“My Life After I Received Christ”: The Mediatization of Evangelical Conversion Testimonies

To feel “good, socially proper, and stable” in the social world, a person “needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and constantly revised life story” that is “created, negotiated, and exchanged” in culturally affirmed ways (Linde 1993, 3). A life story not only expresses a sense of self but also is a means to negotiate membership in a group by asserting alignment with its shared assumptions and values. Thus, life stories “make suppositions about what can be taken as expected, what the norms are, and what common or special belief systems can be used to establish coherence” (3). These qualities are evident in religious conversion narratives—or at least, as the present study demonstrates, in the evangelical Protestant ritual of “sharing my testimony.” Viewed as life stories, these narratives provide rich data to unpack the culture of evangelicalism, a community of faith with which one in four American adults identifies and which constitutes the majority of American Protestants today, making it the nation’s single largest religious tradition (Pew Research Center 2015; Putnam and Campbell 2010).¹

The literature on the psychology (e.g., Ullman 2013), anthropology (e.g., Buckser and Glazier 2003), sociology (e.g., Jindra 2011), and history (e.g., Mullen 2017) of religious conversion is extensive. Yet, few studies examine evangelical Protestant testimonies as a communicative practice. Ethnographic research on evangelical conversion narratives include Harding’s (1987) account of being the object of a conversion attempt and my own study of laypersons sharing testimonies during worship services (Ward 2010). The present study builds on this scholarship by considering the dynamic interplay between local speaking practices and mass-mediated representations of communal norms disseminated by ­evangelical institutions (Ward 2022, 2024). Thus, I analyze popular guides to testimony preparation—outlining, writing, rehearsing, and delivering—published by seven major evangelical organizations. These guides represent the evangelical life story as idealized, methodized, and mediatized by the communal institutions of evangelical culture.

While evangelical testimonies reproduce a shared pattern of cultural life, conversions are also religious experiences. Within communication studies, two theoretical traditions offer insights into these twin aspects of conversion. The sociocultural tradition theorizes communication as “(re)production of social order,” while the phenomenological tradition theorizes communication as the “experience of otherness; dialogue” (Craig 1999, 133). From the sociocultural perspective of reproducing social order, the seven guides are nearly identical in their representations of the ideal life story, the advice they provide for preparation and delivery, and the cultural speech code they reproduce. Testimonies thus function as self-presentations (Goffman 1959) through which believers negotiate an “evangelical self” by adjusting to the expectations of an evangelical “generalized other” (Mead 1934). The act of sharing your testimony serves as a rite of passage with pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases (Van Gennep [1909] 1960) and provides hearers with a model social drama of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration (Turner 1974).

From a phenomenological perspective, this study explores the mediatization of the evangelical conversion experience. A mediatization framework examines the intersection of religion and media through which religious guidance, authority, experience, and community shift from traditional offline settings to dependence on media technologies (Hjarvard 2008; Hjarvard and Lövheim 2012; Lövheim 2011; Lövheim and Lynch 2011). According to Hjarvard (2008): “Through the process of mediatization, religion is increasingly being subsumed under the logic of the media” (11). Further, “As a language, the media mold religious imagination in accordance with the genres of popular culture, and as cultural environments the media have taken over many of the social functions of institutionalized religions” (9).

In American evangelicalism, media mergers have created “a new institutional form appropriate to the Digital Age: the religious media oligopoly” that assumes “control and distribution of print and electronic resources for religious devotion, education, and activism, historically the province of denominations” (Ward 2018d, 177). Although “the authority structures are formally decentralized in evangelicalism,” these institutions are “so large that they function with the power and influence of a denomination in a previous era” (Dyer 2023, 23). As evangelical mass media exert authority over the creation of socially acceptable life stories, evangelical imagination is molded in accordance with genres of popular culture. A striking finding of this study is that the mediatization of idealized conversion narratives normalizes Christian conversion not as an assent to doctrinal truth claims or forgiveness of sins but, in keeping with popular developments in religion (e.g., Rakow 2013), as an experience of religionized therapy to address unsatisfied longings and attain self-actualization.

More than a century after its publication, Williams James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience remains a touchstone in the study of religious conversions. He describes conversion as “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong[,] inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right[,] superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities” (1902, 186). Another influential work, Arthur Darby Nock’s Conversion, defines religious conversion as a “deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right” (1933, 7). Sociologists began studying conversion in the 1970s with the rise of New Religious Movements. Then by the 1990s, “anthropologists began to see the study of conversion as a topic worthy of investigation, in part because of its role in social, cultural, and political change” (Rambo and Farhadian 2014, 12).

Lewis Rambo (1993), a leading scholar on the psychology of religious conversion, observed that conversion “is a process over time” that “is contextual and thereby influences and is influenced by a matrix of relationships, expectations, and situations.” As such, factors in the conversion process “are multiple, interactive, and cumulative” (5). Rambo further asserted that “while this transformation occurs through the mediation of social, cultural, personal, and religious forces…conversion needs to be radical, striking to the root of the human predicament. For me, that root is a vortex of vulnerability” (xii).

Rambo and Farhadian (2014) advocate for an interdisciplinary approach to conversion studies, stating: “The topic of religious conversion requires the resources of various disciplines in order to understand the multiple factors and dimensions that intersect in religious and spiritual phenomena….The task ahead is to find ways of creatively linking micro, meso, and macro studies of converting from many different perspectives” (12). The present study contributes to this interdisciplinary vision by marshalling resources from communication studies, media studies, and digital religion studies. These resources can illumine the digital age processes by which evangelical Protestants instantiate James’s description of conversion as becoming “unified and right,” Nock’s idea of turning from the old and wrong to the new and right, and Rambo’s description of conversion as mediated by a matrix of forces and rooted in human vulnerability.

