5 Ham-Fisted Religious Websites

It's safe to say that God doesn't live on the Internet. Where cathedrals, temples, and houses of worship succeed in providing the sensation that God might feasibly hang out there, websites fail miserably. The translation from stone and stained glass to ones and zeros is clumsy at best, partially because so many of the websites are built by volunteer designers and partially because those designers insist on building websites as though no website has ever existed in the history of the Internet. To their credit, most of them seem to grasp importance of holding on to the short attention spans of accidental visitors, but they don't have a really solid plan for applying that information.

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Yep, looks like heaven.

Even on the websites that clearly took months to produce, you can see the internal struggle of the designers with a newfound skill-set, trying to marry their love of God with their love of being awesome. The following are five examples of that struggle; they are genuine and earnest stabs at being both epic and pious at the same time. You'll notice that all of them are denominations of Christianity, not as a knock against the religion but because they just ended up being the most hilarious. Besides, if I'm going to throw stones it might as well be at the glass houses of people who built them around a belief system of forgiveness.

Warrior Bride International

If you're a woman who loves God but also loves stabbing stuff with a broadsword then this is probably your

website. Every page features a woman in a bridal gown wielding a double edged sword, like she just carved her way through a wedding party to have these pictures taken. In terms of a hook, I'll admit to spending over an hour exploring the site for the pictures alone, so in that respect it's successful. However, if you're the type of person who is hung up on logic, and you're looking for the correlation between prayer groups and a bride prepared to kill something, you will be sadly disappointed. The closest the website offers us in terms of an explanation is this:

God gave Psalm 149:6 the foundational Let me a5 scripture. the praises of God be mn their mouths, and sharp sovord in their bands. I know the has been

Then it takes a turn toward the ominous.

The next I know this is from God, is that Satan has reason tried to physically kill three me times and I'm putting myself the first prayer request War

That's it. That passage from the bible and offhanded mention of Satan making three attempts to end her life is apparently all we're allowed to know. The relationship between the images and the text on each page is so disjointed that I wouldn't be surprised if someone handed the creator some stock photos and challenged her to make a church around them. That or the author just has a fundamental misunderstanding of the world "Warrior." And "Bride." Also, "International."

Though, there is something distinctly Eastern European about this.

Other highlights include a Warfare Store that only sells one book entitled "Breaking Open Your Alabaster Box" (which I'm loosely hoping is a guide for a warrior brides consummation of marriage) and a year-round events schedule with only one event: Tea with God . To the site's credit, if there is one event to have on a church calendar, that's certainly it.

Internet Church for Christ

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As someone whose only brush with religion comes at wedding and funeral services, I'm amazed at how accurately the Internet Church for Christ elicits the same confusion and anxiety I would feel at a real church; nothing is intuitive, the imagery is confusing and it's impossible to tell what on the site is intentional and what's just broken. The home page alone is an exhausting experience; out of context quotes float across a blue sky, "John 3:16" blinks in the upper left corner like a broken VCR clock and a hive of angry butterfly-crosses follows your cursor wherever it goes. Then all subsequent pages feel like an experiment in man's capacity for reason. They are a maze of false walls with no constants; some buttons only work once and then never work again, and all the backgrounds are tile-patterned duplications of one another providing the sensation of running across the landscape of a cartoon.

I feel like I've been here before.

Finally, the 36 menu buttons running down the side of the page are a true testament of the Church for Christ's dedication to acceptance and equality; the "Bible Study" menu button takes no precedence over "Anti-Aging Secrets," and each button is the same size regardless of whether the text fits or not. Ultimately the entire site is as close to a fever dream as you could imagine except with more GIFs and different Elvis music.

Jesus Is Savior

The Jesus is Savior website is essentially the same as the Internet Church for Christ if it were created by a furious schizophrenic. There are so many fonts, photos and hate-filled, incongruous pieces of information on the homepage that at a certain point the human eye just gives up and stares into the vast expanse of the background. The only unifying theme of the site seems to be contempt and a psychotic distrust of literally everything.

Even the links that look like they could lead to a page of genuine enthusiasm prove to have some terrible message attached.

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The site antagonizes anything it can think of, and when it runs out of ideas, it starts to attack its own opinions. It's fitting that the background of the site is outer space because Jesus Is Savior feels very much like a star consuming itself out on the fringe of some galaxy. In fact, it's surprisingly gratifying to just imagine the website creator enjoying stuff, like warm laundry or a really good sandwich on a Saturday. Sadly, even that is probably out of the question.

Evangel Cathedral

The Evangel Cathedral website has an introduction animation with a "Skip Intro" option, but I'm fairly confident that no one has ever used it in the history of the site's existence. The sequence looks like Jesus Christ himself sat over the shoulder of the designer and shouted out ideas to make it more spectacular. What it lacks in message it makes up for in lightning bolts, spinny shooty things and heaps of kick-ass sound effects. It's not until the final scene of righteous souls firing into the air that you're reminded this is a website for a church and then the sequence abruptly stops just as quickly as it started before redirecting to the homepage. The introduction as a whole is hands down the most ambitious effort I've ever seen to hold the attention of someone without making anything close to a point.

Who needs a point when there's a courtyard with a fountain?!

It's understandably difficult for a website to live up to such an epic introduction but the Evangel Cathedral handles it deftly with a wailing guitar solo and flying words that shoot across the page and probably mean something in the context of real sentences. Nearly everything on the page undulates, glides or generally fights for your attention, both to assure you that the church is stimulating to the point of discomfort and to remind epileptics they aren't welcome. Not everything on the page has a message or a purpose, but it all looks like it does and if nothing else, that seems like a fitting analogy for the life of someone who might attend this church.

K&K Mime

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K&K Mime appeals to a very narrow demographic of people who enjoy the pageantry of Baptist church but are sick at the thought of vocal communication. Keith and Karl Edmonds are twin brothers who combined their passion for God with their love of pretending like it's really windy. K&K "silently interpret contemporary gospel," by enacting situations in which they resist temptation, find faith in small tasks, and sometimes get stuck in imaginary boxes.

Some boxes are smaller than others.

As you look at their website, if you find yourself thinking, "That electricity looks familiar" it's because the same company that designed this page designed Evangel Cathedral's. There's even a similar epic introduction. Sharper FX is responsible for church websites all over the country and has somehow gotten away with making them all nearly identical. The K&K Mime site, however, is the only one that shows a little individuality, despite the fact that it's run by twins. (I'm not going to wait until the end of this column to apologize for that joke, I'd just like to get it out of the way now.) As you might expect from mimes, the size 8 font text and horizontal/upside-down menu buttons on the homepage suggest that words are not a priority for K&K Mime. I'm certain that if they could perform a physical interpretation of "Message Board" and "Contact Us" they would absolutely do that instead. Everything on the page is absurdly tiny, including their heads. Everything, except for the massive white gloves. Those gloves, extending toward you to touch you, to reach inside you and hopefully drop a handful of faith.