Lo, Murdoch did bring the good news

Rupert Murdoch is out to prove that you can serve God and mammon after all. The media tycoon’s Fox Entertainment has bought beliefnet, the largest online faith and spirituality network.

The site is a portal that includes interviews with celebrities and politicians, social networking tools, blogs, inspirational stories, sacred text searches and views from teachers and preachers.

Discussion boards carry topics such as “Can inter-faith dating work?” and “Extreme abstinence”.

Beliefnet was founded in 1999 and the company claims to have three million unique visitors a month and nearly 11-million subscribers to a daily email newsletter.

Beliefnet provides content across a broad range of faiths. For the undecided, it offers Belief-O-Matic, a questionnaire that helps to find which religion best defines people. One question seeks to establish the reader’s view of God; is there only one God (corporeal or incorporeal), a supreme force or multiple gods? Another poses a question about the origins of life—the six options include a literal interpretation of Genesis, that God created the earth in seven days; a non-literal interpretation; and Darwin’s world view of evolution.

Murdoch has described himself as a “practising Christian” who goes to church “quite a bit”. He has been evangelical about the internet since buying MySpace for $580-million in 2005.

Fox said the network would give the company an online platform to distribute faith-based programming from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment; plus products from other parts of Murdoch’s News Corporation family, including Harper Collins’s Zondervan imprint, which specialises in Christian books, and HarperOne, which publishes a selection of religious and spirituality titles.

At the same time, Beliefnet will provide faith-based programming for other parts of News Corp.

The market for religious goods and services is growing. According to the Pew Internet Project, more than 82-million Americans and 64% of all internet users go online for faith-related matters. Research cited by Fox suggests the market for religious books, DVDs and software is worth more than $8-billion.

Beliefnet was founded by a former Newsweek journalist, Steven Waldman. It suffered the fate of many dotcoms launched in the late 1990s and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002. - Guardian Unlimited Â