This exploration begins with the “self,” a first-order construct in communication studies. A self that is distinguishable from others is essential because humans live in community, and this self is constructed and negotiated through communication. Charles Horton Cooley (1902) first plumbed this phenomenon by positing a “looking-glass self.” A person then develops a “self-idea” by imagining how others judge their appearance and responding with a self that secures social approval. George Herbert Mead (1934) further observed that a person constructs a self by taking the perspective not only of other individuals but of the “generalized other” or broader society. This cognitive capacity is developed through social interactions. A person learns to interpret others’ verbal and nonverbal communication and then gains an idea of how their symbolic interaction may be interpreted. By mid-century, Erving Goffman (1959) expanded on these ideas to elucidate “self-presentation.” Using a dramaturgical metaphor, he observed that in everyday life a person performs “face work” by staging a socially acceptable self.

While Cooley, Mead, and Goffman explained how a self is socially constructed, ethnographers sought frameworks to analyze the content of what individuals create. In a seminal study, Charlotte Linde (1987) recounted oral life stories that individuals narrated to explain their choice of profession. Each strove to “construct coherence” by going beyond “common sense” and developing an “explanatory system.” An accountant might appeal to common sense for his career choice by citing a precise mind and enjoyment of details, but further explain these traits owe to—in a popular rendering of Freud—his early toilet training. Such explanatory systems “permit the speaker an extra level of distance…to step back from the personal account and give a deeper, or apparently more objective, or truer account than can be conveyed in a common-sense narrative” (352). Similarly, popular idealizations of evangelical conversion testimonies present Christ and the gospel as a deeper, more objective, and truer explanatory system.

Linde (1993) observed that because coherent life stories secure social approval, they provide ethnographers with “model[s] for a unified linguistic analysis” as the stories “make suppositions about what can be taken as expected, what the norms are, and what common or special belief systems can be used to establish coherence” (3). Further, since the life story is comprised of individual stories among which the speaker draws relationships to create a single coherent narrative, the sequencing reveals the speaker’s notions of causality. Life stories, however, may be distinguished from autobiographies. The former are orally transmitted accounts subject to ongoing revision and flexibly adaptable for a given audience, while the latter are written crystallizations at a given moment in time. Nevertheless, popular guides to creating a “shareable testimony” combine elements of both. The testimony is to be a written crystallization at the time of its composition but is not intended as a standalone or permanent record. Rather, the written account is, as will be seen, a preparation for extempore oral sharing and adaptation of the religious life story for a given hearer.

In a classic account of such oral sharing, anthropologist Susan Harding (1987) narrated her observations of a Baptist preacher who, during an interview, turned the tables and attempted to convert her by narrating his own testimony. She concluded:

Harding distinguishes between preaching and witnessing, the latter being “more informal and often occur[ring] in the course of what appears to be no more than a conversation between the witness, who is saved, and an unsaved listener” (169). However, she argues that this interaction “is no mere conversation” but rather “aims to separate novice listeners from their prior, given reality, to constitute a new, previously unperceived, or indistinct, reality, and to impress that reality upon them [and] make it felt” (169). She concludes that ultimately, “conversion is a process of acquiring a specific religious language” (178). Thus, “generative belief, belief that indisputably transfigures you and your reality, belief that becomes you, comes only through speech” until “speaking is believing” (179).

Rambo and Farhadian (2014) observe, “From a normative point of view within a particular religious community, ‘conversion is what a group or person says it is.’ In other words, language is fashioned in the context of particular cultures at certain times in history and for distinct purposes” (10). Lincoln Mullen (2017), in his history of conversion in America, also points to this sociolinguistic phenomenon by relating his experiences of Baptist salvation testimonies:

My own field study of evangelical testimonies also focused on sociolinguistics, employing speech codes theory to analyze the stories I heard (Ward 2010). Within evangelical communities, the phrase sharing your (my) testimony belongs to a metacommunicative vocabulary of designations that evangelicals give to different categories of communication. Evangelicals designate sharing as appropriate communication with believers and witnessing as proper talk with unbelievers. Metacommunicative vocabularies may be invoked through totemizing rituals, which are “structured sequence[s] of actions, the correct performance of which pays explicit homage to a sacred object”; cultural myths that provide “hearers with resources for interpreting their own experiences and for telling their own stories”; and social dramas that convey assumptions about guilt and redemption (Philipsen 1997, 144–46). The testimonies I observed manifested all three invocations. They employed a structured sequence of words that sacralized the Bible, conveyed cultural myths that hearers could emulate to construct their own testimonies, and functioned as social dramas narrating how a breach with God could be redressed through conversion (Ward 2010).

Following Victor Turner’s (1974) theory that ritual is processual, I also observed that the ritual of sharing my testimony consisted of three phases: a pre-liminal phase as initiates were at first separate from the social structure; a liminal phase in which hierarchy was suspended and communitas prevailed as initiates were placed in a marginal state between old and new; and a post-liminal phase as the social structure reasserted itself and initiates were aggregated back into the hierarchy with a new identity. Finally, and again following Turner, I observed in evangelical testimonies a social drama of four phases: breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. Thus, narrators breached communal norms as they put off and postponed conversion, ultimately fell into crises of spiritual doubt, found redress by praying to God and receiving counsel from evangelical Christians, and as professing converts were reintegrated into their churches.

