The Internet is an important technological stride that many different people around the world are currently exploring. It can permeate the lives of those who are connected to it, and cyberspace quickly becomes a part of everyday life-especially if people are connected to the Internet for work purposes. We do not yet fully understand the implications that the Internet has had on our cultural and personal lives, but it is certain that it can affect many wide-ranging parts of life, one of which is religion and spirituality. The Internet does not revolve solely around the stereotypical pornographic or commercial sites. Religious documents are available online, just as some forms of religious worship or practice can be done or participated in online. Other religions refuse to accept the Internet as a valid form of transmittance, just as some people treat the Internet as a religion unto itself. Even though some have denied its validity, many different spiritual groups communicate their presence to a global audience from a relatively small grey box that just happens to be connected to a phone line and many other wires. How the Internet has changed religious practices and vice versa has yet to be seen, but it seems only prolonged study will tell.
To begin with, there are some major issues involved with the anthropological study of religion and the Internet that should be identified. One is that there are few sources coming from an explicitly anthropological, or even sociological, viewpoint. Many sources could not even be strictly considered to be academic and are targeted to a more general audience. Zaleski, writing in 1997, does not analyze the material he has collected in numerous interviews; he simply presents it. While his book is very informative in regards to how major religions view the Internet, it does not synthesize any ideas on why this is so. Another thing to consider is that the Internet has only been present in mainstream, albeit somewhat limited, use since the mid-1990s. There is no accurate way to define how the Internet has influenced cultural patterns as of yet, since cultural patterns are subjective analytical groupings that may change over time through a historical perspective. In other words, most of us do not know enough yet to give an educated opinion on just how revolutionary the Internet was-or was not. Further, there are few existing works that deal with the comparison of religious worship in offline life and religious worship in online life. The ones that do tend to fall prey to many of the problems that other researchers have. Researchers dealing with the Internet have a habit of speculating about the future instead of offering analyses of what has really occurred. They are simply predicting different routes that any trends seen presently-which may very well have nothing to do with the Internet so much as other factors-will take in the future.
Some definitions will be needed in order to follow some of my lines of thought. When discussing religion, what I refer to is a belief system that has been institutionalized. This implies some sort of organization and a membership or community of more than one person, which has survived through time. Another term that is important is spirituality, which I define as something more personal than religion. Spirituality is involved in religion, although spirituality may not be a term that is inclusive of religion, as I have defined it. It is more the feeling or experience than the organization and institutions found in religion, and may exist outside of religion. In terms of theoretical bases found in works about religion and the Internet, many of the available sources studying religion on the Internet mention technological determinism. To make this explicit, technological determinism will determine cultural development; technology is a causational factor from which all other things result. For example if taking an extreme position, the printing press may be viewed as the sole cause of how Protestantism became as popular as it did. Religion is thus attributed as being part of technological development. There were, of course, many other factors involved in the Protestant Reformation, even though the printing press influenced religion.
Technological determinism is also usually tied to a form of evolutionary beliefs in these sources. Many of the descriptions of these beliefs seem to be able to progress only in one direction, and towards a single end. A prime example of these thoughts can be found in Bauwens and Rossi 1999, where a relationship between progressions both technological and spiritual is argued. Father Rossi disputes Bauwens' points that technology causes spiritual progression and that spiritual development as caused by one form of technology is a prerequisite to moving towards the next phase of technological development. He instead finds spiritual progression is not necessarily tied to technological development as an "enabler" for the next level of development, but is required for an understanding of moral and spiritual implications that the technology may have. As Father Rossi has argued against this evolutionary ladder, most anthropologists would agree, and then probably add some additional critique. While some sources (Cobb 1998:20) believe that technology causes humans to culturally evolve in a manner similar to Leslie White's ideas, it would be an over-simplification to look at the relationship between spiritual and technological developments as inextricably connected as causal elements. They are tied together, as both are parts of what makes up our cultural milieu, but they are not forced into a specific pattern of relations that can be charted as an evolutionary development. Further, there are other variables beyond technology that could potentially alter or influence spiritual development.
