The text describes the attitudes of American Protestants towards secular electronic games. These attitudes are characterized by two concepts: neutralization and sacralization. The first one consists in perceiving using cyber entertainment as an activity separate from religion, which leads to positive valuation of the game and its use, and defining it as a source of pleasure, regardless of any negative content such as violence. Sacralization is investing a game with religious significance. Its positive version allows for the implementation of religious attitudes in the framework of gaming, the negative one leads to rejection of secular cyber entertainment.
The text explains the specificity of the American electronic church, presenting the issues of televangelism, including its brief history, and contexts: megachurches, economy, and entertainment. The example of the electronic church shows the importance of economy and popular culture in evangelicalism as well as elasticity of religious contents and forms.
The purpose of the text is to define, on the basis of American Christian websites, how religious messages function in the structures of popular culture. Giving to this issue the context of a broadly defined translation (as transfer of a message from one language to another), identifying the sender with the translator (in a metaphorical sense) and defining his or her aims made it possible to better understand the essence of the problem. Religious messages are adapted to mass culture’s structures and this process takes into account communication possibilities of both a medium and its users. This analysis enabled the author to distinguish and describe such characteristics of pop-cultural Christian narration as marginalisation of the religious content, communicativeness and emotionality.
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