If religious conversion “is contextual and…influenced by a matrix of relationships, expectations, and situations,” and “occurs through the mediation of social, cultural, personal, and religious forces” (Rambo 1993, 5), and if its “language is fashioned in the context of particular cultures at certain times in history and for distinct purposes” (Rambo and Farhadian 2014, 10), then a first step in analyzing evangelical conversion narratives is defining evangelicalism. Such a definition, however, is contested among scholars who argue between three approaches, defining evangelicals either by their beliefs, or by their networks of recognized leaders and organizations, or as “a style as much as a set of beliefs, and an attitude which insiders ‘know’ and ‘feel’ when they encounter it” (Eskridge 2014).

This study adopts the latter approach. As Monique Ingalls (2018) argues in her ethnography of evangelical worship, “drawing hard boundaries around what constitutes religious orthodoxy…fail[s] to capture many individuals’ and institutions’ dynamic—and often ­selective—engagement of normative evangelical practices and discourses….Defining evangelical Christianity by means of institutions runs the risk of ignoring less strictly organized yet highly influential networks” (15). Instead, Ingalls “describes evangelical Christianity as a discursive network that is articulated through concrete, embodied practices” and as “a social formation that is actively performed into being” (17). Similarly, Todd Brenneman (2014) asserts, “Instead of solely defining ‘evangelical’ in the context of belief, we should see it as an aesthetic formulated not only on belief but also by affective and experiential concerns” cultivated through habitual practices (17). In their study of megachurches, sociologist James Wellman and colleagues emphasize that “scholars focus too much on belief in our understanding of religion” (2020, 7), ignoring the power of churches and religion “to illumine the core forms and forces that humans use to generate identity, community, and solidarity” (3).

As these scholars and I contend, defining evangelicals solely by doctrine or by affiliation with leaders and organizations is inadequate for ethnographic research. American evangelicalism is neither a doctrinal nor an institutional monolith; one survey identified fifty-six distinct faith traditions that can be classified as evangelical (Putnam and Campbell 2010). Thus, following Ingalls who demonstrates that evangelical community is performed into being by making music in worship, I maintain that evangelical community is performed into being through a shared speech code. As theological educator Barbara Wheeler (1995) observed, what unites evangelicals, despite their differences, is not “doctrine or ancestry…but religious culture.” She averred that “the best definition of an evangelical is someone who understands its argot, knows where to buy posters with Bible verses on them, and recognizes names like James Dobson and Frank Peretti.” While the poster art and household names have changed over time, the argot remains central to evangelical identity.

Like Mullen, I observed in my fieldwork that evangelicals who shared testimonies during church services had mastered a conventional vocabulary. This raised a crucial question: Where are these discourses circulated, and how are they accessed across churches that are widely separated and have no direct physical contact? In subsequent studies, I explored this question in relation to evangelical discourses on politics, gender roles, anti-intellectualism, biblical literalism, and “worldview thinking” (Ward 2018a, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023). These studies revealed a tripartite picture of an evangelical speech code circulating across three levels of discourse: a macro level of institutions and their mass-mediated representations of communal norms; a meso level of locally public rhetoric—primarily Sunday sermons but also other congregational discourses—that transmit norms and structure joint social action; and a micro level of spontaneous natural talk and private role enactments that reproduce norms. My assertion that “elements of a speech code can appear across the private, locally public, and communal contexts of their use” has recently been added as a new proposition of speech codes theory (Ward 2024; Philipsen and Hart 2024, 251).

This proposition suggests a means of responding to Rambo and Farhadian’s (2014) call “to find ways of creatively linking micro, meso, and macro studies of converting from many different perspectives” (12). However, tracing the links between “testimony talk” at the micro (private) level, locally public testimony-sharing at the meso (congregational) level, and institutionally mass-mediated testimonial norms at the macro (communal) level requires the disciplinary resources of media studies. This is facilitated by the emerging research fields of media and religion (Stout 2013) and digital religion studies (Campbell and Tsuria 2022). As Christopher Helland (2016) observes,

Similarly, Campbell and Rule (2020) state, “As the Internet has become embedded in our everyday lives, digital media increasingly informs the practice of religion, the things adherents do to enact their beliefs and express religious identity, the things adherents do to demonstrate their affiliation with a religion or religious community” (363). To explain this intersection, scholars have advanced multiple theoretical approaches (Campbell 2017; Lundby 2013) and variously argued that: technological values deterministically shape society (Ellul 1964; McLuhan 1964); media function as mediators of cultural meanings that facilitate users’ meaning-making (Hoover 2006); forms of the sacred are inherently mediated through symbols, with media facilitating this process (Lynch 2012); and religious communities socially shape their technology use as they negotiate traditional offline practices with new online affordances (Campbell 2010). While each approach offers insight, the mediatization of religion framework is most applicable to the present study because it best explains the observed data: how the intersecting logic of media subsumes that of religion, establishes a cultural environment in which media take over the social functions of religious institutions, and molds religious imagination in accordance with the languages and genres of popular culture.

Media sociologist Stig Hjarvard (2012), a leading theoretician, distinguishes between mediation and mediatization. Mediation refers to “the concrete act of communication through a medium…[that] extends human communication in time, space, and ways of expressions.” This act “may alter the form and content of the message and influence the relationship between the sender and receiver,” but it “does not alter the social institution itself or its relationship towards the outside world” (26). By contrast, mediatization “concerns the long-term process whereby social and cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a consequence of the growth of the media’s influence” and, in the case of religion, alters practices and beliefs “through the increased presence of media both inside and outside the institution of religion” (26).

