Media chatter about religion heated up in the past week in response to Brit Hume's come-to-Jesus altar call for Tiger Woods.  The story first got framed as a smack-down between Jesus and the Buddha, and subsequently as a lesson in liberal tolerance for religious difference. CNN's Rick Sanchez tried another tack, when he interviewed "a Buddhist expert" for a segment Sanchez called Buddhism 101. Beliefnet blogger Ethan Nicktern pushed beyond the polarization, explaining Buddhist basics to Sanchez, who outed himself as a Christian, but of a more open-minded sort than Hume. Over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat defended Hume's remarks and called debate about religious differences essential to public life. But really, is this the kind of debate about religion we must endure in the U.S. – one involving two layers of celebrity and filtered finally through the lens of politics?   

In the middle of this predictable kerfuffle, I stumbled on a different media universe. It's nothing new to claim that anybody with a laptop, a camera and wifi access can become a reporter, or even a preacher.  But the point I want to make echoes Diane Winston's observation in the Scoop about how the realities of the digital world change religion reportage. The samizdat possibilities of the web, its democratic and decentralized tendencies, its affront to authority, can scramble our notions of religion and religious expression.

Take, for instance, QueerComrades.com, a website documenting LGBT life in China. In its 3 short years the site has racked up 10 million hits, with Chinese and other viewers clicking there to learn about queer punk bands, drag shows, lesbian sex toys and the gay bear subculture.  

This month's webisode, Opening God's Closet, focuses on religious faith and practice among queer-identified people. It starts out with back-to-basics questions that big news media in America too often skip right over: What is religion? How does it function? What does it do for people?  Those questions are answered by looking at 5 individual lives – 3 gay Chinese Buddhists, a gay Malaysian Christian of Chinese descent living in the U.S. and the Anglo pastor of New York's Metropolitan Community Church, who visits China, bringing tidings of her gay-friendly brand of Christianity.

This is no Emmy-award winning documentary: no snappy production values, no celebrity talk, no stentorian declarations about religion in public life. But its representation of spiritual amity could very well double as a message to Chinese authorities that religious practice is nothing to be feared, not even marginalized expressions of it.  

Recently, news about religion and gay life in other parts of the world has been focused on Uganda's draconian anti-homosexuality laws and the link with American ex-gay groups. (Finally! The story had a hard time gaining traction in the U.S. Rachel Maddow hammered the story for weeks, but it only hit the front page of the New York Times on January 4th). And then came the row over Brit Hume's altar call to Tiger Woods.  

Between those two stories, Opening God's Closet flies in beneath the radar, showing public expressions of private faith unthinkable to Ugandan Parliamentarians and unrecognized by those at Fox News, CNN or the New York Times.  The web is good at bringing us narratives of religious faith and practice as it morphs into unexpected forms, crossing all kinds of boundaries along the way. It allows us to tell such stories well, but can't other media, too, if only we put aside what we think religion is and focus instead on what religious people say and do?

J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.