of spiritual audiences after the success of The Passion of the Christ. “We have Mel Gibson to thank for awakening Hollywood studios,” says Roland Hamilton, director of national advertising. Pharmaceutical companies also cottoned on to the idea that people talking about depression, loneliness and chronic pain on discussion boards might also be open to trying pill-shaped remedies.
By 2005, the second internet boom was on and Beliefnet went back to the venture capital community and managed to raise about $7m from SoftBank and Blue Chip Venture Company. This time, things were different. Waldman and his partners wanted to use the money to expand the site, not to keep the lights on.
Since then, Beliefnet has turned toward the latest spiritual vogue – what marketers refer to as “Lohas” (lifestyles of health and sustainability). This is a catch-all movement devoted to everything from community agriculture and corporate social responsibility to Pilates and eco-tourism.
Whether or not it is a good thing for religion, it has certainly been good for business. Lohasians are now the second-largest group on Beliefnet after Evangelicals, by Waldman’s estimate. They have not only increased traffic, but also helped to expand the site to a new category of health and wellness advertisers.
That may be part of what attracted News Corp’s attention. Like other media companies, it has gradually been moving into the faith market – a trajectory that began in the 1990s as media executives saw the commercial success of religious-themed books. News Corp now owns Zondervan, a Christian bookseller, and HarperOne, a publishing label that specialises in spirituality. Last year, it launched Fox Faith, a distributor of religious-themed and family-friendly home videos.
A quick glance at the whiteboard in the back of the Beliefnet conference room a month ago offered a hint of some of the synergistic possibilities. Scrawled across it was a News Corp organisational chart with dotted lines running between book publisher HarperCollins, the 20th Century Fox film studio and MySpace, the social networking site with more than 110m visitors.
Dan Fawcett, head of the Fox Entertainment Group, has said that he hopes to use Beliefnet to capture part of a market for religious media – including DVDs, books and magazines – that he estimated at more than $8bn. “It’s a segment that’s huge and still growing,” he said.
In the near term, News Corp’s expertise is expected to bolster Beliefnet’s new social networking platform and improve its ability to offer online video – one of the fastest-growing areas of internet advertising. Its longer-range plans are unclear. While News Corp’s ownership could vastly expand Beliefnet’s reach – particularly among younger audiences – it could also create an uncomfortable situation in which the media conglomerate could throw its marketing muscle behind particular religions or preachers in the same way they promote blockbuster films.
Waldman has never met Rupert Murdoch and admits some apprehension at entrusting his holy creation to the company that gave the world the topless Page 3 girl. He also says that he had not been planning to sell when News Corp came calling. Two other media companies also submitted bids.
Nonetheless, he says he is comfortable now, after receiving assurances from News Corp. Fox demonstrated its multi-faith heritage by sending over a still from The Simpsons that featured Krusty the Clown, the embittered comic – and son of a rabbi – performing on a stage whose curtain was embroidered with a cross, a crescent, a peace sign and the Star of David. Waldman smiles as he shows it off in his office. After all, he understands as well as anyone the benefits of a diverse congregation.
Joshua Chaffin is the FT’s senior media reporter