Hjarvard (2012) further describes mediatization as a “double-sided development” in which media develop as an autonomous institution while simultaneously becoming “integrated into the very life-world of other institutions” (25). For example, a church’s Facebook page must adhere to the platform’s rules on appropriate posting content, length, and language to effectively reach both followers and prospects. Through this and other examples, Hjarvard points to three media metaphors to explain how media shape religion: media as a conduit for disseminating information about religious issues; media as a language that formats religion “through the genres of popular culture, like adventure, consumer guidance, reality television, science fiction, etc.” in a way that “often has the side effect of promoting individualism and consumer behavior—also in the area of spiritual issues—due to the commercial nature of popular media” (27); and media as an environment for transacting relationships, rituals, worship, morality, and therapy. He concludes:

Since its introduction, the mediatization framework has been applied to analyze various intersections between media and religion, including Brazilian religious practices (Martino 2020), Asian religions (Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2018; Yoon 2014), Islamic televangelism (Eisenlohr 2017) and YouTube videos (Al-Zaman 2022), Indonesian (Setianto 2015) and Hungarian (Hazim and Musdholifah 2021) Muslim diasporas, the Italian Catholic LGBTQ community (Giorgi 2019), Buddhist digital media (Jin 2015), and Hindu digital games (Zeiler 2014). The present study applies this framework to the mediatization of American evangelical conversion testimonies to demonstrate how evangelical media have taken authority over the creation of communally acceptable life stories and how this development reformats the conversion experience through the popular genre of individualistic self-help therapy culture.

This study is part of an ongoing ethnographic research program to “write the culture” of American evangelicalism. The program is grounded in the ethnography of communication, a branch of sociolinguistics that holds that a speech community constructs a distinctive culture through shared rules for interpreting in-group talk (Hymes 1974). Speech codes theory posits that members of a culture pattern their speaking around shared assumptions about the nature of persons, how people should be linked in social relations, and what symbolic actions are efficacious—for example, in establishing personhood (Philipsen 1997; Philipsen and Hart 2024). An ethnographer of communication unpacks a culture by interpreting how its speech code reveals underlying shared assumptions.

Ethnographers adopt one of four stances in fieldwork (Gold 1958): a complete observer who observes informants without interaction, an observer-as-participant who interacts to collect predetermined types of data such as structured interviews, a participant-as-observer who interacts without a predetermined agenda to learn communal norms by shadowing culture members, or a complete participant who is fully immersed as a culture member and can access unspoken communal assumptions. In this study, I adopt the stance of a complete participant, having come of age in American evangelical culture following a teenage conversion. Numerous field studies of American evangelicalism have employed this approach (e.g., Balmer 2014; Frykholm 2004; Malley 2004; Watt 2002). My own fieldwork spans five projects: four years of weekend touring with a gospel singing group that visited some two hundred churches in seventeen states, three years observing a nondenominational evangelical congregation, two years observing a Baptist church, two years participating in a men’s small group Bible study, and ongoing media ethnography of evangelical broadcast and digital media as well as mass-market books and magazines.

The present study builds upon my earlier research on the sharing my testimony ritual, which I observed scores of times during the mid-2000s while touring with the gospel singing group and as a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services (Ward 2010). My insider status allowed me to explore taken-for-granted connections between local and institutional discourses on testimony-sharing, informing my selection of data sources for the present study. I began with a convenience sample (Table 1) of online guides to “preparing your personal testimony” published by organizations I recognized as major influencers in evangelical media. These guides are published on static websites and are best viewed as mass communication tools rather than interactive platforms.

A limitation of the present study is that, unlike the planned locally public rituals of testimony-sharing that I observed in church services and that were attended by believers, the online guides instruct users in testifying to nonbelievers in private conversations. Such private testimony-sharing happens spontaneously “as the Spirit leads” and is not readily accessible to an observer. Nevertheless, the ethnography of communication (EC) and speech codes theory (SCT) view all forms of communication, not only in-person speaking, as amenable to interpretation. Both EC and SCT are applied today “in the realm of technology-mediated communication,” as both approaches “are amenable to use in all types of settings, and in recent years have been successfully used to study…interactions in virtual communities and other online spaces” (Hart 2017, 8). For this reason, the online testimonial guides offer language use that is amenable to ethnographic interpretation. Further, comparing language in this context with testimonial speaking in public worship settings can suggest evangelical cultural assumptions about the natures of, and social relations between, believers and nonbelievers, while also suggesting how mediatization may have altered testimonials practices in the years since my early field study.

The popular method for preparing a personal testimony, as outlined by the seven evangelical organizations, follows a tripartite structure that divides a believer’s life into three phases. Table 2 shows the language used by each organization to label each phase. Notably, all seven ministries label the first phase as “before” conversion, five label the second as “how,” connoting that conversion occurs via a method, and six label the third phase as “after” conversion. Conversion is described using a narrow cultural vocabulary of encountering, meeting, receiving, coming to, trusting, following, or accepting the person of Christ (the predominant usage, connoting his deity and salvific efficacy) or Jesus. In this way, idealized evangelical conversion narratives are disciplined by a clearly demarcated tripartite structure.

Once the life story is appropriately structured into its three phases, each of the seven organizations supplies believers with a series of preparatory questions to guide narrativization of each phase. Table 3 categorizes these prompts across the three phases of testimony structuring. InterVarsity, Cru, and The Navigators also offer downloadable worksheets for users to print out and complete by hand. The dominant theme of the “before” questions is a lack of personal fulfillment due to unmet “longings and desires” (InterVarsity), dependence on things that “let me down” (Cru, Billy Graham) and “disappointed me” (Great Commission), what “was missing in your life” (Tyndale, Navigators), and misplaced priorities (Focus on the Family). Notably absent are references to sin that would compel the unbeliever to seek God. Instead, denial of happiness is what prompts unbelievers to reassess their lives.