Part of the evolutionary scheme of beliefs, to an extent, begins to look as if it had been lifted from science fiction novels. Indeed, it has in some cases. The word cyberspace first came into use by William Gibson in his science fiction novel Neuromancer (Cobb 1997:30). There seems to be several ideas about human evolution in cyberspace that theorists toss about. Some render technology into something that allows the next progression to become possible, and others see it as an extension of the evolution itself. Human evolution will follow the model of technology in terms of mass connectivity, and become a collective mind. Others believe that a collective mind will be enabled by the technology, and minds will be hooked up or wired into the Internet just as computers are. An aspect of this idea is omniscience, the ability of a person who is logged into the net to "know all" or even "be all" by virtue of the connections that it grants them. The mind becomes likened to a computer; thoughts and emotions as well as anything else are processed as "files." If this is true, then it is possible to take the contents of a person's biological brain and upload them into a form of digital brain that physically does not deteriorate: instant immortality. Cyberspace allows users to transcend their bodies, as many religions aim towards. To me, these qualities make the Internet into a place, which allows people to recreate themselves as a version of their own god. Omniscience, immortality, transcending the body-all these things are classic goals or qualities of spiritual enlightenment or spiritual control.
Wertheim (1999) has worked with the idea that cyberspace is a new version of Heaven, this time created by humans and not God. Part of her ideas rest in the basis that the tradition of the Western world to separate the mind and body has lead to the ideas that qualities that are not physical become equated with the mind (Wertheim 1999:149). Interestingly, the mind also includes spiritual qualities and beliefs. Thus, the Internet is largely a spiritual "space" somewhere in the ether. It becomes part of the Christian concept of Heaven through this link, but also holds a promise of the sacred to many people. One thing that is important to remember, though, is that this version of Heaven is under our direct control. There is no intermediary of the priest and other clergy, or barriers of divine beings that work for God. We are directly connected to technology that allows us divine creation. We can create our own utopic worlds online-the act of creating somehow becoming important once we realize we can have our own six days, and own a web page. But if you know how, creating the world can only take about six hours. Somehow, in a crucial way, the Internet has begun to allow democratic belief systems, or belief systems independent of control to exist as a large presence. To some extent, this is because cyberspace works with a form of power relations that render hierarchies of power and control in religion as unnecessary. There is no one person that must be accessed in order to attain spiritual enlightenment. There are multiple sources that allow each and every person who accesses them to work at their spirituality on their own level.
Something that I may suggest about the digital divide
between different countries and cultures is a relatively important
idea, which I have not seen expressed in any literature involving
religion and cyberspace. Perhaps not only social and economic factors
play a part in whether or not countries are able to become online.
It may be that because of the Western philosophical separation of
body and mind, there is some predisposition towards accepting both
the technology and the immaterial quality of it. I must emphasize that
alienation from the net would not occur simply because of backwoods
ignorance. There are people who have been raised within a Western tradition
of thought who neither enjoy the idea of the technology, or the confusing
abstract existence of the Internet. My point is simply that people coming
from a background where, perhaps the mind and the body have been kept as
a unified concept, may find the use of such a technology disdainful.
I have had personal acquaintances who refuse to use the Internet
on the basis that it is not real, and untouchable. It is somewhere
"out there" in the world as an amorphous blob of wires and electricity
and clacking keys that cannot be truly touched. In this way, the
religion and spiritual beliefs of certain people may delay their
acceptance of the Internet as a valid medium used in everyday life.
Spirituality and religious doctrines could potentially exacerbate
the digital divide around the world.
Regardless, there are other religions that have no compunction about using the Internet for their daily practices. There are primarily two ways that religious organizations go about this. The first is communication and information sharing, and the second is actual religious worship online. Christopher Helland (2000:207) has identified and worked with these two uses as what he refers to as Religion-online and Online-religion. Religion-online is an organized attempt to present religion through a medium for communication within a traditional top-down hierarchy, and Online-religion is where a more egalitarian existence reigns, and the process of liminality allows for religious practice. To Helland, use of the web for communication implies traditional use, the kind that has been employed prior to the Internet. For religious practice, it gives justification to holding rituals or other practices online within Victor Turner's ideas of liminality, and denotes a more equal state of being. These connotations should not necessarily be applied to all instances, as both communication and religious worship can exist outside of the specific organizational realms that he places them in. Communication includes members of a congregation sending each other e-mails, posting a web page in order to educate the public about some aspect of the group's religious practices, or scheduling a chat time where a leader of the religious community is available online. It is not always a direct person-to-person exchange, as posting a web site does not entail that its creator must monitor it every hour of the day; instead, it is something that visitors receive as a kind of passive absorption.
