The face we see in the digital mirror: how technology is changing religion

We used to be born into a religion, for example, and now we change religions and "shop for churches." We used to stay married, but more and more people divorce and remarry. We used to choose a vocation and stay with it, but now we expect to have several careers in a lifetime. In every dimension of our lives, that which we took for granted as divinely ordained was in fact determined by an unvarying context for our lives, and it is that very context that our technologies undermine and transform. Then new contents inevitably flow into the new contours generated by a new context.

Changing face of Christianity

So the question is not will new technologies, and specifically digital ones, turn religious, political and economic structures on their collective ears, but will our identities persist in a recognizable form that includes and transcends the forms that came before? Or will there be such a disconnect that when we look into the digital mirror, the face we see does not resemble the one we used to see?

Just as many Jews and Christians look differently on their shared symbols and traditions, with Jews emphasizing the differences that make them distinct and Christians emphasizing the shared heritage that links them, new religious organizations and institutions will include and transcend our current structures according to those inside them but will constitute an unacceptably radical shift for those in the older structures.

I once identified the MOOs and MUSHes emerging in primitive cyberspace (multiplayer online games originally created in text) as the brackish tidewaters where new spiritual life was likely to emerge. Their descendents, multi-player online gaming communities like Everquest with hundreds of thousands of participants, have fulfilled my predictions. Spirituality and religious quests permeate those gaming environments and usually draw on various Neo-Pagan spiritualities that seem to be prevalent in hacker communities--yes, hackers often have a deep interest in spirituality, but it is usually expressed through nontraditional religions such as Wicca. Games include spells, rites, rituals, incantations and numerous religious classes of avatars like monks, spiritual warriors and warlocks. Asian disciplines, too, are mined for the spiritual implications of martial arts. Although Catholic traditions would work equally well, the flavor of exotic martial arts and the dissemination of its forms through movies (when was the last time you saw Christian warriors portrayed positively in a movie?) appeals more to young people than an Ignatian retreat or Benedictine discipline.

The implications of this article are not trivial. We are moving together, like it or not, through a zone of annihilation that challenges all of the ways we hold ourselves as human beings and possibilities for action in the world. The transformational energies of our time will become a firestorm when core proclamations about our beliefs begin to smoke and burn.

If Christianity is to embrace and be transformed by those energies, it will necessarily become something other than what it has been or at least what it has been thought to be. Perhaps claims to exclusivity and universality will survive the fire, but perhaps not. Perhaps those claims will both intensify and diminish, intensify because some can't help but cling to the past and diminish because we are all nevertheless being recontextualized in a way that will remind us unceasingly that the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon. We can make this passage with sanity only if we know and have confidence that God is God and will defend Godself and cannot perish, while everything in this life, including our ideas about God, is transitory and passing.