While the “before” questions center on unhappiness and unfulfillment, resolution is deferred to the “after” phase. The dominant theme of the “how” phase is processual. Questions focus on how the prospective convert realizes that life is unfulfilling, encounters the gospel for the first time, initially reacts to and then struggles with that message, the role of (evangelical) Christians in this process, and the particular moments and persons that resolve these struggles in favor of conversion. None of the organizations’ guides explicitly explain the gospel; the assumption is that believers already know its meaning and significance. The “how” of conversion is thus shorn of confession, repentance, prayer, or assent to doctrinal or scriptural truth propositions. Instead, the process is framed therapeutically as overcoming unfulfillment through surrendering to Jesus (InterVarsity, Billy Graham), accepting Jesus/Christ (Cru, Great Commission), or trusting Christ (Tyndale, Navigators).

Lastly, the “after” questions guide the narrativizing process by prompting before-and-after comparisons of the unconverted and converted life. The focus is not on redemption, deliverance from sin, or eternal salvation through Christ. Rather, the questions prompt believers to testify about their therapeutic self-actualization—how their lives have changed, how their attitudes and perspectives on life have shifted, and how their previously unfulfilled needs and longings have been addressed.

Using the language and structure of the seven organizations’ guides, an idealized evangelical testimony might in outline sound like the following 150-word narrative:

Thus, the narrative follows the structure of a social drama. It begins with a breach as the unbeliever is separated from Jesus, leading to a life crisis characterized by unfulfillment. This crisis is redressed when the prospective convert encounters the gospel and, with the help of (evangelical) Christians, struggles through to receive Jesus. At last, the new convert is integrated into the (evangelical) Christian community, and in the ultimate sense, reintegrated into the divinely intended right relationship with Jesus.

After working through the testimony preparation questions, believers are advised to document their testimony in writing, following structured guidelines as shown in Table 4. Five out of the seven guides offer scriptural justification for preparing written testimonies; four of these cite 1 Peter 3:15 (which encourages believers to “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”) and one guide cites Luke 8:39 (which states, “So he went through all through the town proclaiming the great things Jesus had done for him”). Furthermore, five of the seven warrant the before-how-after structure as derived from the apostle Paul’s conversion testimonies recounted in the book of Acts. These scriptural references are important because biblical warrant is taken at face value in evangelical culture as authoritative and binding (Ward 2022).

After providing scriptural justification, the advice is practical: Keep the testimony concise, under three hundred words, so it can be spoken in three minutes or less. Use conversational wording and avoid Christian jargon. Structure the testimony around a theme that captures attention, ties the story together, and provides closure. Follow the before-how-after structure. Relate only the highlights. Be authentic. Strive for relevance to and connection with the nonbeliever. Edit and rewrite as necessary.

Additionally, four out of the seven popular guides recommend rehearsing the personal testimony aloud, possibly in front of (evangelical) Christian friends, until the telling feels comfortable and natural. Table 5 outlines the organizations’ tips for oral delivery to prospective converts. Recommendations include: seek unforced opportunities, prepare to help prevent nervousness, be conversational and clear, avoid lecturing, and conclude the presentation within three minutes.

In the testimony preparation guides, constructing a self through taking the perspective of the “generalized other” has two levels of response. First, as illustrated by Table 4, the guides counsel the believer to present a self that “will be understandable” (InterVarsity) to the surrounding culture by being “authentic and personal” (Navigators) and by “describ[ing] your life in ways that will help others recognize similarities in their own lives” (Billy Graham). Additionally, as shown in Table 5, the presentation of a testimony should be natural, relaxed, conversational, open to questions, and extemporized for each listener. When sharing a testimony with a non-Christian, the InterVarsity guide advises:

The second level of perspective-taking involves the user of these popular guides imagining how the generalized other of the evangelical community might perceive them. Will the evangelical self that the testimony presents conform to the expectations of the larger evangelical community? Will the self be accepted if the story does not follow the communal model that neatly divides life into before, how, and after conversion, or if the narrative does not employ the coded language of receiving/trusting/accepting Jesus? In the 1980s, I was “discipled” as a recent convert and recall the peer pressure to compose a personal testimony that would be deemed acceptable to the generalized other of the evangelical subculture, and thus claim a valid evangelical self. Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor of self-presentation as “staging” is evident here, as evangelicals are advised to script their conversion narratives.

The content of evangelical testimonies-as-life-stories also adheres to Linde’s (1987) framework for constructing coherence through explanatory systems that supplement common sense. Popularly idealized testimonies begin with the commonsense notion that unfulfilled longings need resolution. These conversion narratives then reference an explanatory system in which knowledgeable and caring (evangelical) Christians guide individuals to comprehend the gospel and meet/receive/trust/accept Jesus Christ, who then produces the change that resolves their longings. This explanatory system “permit[s] the speaker an extra level of distance…to step back from the personal account and give a deeper, or apparently more objective, or truer account” (352) than plain common sense.

In line with Linde’s (1993) observation that the sequencing of events that creates a coherent life story also reveals the speaker’s notions of causality, evangelical notions of causality are seen in the sequencing and structure of the testimonial narrative: Before I accepted Jesus, How I accepted Jesus, After I accepted Jesus. These stories illuminate the assumptions of evangelical culture regarding the expectations, norms, and belief system that establish coherence. Thus, unfulfilled longings are perceived as the norm prior to conversion, while the resolution of those longings is the expected norm afterward. What coheres the narrative is belief in the gospel of accepting Jesus, who then produces change so that the convert now views life differently and is satisfied.

