Although Soto and his ilk’s approach to church may seem novel, it isn’t particularly surprising in the context of American evangelicals’ relationship to media and technology. Evangelicals have a long history of being early and eager adopters. After the Scopes trial, in 1925, when their opposition to teaching evolution in schools was widely derided in the media, the Christian fundamentalists of the time regrouped, rebranded, and began to call themselves “neo-evangelicals.” (Later, they would drop the neo.) They promoted their new self-image on the radio, amplifying the voices of evangelicals such as Charles Fuller and Aimee Semple McPherson—wholesome, folksy personalities who combined religious teaching with music and entertainment. Keeping pace with popular culture in the 1950s, Billy Graham, sometimes called “the pope of evangelicalism,” started a film studio, World Wide Pictures, in 1953. The televangelists of the 1980s proved to many of their followers that they had a prominent and vital role to play in modern American culture. Later, in the 1990s, contemporary Christian music did the same…

I’ve spent 10 years researching multimedia megachurches, so-called start-up churches, and faith-based tech companies. I’ve chronicled hackathons in which coders raced to create cloaked Bible apps that can be secretly opened in places where proselytizing is illegal; I’ve met evangelical futurists, pastors turned founders, and programmers turned pastors. Many techie evangelicals told me that they thought that keeping up with new media technologies was the only way to attract a younger generation moving away from religion. Others thought their experiments might even help redeem the internet itself, or might be part of hastening Jesus’s return, or the rapture, by fulfilling the book of Revelation’s prophecy of Christ’s return once his gospel has been preached “to every nation, tribe, language and people.”