Miracles or Love? How Religious Leaders Communicate Trustworthiness through the Web

A religious organization should communicate trustworthiness by attempting correctly to interpret its message and by recruiting new members. Modern communication involves new means of communication like the Internet, which has become an important medium capable of spreading a complex message to a large audience. Religious movements are a growing social and organizational force that employ modern communication methods and criteria. This paper addresses the convergence of religious communication and the Internet, by focusing on trust, a fundamental element of any type of communication, especially of a religious kind. Two main drivers can elicit trust: capabilities (the skill to realize what is promised) and benevolence (the lack of any opportunistic or egoistic goal). This paper employs the content analysis method to analyze the biographies of religious leaders posted on the their official web-sites, in order to verify the existence of these two trust drivers, i.e., leader’s capabilities and benevolence. The results demonstrate the different stress placed on each.