Given that the popular guides eschew references to propositional truth claims, the gospel and accepting Jesus become sacred totems that foster folk-religious “magical thinking.” Though believers acknowledge that the laws of nature generally govern events, they perceive conversion as a contradiction of the normal order, based on their “belief in some form of supernatural or alternative form of causality that extends beyond those that govern the natural world” (Rosengren and French 2013, 45). Such “thoughts and beliefs are also substantially influenced by cultural support” and “testimony is particularly useful for learning about things that are generally unobservable” (53).

Furthermore, popular guides for testimony preparation support Harding’s (1987) assertion that the narrative “is not just a monologue that constitutes its speaker as a culturally specific person; it is also a dialogue that reconstitutes its listeners” (167). Her observation that the “speaker’s language, now in the listener’s voice, converts the listener’s mind into a contested terrain, a divided self” (169) is strikingly evident in the rigid division of life outlined in these guides: before, how, and after a believer accepts Jesus. Again, this dynamic operates on two levels. The guides urge believers to prepare testimonies that may convert hearers, while simultaneously communicating to believers the institutional norms that discipline users’ life stories. In the same way that I experienced forceful suasion when “discipled” as a recent convert, the popular guides to testimony preparation work powerfully to confirm in believers a separation “from their prior, given reality, to constitute a new, previously unperceived, or indistinct, reality, and to impress that reality upon them [and] make it felt” (169). In this way, evangelicals cement their identification with the evangelical community by constructing institutionally legitimized self-presentations.

This dynamic of communal identification through self-presentation was vividly portrayed in my early study of evangelicals who shared their testimonies not with unbelieving friends but with fellow believers during Sunday worship services (Ward 2010). In that setting, I observed the rich repertoire of the evangelical speech code, which is also seen in the language used in the testimony preparation guides: sharing, testimony, receiving Christ, encountering Christ, meeting Jesus, accepting Jesus, trusting Jesus, surrendering to Jesus, following Jesus, the gospel, a changed life. As noted earlier, I identified sharing and witnessing as metacommunicative vocabularies that designated sharing as talk appropriate with believers and witnessing as talk appropriate with unbelievers. The seven guides, however, employed sharing and omitted witnessing, suggesting that the former is acceptable not only among professing believers but also with prospective converts. When the hearer is potentially in the liminal stage between belief and unbelief, sharing is an acceptable communicative strategy that proffers an intimacy with which to draw in the listener.

During my four years of concert touring and observing testimonies at worship services, I saw a rite of passage that reproduced a culturally approved social drama of breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration (Ward 2010). While those speakers orally reproduced expected social dramas in live settings, the seven popular guides to testimony preparation encourage users to replicate this structure in writing. Consequently, users are institutionally disciplined to align their life stories with a culturally sanctioned social drama of breach (separation from God), crisis (unfulfilled longings), redressive action (accepting Jesus with the help of knowledgeable evangelicals), and reintegration (a changed life through acceptance by Jesus and the evangelical community). By reflecting on the guides’ questions, outlining the before-how-after phases, and committing their narratives to writing, believers mentally traverse the pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases of their own conversion, personalizing and internalizing the institutionally approved social drama.

Further, this study affirms my claim that American evangelicalism is a speech community with macro, meso, and micro levels of discourse. The popularly published guides to testimony preparation powerfully demonstrate the interaction of these levels and illustrate how private enactments of sharing my testimony cannot be isolated from institutional discourses about what constitutes socially acceptable self-presentations of evangelical life stories.

The role of evangelical media organizations in guiding the faithful in preparing their personal testimonies is not a new development. Decades ago, as a recent convert, I was not instructed by my local church pastors, elders, or teachers but rather by a “discipleship training” curriculum from The Navigators, one of the organizations surveyed in this study. My church purchased this mass-market curriculum and held weekly small group meetings led by a lay member who guided attendees through the steps prescribed in the workbook. What remains then to be analyzed is how the mediatization of communal expectations for conversion testimony narratives maps onto the language of popular culture genres.

Perhaps the most striking finding of this study—contrary to the popular stereotype of evangelicals as hell-and-damnation Bible thumpers—is the infiltration of popular therapeutic culture and language into evangelicalism. As indicated in Table 3, the testimony guides predominantly frame pre-conversion “before” questions not in terms of sin or divine judgment, but in terms of unhappiness and unfulfillment: “Make a list of the longings and desires that shaped your journey to Christ” (InterVarsity); “Where did I get my security, identity, or happiness from? How did those things begin to let me down?” (Cru); “Where did you get your happiness and security? How did areas where you put your trust let you down?” (Billy Graham); “Before you met Christ, what were some of your needs, what was lacking, or what was missing in your life?” (Tyndale, Navigators); “From what did I get my security or happiness? How did those areas begin to disappoint me? To what source did I look for security, peace of mind, happiness? In what ways were my activities unsatisfying?” (Great Commission).

