Website Review

As part of my course on religion in the virtual space I was tasked with reviewing a website. I chose the website for Pieter L Valk, an evangelical Christian writer and speaker who focuses on sexuality within evangelicalism.

 Pieter L Valk describes himself as a writer, speaker, church consultant, and counselor, and his website www.pieterlvalk.com functions as the platform for drawing together his work. Pieter is a self-identified celibate gay Christian, and the totality of his work, as collected on his site, is focused on this positionality and issues related to it. I’m interested in Pieter and his website for several reasons, primarily because, as a former evangelical and one who pursued celibacy as a means of managing my queerness, I am interested in understanding how my experience of Christianity shaped me and continues to shape me after I have left the tradition. While that is partially a personal project, it intersects with much of my academic work, particularly how religion shapes the identity formation of queer people and how that shaping is reinforced via the rhetoric and culture of religious traditions, particularly evangelical Christianity. I argue that Pieter’s website, as well as his social media, is an example of the ways that religious products and spaces shape and reinforce religious elements of identity and functionally create and reinforce a particular reality. 1

Purpose

The landing page for Pieter’s website prominently describes the purpose of this site, and Pieter’s work, is “Helping churches love gay people & celibate Christians find family.” In a February 3, 2022, Instagram post, Pieter expressed that this website came about because “mentors encouraged me to gather my different kingdom work projects on a personal website” (@pieterlvalk via Instagram). Pieter’s Instagram page often contains posts that are condensed versions of blogs, or longer pieces, with the post encouraging the reader to “read the article at the link in my bio” this locates his webpage as the narrow part of a funnel inviting the more casual consumer or Pieter’s work entry into more content. The website also functions as a place for people to contact Pieter for speaking, consulting, or scheduling a session with him in his role as a licensed counselor. So while the website serves as the online repository of Pieter’s work and a marketing and business tool, it also is serving a location for the creation and maintenance of a reality.

Significance

Within segments of Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, the issue of sexuality is fractious, and there are, broadly speaking, two main camps for what Christians believe about this issue. 2 The two broad camps are “Side A” and “Side B.” 3 Side A is those that believe there is nothing inherently sinful regarding Christians who engage in same-sex sexual behavior or are in same-sex relationships; this group is also called “affirming.” On the other hand, Side B believes same-sex behavior is inherently sinful, and therefore all LGBT+ Christians ought to be celibate or in a mixed-orientation marriage.

Pieter is very much within the Side B camp; the entirety of the website points to this position as it is the central aim of Pieter’s broader work. Both Pieter’s social media postings, as well as this site, are targeted at an audience of like-minded people. There is little effort to convince “Side A” people to convert to “Side B,” and neither are there attempts to evangelize non-Christians. This rhetoric is an example of what cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz meant when he said that a group’s view of the world is “rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a way of life.” 4

Pieter’s work, as shown on his website, lays out a claim that Christians ought to uphold a traditional sexual ethic. The site then goes about reinforcing a vision of reality where that claim makes logical sense, all reinforced by the language, rhetoric, and aesthetics of the site generally, as well as in the particulars of what Pieter is writing and saying. One can imagine that for Pieter’s audience, this is a welcoming and edifying site and is a fulfillment of his mission.

Aesthetics, Functions, and Accessibility

The website is visually stimulating and appealing, with Pieter’s image on the landing page lending a thoughtful gravitas to the content, as well as foregrounding Pieter as the focus of the site. The website banner lays out the general divisions of the site, and the landing page contains a synopsis of what will be encountered. The publications section does get to be a little “busy,” with many images and texts competing for attention. This section of the site also is the least easily navigated with a confusing scrolling of posts at the top, and then posts grouped by “Top five of X” or by resource type, topic, and then a link to the bottom for “all resources.” The posts don’t appear to have an easy way to sort by publishing date, and the posts also do not include the year they were published.

As someone without visual or physical impairments related to using a computer, I interact with websites differently from other people, mainly focusing on aesthetics and base functionality. To judge the accessibility of a website, I rely on online accessibility trackers such as www.accessibilitychecker.org. I utilized this website to check the accessibility of Pieter’s site and the checker gave Pieter’s website a score of 59, indicating that there are challenges people who use screen readers or those with visual impairments may have difficulty in navigating the website 5.

The website also does not include an expansive bio of Pieter. Instead, the “About” section briefly explains the elements of Pieter’s work. This omission is surprising in a site with such a personal focus, especially considering that much of Pieter’s work includes discussions of his lived experience.

Conclusion

This review has focused on exploring both the content and the form of Pieter Valk’s website. I am generally less concerned with the mechanics of a website, other than if they work or if they are annoying, and so my attention rarely focuses on that. Instead, I am more concerned with what the website is doing, so this review has primarily occupied itself with exploring that. I have sought to explore what this site is doing within itself, especially how the website is part of a larger conversation about the inclusion and exclusion of LGBT+ people from Christian churches and communities. To that end, Pieter successfully displays a body of work that effectively reinforces the reality where the theology and ethics of Side B Christians make sense, and the call to celibacy is not only reasonable but righteous.

Notes

1 It should be noted that I know Pieter via mutual friends, as well as interacting with his posts on social media with some regularity.

2 When using the phrase Christianity, I am specifically talking about Christianity as it is practiced and discussed within the American context.

3 A helpful resource explaining this language in more detail: geekyjustin.com/side-a-b/

4 Geertz, Clifford. “Religion as a Cultural System” essay in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 89-90.

5 www.accessibilitychecker.org/audit/? website=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pieterlvalk.com&flag=us Pieter’s site was evaluated on 1 May 2022