GodTube - where the rightwing Christians surf

GodTube - where the rightwing Christians surf

Tim Dowling
Monday April 30, 2007
The Guardian


Imagine for a moment a parallel universe where everything looks familiar, but where everyone is a rightwing fundamentalist Christian and Darwinism is widely seen as a crackpot fairytale. Well, now you can visit such a world any time you want: GodTube, Christianity's answer to the heathen YouTube, is a clearing house for Christian music videos, user-generated sermons, evangelical short films and anti-evolution cranks. One of the most popular videos is an excruciating four-part parody of those Mac v PC adverts - Christ-follower v Christian; another features a preacher with a microphone berating a street performer dressed as Gene Simmons from Kiss. A clip titled They Day They Kicked God Out of the Schools characterises the recent spate of US campus killings as God's revenge for outlawing school prayer. Elsewhere, an old man delivers a boring lecture about why the Earth really isn't 4.5bn years old after all.

GodTube ("Broadcast Him") is part of the conservative Christian counterweb that now runs in tandem with the wider online world: Conservapedia and Creationwiki.org look just like Wikipedia but are free from the unpleasant left- liberal bias that tends to accompany the truth. There's even a "Christian MySpace Alternative" called DittyTalk (the explanation for the name is longwinded and unconvincing - surely it's designed to ensnare surfers who type "dirtytalk" too quickly?). Here, everyone who signs up gets at least one friend: Jesus.

It's possible to travel in this virtual domain without meeting anyone who doesn't go to church, though it is at the moment still a small universe: at present GodTube only has 4,356 videos on offer, while YouTube gets 65,000 new ones a day. Creationwiki has fewer than 3,000 entries, against Wikipedia's 1.7m.

Nor is this realm the safe haven it ought to be. Like Wikipedia, Conservapedia often falls victim to pranksters. The comments section on GodTube is hijacked by dissenters who seem to find the Christian-themed polemics unintentionally amusing. Commenting on one clip, a hilariously suggestive, minute-long presentation in which a man holds up the banana as evidence of Intelligent Design, "Soupdragon" writes: "All that proves is that you, the same as everyone else, are a few steps away from monkeys."