The emergence of digital and internet technologies has created new spaces for religious engagement and introduced alternative venues for community-building, identity construction, and religious practice for marginalized new religions. Ethnographic research on the Family International’s reconfiguration as an online community, subsequent to a sweeping reorganization introduced in 2010 referred to as “the Reboot,” explores the role its integration of digital media and virtual spaces played in the renegotiation of the movement’s religious identity and community. The movement’s journey to networked community affords insights into transformative ways that religious culture may be reconstituted through digital engagement, and the challenges new religious movements face in retaining community boundaries and distinctive identity within the interconnected and increasingly globalized context of today’s digitized world.

This article is a theoretical and ethnographic investigation of the role of marketing and branding within the contemporary ISKCON movement in the United States. In it, I examine the digital marketing enterprises of two prominent ISKCON temples: ISKCON of New Jersey and ISKCON of D.C. I argue that by attending to the vastly different ways in which these temples present and portray ISKCON online—including the markedly different media imagery by which they aim to draw the attention of the public—we can learn about an ideological divide concerning marketing within American ISKCON. This divide, I argue, highlights different ideas regarding how potential newcomers become attracted to ISKCON. It also illuminates an unexplored facet of the heterogeneity of American ISKCON, principally in terms of the movement’s public face.