“My Life After I Received Christ”

Having a conversion “testimony” and evangelizing nonbelievers by “sharing” that testimony are membership expectations of American evangelical culture. As such, institutional mass media provide guidance on testimony preparation and delivery. This study analyzes online testimonial guides from seven major evangelical organizations. That the guides’ advice is essentially identical suggests that testimonies are life stories by which believers negotiate group membership through self-presentations acceptable to an evangelical generalized other. The guides deploy a shared speech code whose language (re)produces the community’s social order. Meanwhile, a process of mediatization has shifted religious authority from traditional offline authorities to a reliance on media technologies. Introducing media language and logics into the religious sphere has had the effect of reformatting evangelical conversion testimonies in the genre of popular therapy culture.