In contrast to use of the Internet by religious groups for communication, there is also the issue of religious practices that are conducted online. This category tends to include rituals and other symbolic practices which contribute to religious understanding, sometimes within the tradition specifically, and sometimes outside of it in a broader sense. Depending on how it was intended and what it meant to the person, reading an online copy of the Bible could be a straight form of communication-a religious group posting it for the purpose of communicating their beliefs. But at the same time, reading the Bible within the Christian tradition may very well be considered a form of independent worship, if done with the proper intentions and mindset. It is difficult to define what is religious worship when the concepts of religion or spirituality can permeate so many aspects of our lives. I am moving away from Helland when I note that one important point may be that religious communication online may be considered a passive action, whereas worship online may be considered an active action. This is, however, a highly subjective definition that would be a personal separation for those who are involved in the religious worship.
The Internet used simply as a medium for communication
seems to be much more common for religious groups than to worship
online. Most of this has to do with the fact that religion is something
that involves the human soul, some sort of connection to the person
who is performing the religious act. When a person is logged on to
the Internet, there is only a certain range of things that may occur.
Visual and audio information can be transmitted through the wires
that link a person on a computer to a server to another server to
another person on another computer. But there is no direct connection from
person to person in this sense, and a person's soul or energy is generally
not see as transmitted over the wires by most religions. As Rabbi Kazen,
who is involved with the Orthodox Jewish site for Chabad-Lubavitch
explains to Zaleski (1997:18) during an interview, "Each individual
person has a spark of godliness within them, which is the soul."
According to Rabbi Kazen, many Jewish religious acts cannot be held
on the web, partly because of the absence of the soul, but also partly
because some religious acts are physical. They cannot be separated
from the actual physical connection to the spiritual meaning. Acts,
such as the Sabbath cannot be done in front of a computer-the entire
act of being online during a Sabbath is contrary to how the time
should be spent. When Zaleski interviews Swami Atma about religion
and cyberspace, he discovers that the yogic branch of Hinduism does
not suggest worshipping online for a different reason. Partly, it is
acknowledged that there is a different transmission over the Internet,
but more importantly, computers are found to be draining in a very
negative sense. Swami Atma comments, ".the energy or vibration around
a computer is not very good for [people]." (Zaleski 1997:211). He
continues to speak about how breaks away from the machine are necessary
when working for long periods of time, and connects this negative,
draining feeling briefly to the possible medical factor of electromagnetic
fields.
Other religions accept the Internet for more than use as a sophisticated form of advertising, and even encourage their members to worship online. Schroeder, Heather, and Lee (1998) have completed participant-observation in an online charismatic community where it was found that the religious worship was not markedly different. Services were led online very similar to and using the same language as services held offline. However, the sense of community that one receives from having a spiritual community is not as satisfying online. In the pagan Internet community, many pagans do participate in online rituals, ceremonies, and spells. Some who worship in this way call themselves "technopagans" to denote the connection that they place between spirituality and technology. One recorded ritual was described as casting the circle, where normally candles or people stand at the four corners east, west, north, and south. In this ritual, there was a networked personal computer with an Internet connection where those participating in the ritual were involved both in the physical world and the abstract world of cyberspace simultaneously (Davis 1995). The ritual allowed anyone who was online at the same time to participate through the use of VRML, a type of virtual reality protocol for the Internet that uses a graphical interface.
The open participation granted by the technopagans running this ritual is an important aspect. It was not only open to those who took the time to attend in real life. Most people who were present at the actual event were probably there because of local community connections. Real life and "virtual" life tend to crossover; the religious community of Wiccans and other pagans maintain sites, but do not tend to depend upon the online aspect of religion (Horsfall 2000:181). Many sites are used in order to network in person with other pagans in a user's local area. Paganism is characteristically a religion that has a decentralized mechanism for control, if any control at all. The Discordians, a specific pagan subgroup, pride themselves on chaotic and anarchistic behavior. In many pagan groups, people take turns leading as long as they have the proper knowledge base to do so. This is similar to the Internet, which thrives on knowledge and content as opposed to seniority. Many pagan people improvise their rituals and practices of worship; the symbolism and spirituality is more important than a choreographed and aesthetic ritual. Religious rites can be performed using a butter knife in place of a ceremonial dagger; there is more emphasis placed on symbols to attain the desired effect of a ritual. There is also a much more egalitarian way of approaching worship in paganism than there would be, for instance, with the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church does not have the same fluid adaptability or form of organization, although that does not mean that followers necessarily always obey the Roman Catholic Church and work within that hierarchy.
