Where have all the Christian bloggers gone?
Where have all the Christian bloggers gone?
Gone to Facebook or Patheos, or given up blogging altogether?
About six years ago a group of Christian bloggers (and one atheist) got together for coffee in a cafe in Hatfield, Pretoria, and spent a couple of hours chatting. Some had met before, because they were at university together, but others had only known of each other because they read each other’s blogs. It was an interesting gathering, but I wonder if it would be possibe to do such thing today, not necessarily with the same people, but with anyone.
Is the state of Christian blogging a bit like this ruined church in an Albanian village?
Some of their blogs are still in my blogroll, but nothing has been posted in them for a year or more. I often even forget to look.
That was also the time that the print media were trying to carve a niche for themselves in the blogosphere. The Mail & Guardian invited some active bloggers to blog in their Thought Leader section. That, it seemed to me, was a betrayal of the spirit of blogging. It was bloggers allowing themselves to be coopted by the mainstream media.
Something similar happened with Patheos, which was a kind of vacuum-cleaner site that sucked in several Christian blogs that I used to read. I rarely read them now, because of my aversion to the very concept of Patheos. It describes itself as “hosting the conversation on faith”, which seems to confuse means and ends, as if “faith” were something separate from life itself. Faith is surely a conversation about life, and not an end in itself. Hosting a conversation on faith seems to be removing religion from the publicx square, and isolating it in a kind of religious homeland. My blogging friend Macrina Walker has written about religion in the public square here.
The public square in Tirana, Albania, where religion was forbidden for 27 years.
When another Christian blogger, Ryan Peter (whom I haven’t managed to meet face to face yet), proposed setting up something called The Christian Blooger I was a little wary, fearing that it was yet another attempt at setting up a vacuum-cleaner site like Patheos or Thought Leader. But his proposal for The Christian Blogger shows that he is aware of the dangers, and is trying to avoid them.
Ryan Peter used to participate in a similar venture in the past, a kind of “blog of blogs” called Emerging Africa, which sadly is no more. It was run by Roger Saner, another blogger who seems to have disappeared from the scene, and whose blog hasn’t been updated in years. So could The Christian Blogger lead to a revival of Christian blogging in South or zouthern Africa? I hope so.
