From Site Design to Flirting Options: Christian vs. Non-religious Dating Sites (2012)
Undergraduate: Mazaré Rogers
Faculty Advisor: Jordynn Jack
Department: English
The experts behind online dating websites pledge to use clients’ information they provide on a comprehensive registration profile to scientifically or divinely match any single man or woman with multiple compatible people. This paper will compare the features of the non-religious dating sites with Christian dating sites to explore the rhetorical strategies used to persuade customers that their site is best for finding harmonious friends, dates, or spouses. The Christian dating sites used will be Christianmingle.com and Christiancafe.com and the non-religious dating sites will include Eharmony.com and Chemistry.com. Special attention will be given to what the sites use as their authority on the matters of date matching: either science or God. Some of the features that will be compared are photographs, customer reviews, logos, and communication tools. I will compare buzzwords such as community, God, perfect match, and chemistry to show the goals of each site. One might expect that the sites claiming to have ordination from God or divine guidance would be more restrictive in their features and options for their clients. To the contrary, I will show that the non-religious sites are more restrictive because they base all of their findings on science.