I would speculate that people with a decentralized
religion would be more successful in using the Internet effectively
than others who follow a rigid hierarchy. It would allow for more
community ties between people as opposed to discrediting, or even
disallowing, contact with other members of the faith over the Internet.
A religion could become much more solid, in a sense. The more relationships
that different people in a group have, the loser they will be with
each other, and the closer they are, the more supportive they will
be. The people who logged on to the technopagans' virtual ritual
could have been from anywhere, of any faith, acquainted with organizers
or not. Whether the organizers liked it or not, the ritual was not
entirely in their hands, even though it was unstated that those attending
were supportive of what was going on. The potential reach that religious
ceremonies may attain becomes globally important when taken in context
with cyberspace. A widely disparate group of people is able to mutually
connect through these electronic connections in order to become a
spiritual community. There is no means available to record or control
participation in religious activities on the Internet, and there are ways
to conceal correct numbers if certain groups were to desire it. People
who worship in cyberspace are not falling under the normal jurisdiction
of the church or whatever other religious organization they may belong
to. There is also a certain lack of effectiveness that any religious
persecution would have when specifically directed to sites that can
be mirrored or other communicative devices employed by religious
and spiritual groups. If sites are taken down, they will be posted
elsewhere (Horsfall 2000:169).
There is no authority over spirituality online except
a personal authority. There is no control over the information that
is published in cyberspace other than what restrictions particular
servers may choose to enforce. Because of the decentralization that
the Internet both enables and feeds off of, finding out what is accurate
or authorized and what isn't is very difficult. The Internet can
be used in order to legitimize information. When something is published
and made available to the general public, there is an assumption
that the information that is distributed will be correct. This is
untrue; many books and articles in magazines are blatantly incorrect. There
is no cause for people to assume that various sources are correct online,
especially when the Internet is particularly deceptive. When used by someone
who wishes to be known as someone or something else, the Internet can be
used as a mask. It would be possible for someone to post a homepage under
somebody else's name out of pure malicious intent. Much more insidiously,
groups can present themselves to an audience through a carefully designed
site to appear something other than they are not. A certain religious group
may have had some negative press in the past, and wish to discredit the
harmful publicity. Or a web page may seek to be more legitimate through
content, giving the impression that there are more people involved than
there really are. It is possible to deceive people who have not had much
experience with the religious group. This may place a greater emphasis
on being able to back up claims on the organization's parts, and
encouragement for the casual browser to become more knowledgeable
using dependable sources.
The Internet also supplies a means for minority groups to get more attention than they are usually able to. Monetary support, membership, and many other factors are not important for getting a message out when the communication medium is the Internet. It is entirely possible to create a website that is free, other than the time that a person (or people) may invest in it. Communication is also faceless, and the stereotypes that may influence how people treat visible minorities melt away on the web. For religious groups, this allows universality to its memberships-the only important factors are that they are part of the spiritual community and that they are actively worshipping. Even then, in certain cases exceptions are made. Spiritual experiences could be purely spiritual online, as cyberspace is an entirely immaterial "place" where physical life does not exist beyond what is playacted as physical. In MUDs and chat rooms, commands are made that refer to life offline, such as certain commands that will allow a user to "do" an action as opposed to being seen as speaking something. The physicality of the real world outside of the online world is superimposed upon the immaterial and spiritual realm. Minority groups are able to work within the abstractions so that others do not persecute them. In the Southern area of the United States, to be a pagan is to be haunted by choices of religion and spirituality for the rest of the time a person lives there. On the Internet, there is a growing community of pagans. Since the Internet is not limited by geographical constraints, there is more support available within the spiritual community; it allows a greater barricade for when a person is attacked because of a belief.