Correspondingly, the post-conversion “after” prompts emphasize therapeutic emotional fulfillment and self-actualization through Christ: “How did/does knowing Jesus address the longings, desires, and restlessness that you identified previously in your life?” (InterVarsity); “List some specific changes in your character, attitude, and perspective on life….Even though my life still is not perfect, how does knowing Christ help me deal with that fact?” (Cru); “How did receiving Christ address the problems that you had in your life?” (Billy Graham); “Give an example of how Christ met your needs or how He is now contributing to your life” (Tyndale); “What fear(s) are you overcoming since you put your trust in God?” (Focus on the Family); “Give an example of how God has met your needs—either physical or emotional—since you accepted Jesus” (Navigators); “Specific changes and illustrations about the changes Christ has made in my life, actions, and attitudes” (Great Commission).

The mapping of evangelical culture onto popular therapeutic culture is not recent. In the 1970s, the evangelical Church Growth Movement gave rise to “seeker-sensitive” megachurches that “would come to dominate the evangelical landscape” and “drew on therapeutic trends in Christian counseling that emerged from American clergy’s adoption of insights from modern psychoanalysis and behavioral science” (Worthen 2013, 134). By the end of the twentieth century, the “triumph of the therapeutic culture” was evident, with self-help taking on “features comparable to a religious conversion, even among Evangelicals who often are ambivalent about so explicit a focus on the therapeutic” (Roof 1999, 39).

A generation later, the ideal testimony portrayed in the seven popular guides indicates that evangelicals have fully shed their ambivalence toward popular therapy culture and now frame conversion as self-help. Even today’s massively popular generation of prosperity gospel preachers has “set aside much of the hard [financial] prosperity…in favor of the therapeutic inspiration of soft prosperity” through emotional healing (Bowler 2013, 110). This trend spans all major faith traditions, suggesting that “religion has become more therapeutic in its emphasis on good feelings” (Wuthnow 2020, 131). The present study indicates this observation now includes American evangelicalism.

The mediatization thesis posits that media create a language that formats religion through genres of popular culture in ways that often promote individualism and consumerism. Thus, while American evangelicalism first grew in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through revivals outside the religious establishment (Hatch 1989; Stout 1983), a post-Civil War evangelical subculture emerged with its own institutions as it leveraged advances in media technology. The late nineteenth-century “revolution in cheap print” (Starr 2004) spawned a mass-circulation evangelical print culture (Brown 2004; Moore 1994; Nord 2004). Subsequently, with the rise of radio in the mid-twentieth century, “suddenly, evangelicals were—even across traditional denominational boundaries—referencing the same celebrities, listening to the same music, purchasing the same books, using the same catchphrases, and sharing the same rules for interpreting one another’s talk” (Ward 2014, 124). By 1950, “evangelicalism was less a matter of particular denominations…[as] masses were often reached less by the standard church than by the numerous parachurch organizations: evangelical education institutions, publishing houses, radio ministries, and student movements” (Ellwood 2000, 188). Meanwhile, from the revival era of the late nineteenth century (Evensen 2003) through mid-century evangelical radio (Ward 2017) to the present popularity of Contemporary Christian Music (Smith and Seignious 2016), evangelical music culture has consistently adopted mainstream musical forms. The mediatization of American evangelical religion has thus been ongoing for some 150 years and is now accelerating in the Digital Age, where content is easily shareable across platforms. This has enabled both old and new media content to be streamed on demand, massively boosting distribution to millions of users (Ward 2018b).

In the present case, the mediatization approach to evangelical Protestant testimonies contributes to both conversion studies and digital religion studies. In the prototypical evangelical life story, the convert, as described by William James (1902), transforms from a divided self to one that is “superior and happy” by gaining a “firmer hold of religious realities.” Similarly, as Nock (1933) described, the evangelical convert transitions from the old, wrong self with its unfulfilled longings, to the new, right self that is self-actualized. And, as in Rambo’s (1993) model, evangelical conversion proceeds within a context of multiple, interactive, and cumulative factors mediated by a matrix of social, cultural, personal, religious, and linguistic forces. Notably, the present study affirms Rambo’s observation that the radical transformation of religious conversion is rooted in “a vortex of vulnerability” (xii), as evangelical converts testify how unfulfillment in their prior lives is the impetus for their conversion.

Interpreting the online testimonial guides through a mediatization framework reveals how religious guidance on constructing an appropriate life story “is transferring and blending with the digital world” and represents “an intermingling of our modern mediated society with contemporary religious beliefs and practices” (Helland 2016, 177). Alongside the prevalence of individualist and consumerist therapeutic language in the seven popular guides for personal testimony preparation, equally notable is the absence of traditional theological references to sin, guilt, confession, repentance, prayer, forgiveness, atonement, redemption, salvation, or heaven. Mediatization has reformatted the language used to cognitively frame and interpret the conversion experience as the focus has shifted to deliverance not from sin, but from unhappiness. Phenomenologically, the convert experiences dialogue with a supernatural other who provides therapy rather than atonement, as well as dialogue between a “before” self who is unfulfilled—as opposed to unredeemed—and a new “after” self who attains immediate earthly fulfillment rather than a deferred heavenly reward. This change occurs not through mental assent to truth propositions but rather through emotional surrender to supernatural therapeutic intervention. Thus, as Campbell and Rule (2020) note, “digital media increasingly informs the practice of religion” and how evangelicals enact their beliefs, express their identity, and demonstrate their affiliation.

In emic research, the ethnographer enters the field without an a priori framework for classifying observations. Instead, units of analysis emerge naturally from observing a community’s social interactions. After completing fieldwork, the gathered data is reviewed, and appropriate etic frameworks are sought to help explain what was observed. In the present study, the importance of personal conversion testimonies within evangelical Protestant culture was abundantly evident, along with the decisive role that evangelical institutions’ mass-mediated representations play in shaping narrative conventions. Therefore, analytical frameworks were needed to interpret not only the cultural assumptions coded into the testimonies themselves, but also the effects of these assumptions’ mediation via institutional mass communications.

