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Once relegated to cheap newsletters distributed to a handful of like-minded readers, critics of prominent evangelicals are finding an inexpensive yet powerful platform on the Internet's World Wide Web.

Both Christian fundamentalists and secular liberals have created forums on the Web, reproaching individuals and organizations, and giving them electronic visibility rivaling their targets. The World Wide Web is the most popular incarnation of the Internet, meshing text, graphics, and sound.

"You have a potential audience of 40 million or 50 million people," says Mark A. Kellner, author of God on the Internet. There are official and unofficial Web "home pages," as the electronic displays are known, for dozens of top evangelicals. Internet search engines, which catalog the contents of the Web, make no distinction between official and unofficial sites, between those supporting and those opposing their subject, or between massive corporate sites and small sites created by a resourceful loner.

"What these groups are counting on is random action provided by search engines," Kellner says. "Once they get you there, they keep you with this dramatic sensationalism."

Observers say critics are drawn to the Web by the confrontational nature of the medium as well as its colossal potential audience at little cost.

"The cyberculture encourages people to be critical and sassy," says Quentin J. Schultze, communications professor at Calvin College and author of Internet for Christians. "It's all about saying whatever you like. Religion is just one aspect of this. It's true for every kind of institution you can imagine." There also are anti-corporate Web sites for every major corporation.

For organizations not accustomed to severe criticism, Schultze says, "the Internet represents an enormous public-relations nightmare. Any critic can find other critics and marshal a case against you." A few years ago, detractors often were limited to writing letters. "Now you can wage a campaign for almost nothing."

REALITY CHECK: But while the potential audience is astronomical, real traffic can be infinitesimal. Some sites measure the number of times, or "hits," a Web page is accessed. However, a page with five graphics may register between one to six hits each time it is visited, depending on several variables.

Poppy Dixon, director of the Postfundamentalist Press Web site (http://www. postfun.com/pfp/), says their site registered about 50,000 hits a month when it first went on the Web in September 1995. Now, she says, they receive between 5,000 and 10,000 hits a month, with a dozen electronic-mail messages a day. By comparison, the official Promise Keepers site (http://promisekeepers.org/) receives about 1 million hits a month. Even more important than the number of hits, Schultze says, is who is visiting the sites.

"Evangelical Christians haven't caught up to the cyberculture yet. They won't run across these sites," he says. "Years down the road, these organizations' constituencies will be a part of the cyberculture. Then the organizations will be in trouble."

In most cases, the best policy for the targeted organizations is to ignore the sites, Schultze says, and that is exactly what is happening.

"We've seen all of them," Don Clarke, Web site editor for Promise Keepers, says of the critics' pages. "We're not concerned in the slightest. We believe we're where we're at because of God." Clarke says the organization has attempted to respond to the most common questions and criticisms in their Frequently Asked Questions section of their site, but not because of the sites.

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November 11 1996, Vol. 40, No. 13