New Religious Movements-also commonly known as cults, although that term is viewed as derogatory by most academics-are generally considered to be in the minority groups of religious belief. The New Religious Movements that are able to post to the Internet have a wide array of tools at their disposal to try to recruit new members. Ultimately, however, their detractors have more of an advantage (Mayer 2000:256). Part of this may be that when a site is posted in which a New Religious Movement is criticized, the Webmaster does not usually go out of their way to inform the subject of criticism. Mayer points out that religious groups can deal with negative press on the Internet several ways. They include developing a very strong and effective official homepage; encouraging members of the group to produce web sites about the religion; discrediting the Internet in general; ignoring the Internet; and finally, altering an old and unsuccessful policy that the group held towards the Internet (Mayer 2000:260-266). The idea is to either make sure that only good press is what people will see, which is what happens when members of the movements construct their own sites in overwhelming quantities, or to justify to members of a movement why they should discount negative information that is found when they are on the Internet. The strategies of what Mayer refers to as "propaganda wars" (2000:268) are mainly concerned with making sure that search engines will return the homepages with positive press as close to the top of the list for the religious groups.
Sometimes the passive transfer of information that I had referred to earlier becomes much more active. Some could see an active search for members to increase the members in a religious group as a form of religious worship. The actual marketing of religious pages is done not in terms of accurate amounts of which sites are the most applicable or informative. What is actually found in a search, then, is what certain religious groups may either desire or dislike their audience to find out. Much of the communication that religious groups use the Internet for is to provide information for members. There are, nevertheless, some pages that focus entirely on conversion of new members, or returning former members who have gone astray to the so-called true path. However, it does not seem that this method of communication is necessarily all that successful. Mayer (2000:251) points out that the members who were recruited by Heaven's Gate from the Internet were no more than they would have accomplished in real life. The number amounted to two. Probably, a person does not tend to stumble upon a site that is recruiting for these religions, but finds it through other social contacts that are somehow already connected to the movements. The Internet is just another medium for this exchange of information.
Both the Internet and religion work together, tied
by their common origin in humanity. While the Internet changes religious
worship, it most strongly affects the religious community in that
the abstraction of physical space is very different from normal practices,
which occur on a spatial plane. The Internet is not spatial; it is
far more likely that a spatial view is imposed upon it. The religious
community, when combined with this immaterial and abstract plane
as in the ritual completed by the technopagans, is embellished and
expanded. The Internet also allows religious freedom, but does not
label the different religions as to which of the organizations are
legitimate. I would imagine that working spiritually on the Internet would
have a more solitary feeling to it than if it was in a religious group;
it seems more to be a tool that can be used, but also a tool that
many religious groups regard as potentially dangerous or insufficient
for all purposes of worship. It would seem a difficulty to engage
in a monastic life through a virtual community, or to meditate. Part
of the problem with the Internet is that the sheer quantity and availability
of information, even if it is not always useful, becomes another
factor that adds to distraction from spiritual pursuits. It does
not limit spiritual pursuits beyond the restraints of the medium,
but it may be detrimental in that for an individual, it may cause
them to work away from their religious practices and discipline.
It would be fascinating to track how religions develop online, and
to somehow archive versions of different major sites as they progress
for later study in a context with more perspective.
Works Cited
Bauwens, Michel and Vincent Rossi
1999 Dialogue on the Cyber-Sacred and the Relationship Between Technological and Spiritual Development. Cybersociology (7). Electronic document. http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/magazine/7/rossi.html retrieved Nov 1, 2001.
Cobb, Jennifer
1998 Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World. New York: Crown Publishers.
Davis, Erik
1995 Technopagans: May the Astral Plane Be Reborn in Cyberspace. Wired 3(7). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/technopagans.html retrieved Nov 1, 2001.
Helland, Christopher
2000 Online-Religion/Religion-Online and Virtual Communitas. In Religion and the Social Order, vol. 8. Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Pp. 205 - 223. New York: Elsevier Science.
Horsfall, Sara
2000Religious Organizations Use the Internet: A Preliminary Inquiry. In Religion and the Social Order, vol. 8. Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Pp. 153 - 182. New York: Elsevier Science.
Mayer, Jean-François
2000 Religious Movements and the Internet: The New Frontier of Cult Controversies. In Religion and the Social Order, vol. 8. Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Pp. 249 - 276. New York: Elsevier Science.
Schroeder, Ralph, Noel Heather, and Raymond M. Lee
1998 The Sacred and the Virtual: Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(2). Electronic document. http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/schroeder.html retrieved Nov 4, 2001.
Wertheim, Margaret
1999 The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Zaleski, Jeff
1997 The Soul of Cyberspace. New York: HarperCollins.