The search for appropriate analytical frameworks led in two directions. First, evangelical Protestant conversion testimonies were interpreted as life stories, which are common units of analysis in ethnographic research. When understood as life stories, testimonial communication becomes a way to stage and negotiate self-presentations that are acceptable to the evangelical community. This invokes a sociocultural approach to communication, as the language deployed in evangelical testimonies (re)produces the community’s social order. This language instantiates a shared evangelical speech code that circulates across private (micro), locally public (meso), and institutional (macro) settings, enabling culture members to interpret a storyteller’s cultural meanings and assumptions.

It is unsurprising that evangelicals feel driven to present a self whose life story is acceptable to their community; this tendency holds true across all human communities. However, this study reveals specific norms of sequencing and language that render an evangelical conversion narrative coherent to other evangelicals. The sequencing is rigidly tripartite: Before I accepted Jesus, How I accepted Jesus, and After I accepted Jesus. The plot is straightforward: The “before” self is not actualized. The “how” of attaining self-actualization cites an explanatory system—offering a deeper and purportedly more objective truth claim than mere personal anecdote—of meeting Jesus through hearing the gospel, shared by a caring and knowledgeable evangelical. In this way, the “after” self becomes actualized. Such a life story draws considerable, even ultimate, narrative power from its sequencing as a social drama of breach, crisis, redressive action, and integration.

A culture’s speech code is “a system of socially constructed symbols and meanings, premises, and rules, pertaining to communicative conduct” (Philipsen 1997, 126). This code is patterned on the culture’s assumptions about the nature of persons, how they should be linked in social relations, and what symbolic actions are efficacious. Two elements of a speech code are metacommunication (the terms by which culture members designate different categories of communication) and symbolic terms that simply and quickly communicate complex, taken-for-granted ideas, values, and meanings.

In evangelical culture, the language of encountering, meeting, receiving, coming to, trusting, following, and accepting constitutes a metacommunicative vocabulary for communicating with the divine. In turn, accepting Jesus and receiving Christ serve as symbolic terms. This language connotes passivity; the convert is not the actor but is acted upon by Jesus/Christ. Thus, the speech code is woven around evangelical cultural assumptions that believers are inherently objects of action while Jesus/Christ is the actor; believers are socially linked to the divine as trusting receivers/accepters/followers; and sharing my testimony is symbolically efficacious in establishing evangelical personhood.

The second direction followed by this study interprets religious conversion as an experience, thus introducing a phenomenological perspective on communication. This raises crucial questions: What do evangelical converts experience through their dialogue with a supernatural other and through the dialogue between their “before” and “after” selves? And what effects arise when the framing that shapes converts’ cognition and interpretation of their experiences is normed through institutional mass mediation? Here, this study adopts a mediatization of religion approach, finding that the evangelical community relies on media technologies to authoritatively guide believers in constructing communally coherent life stories. Consequently, this guidance is infused with media logic and language that reformat converts’ interpretations of their conversion experiences in line with the popular genre of individualist and consumerist therapy culture.

A further effect of mediatization becomes apparent when comparing the present findings to my earlier research on evangelical testimony-sharing within the locally public setting of a church worship service (Ward 2010). In that context, testimonies functioned as totemizing rituals that paid homage to the Bible as a sacred object. Conversion resulted from being shown the Bible by a parent or other evangelical mentor, and a validating effect of conversion was the desire to read and cite the Bible. In a recent study, I observed that discourse in a locally public evangelical church setting pervasively enculturated biblical literalism (Ward 2022). In contrast, the seven online guides for preparing a personal testimony reference the Bible only in an introductory statement, citing a single verse as a warrant for creating such a testimony. The questions that guide users through the before-how-after ­narrative do not refer to the Bible at all.

The seven online guides present the gospel and accepting Jesus as a deus ex machina solution for self-actualization. In this context, mediatization may be contributing to de-textualizing American evangelical religion. This observed effect aligns with findings from other field studies, which indicate that evangelical laity engage with the Bible only insofar as a “plain” surface reading of a verse or passage can be flexibly appropriated for personal application to present felt needs (Bielo 2009; Luhrman 2012; Malley 2004). As one evangelical theologian reports, “In America, there is so much focus on the illustration, on the modern application, compared to that boring…constant emphasis on the scripture itself” (Alberta 2023, 141). Similarly, in contemporary evangelical worship, “There are no hymnals, just PowerPoint-projected lyrics of songs people know so well that many sing them with their eyes shut” (Luhrmann 2012, 4).

A parallel de-textualization of conversion may also explain another observation from my fieldwork. In my first field project from 2003 to 2007, I toured churches across the eastern United States and observed the sharing my testimony ritual scores of times. Those years predated the release of smartphones and the subsequent acceleration of digital religion in everyday evangelical life (Dyer 2023). However, in my next field projects from 2013 to 2016 and again from 2022 to 2024, the frequency of testimonial rituals was noticeably reduced. This comparison across two decades may suggest that mediatization is transforming “digital evangelicalism” into a pop-therapy lifestyle that is only inchoately “biblical” (Ward 2022, 2023), privileging visualization and “heart knowledge” over textualization and “head knowledge” (Ward 2018c, 2020, 2021). Like any culture, evangelicalism is not static or monolithic. Rather, evangelical identity—as seen in the life stories that believers are disciplined to construct by their institutional mass media—is evolving in response to new contexts, particularly the rise of digital religion.

Published online: March 11, 2025