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God Sitings
Searching for Faith
December 2001
By Laura Fisher Kaiser
Search and you will find: Fueled by a
rapidly growing number of venues and resources, more people
than ever are seeking faith, community, and solace online. In
this special report, we look at what's going on, what makes it
different, and how, for some, the Net has become a religious
experience all its own
The sky is a beautiful blue this Sunday
morning, and it's time for church. I'm not a big churchgoer,
but today I have a front-row seat at Atlanta's Peachtree
Presbyterian Church. Never mind that I'm neither a
Presbyterian nor in Atlanta. Like the rest of the world, I am
reeling after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Looking for
comfort in the church's live Webcasts, I'm not
disappointed.
Though he looks lilliputian inside my
Windows Media Player, senior minister Dr. Victor D. Pentz
delivers a rousing sermon, at one point comparing Jesus to the
brave New York City firefighters—both having descended into
hell, "as a southern boy might say, to kick Satan's tail." For
the first time in days, a wry smile creeps across my face, and
as the Web cam pans over the pews tightly packed with grim
congregants, I detect a ripple of relief.
At around the same time, Bill Hull logs
on to Peachtree before attending his regular Presbyterian
service in the small Texas town of Wimberley. The 56-year-old
is one of more than 14,856 who tune in monthly; it's his way
of reconnecting with the church of his youth. He confesses
he's not as reverent as he would be in person, but he sings
the hymns in his head and can print out the church bulletin.
"It's not like cable TV, where if you miss the telecast,
that's it," Hull says.
A recent Pew Research Center survey
reveals that since September 11, nearly seven of 10 Americans
are praying more; over the course of each month, some 25
million adults turn to the Internet for religious
"expression," according to a survey by Barna Research, a
consulting firm in Ventura, California. With more than a
million religious sites from which to choose, individuals of
every creed—from Adventists to Zoroastrians—are flocking
online to congregate, meditate, chat, study, pray, debate, and
even date. Travelers, too, are using the Net to find churches,
mosques, gurudwaras, and synagogues far from home.
In recent years, the major faiths have
built up a sizable Web presence. Catholics, Jews, Mormons,
Muslims, and the myriad Orthodox and Protestant denominations
are firmly ensconced in the haven of absolute religious
freedom that is the Net. The Vatican has its own Internet
country code (.va); even the technophobic Amish can be found
hawking butter churns at the Amish
General Store. Multifaith sites such as Beliefnet
and OurFaiths.org Religion Communities have
their share of "loyalists"—people who hold passionately to the
faith in which they were raised—but also cater to seekers of
all sorts. The religion communities on Yahoo!, America Online,
and MSN boast thousands of members chatting not only about
mainstream beliefs but also about such esoteric subjects as
Cao Dai, fire walking, and Umbanda. If all of that sounds a
bit serious, the Web being what it is, there are plenty of
quirkier pews—for example, the Virtual Church of
the Blind Chihuahua and the First Online
Church of "Bob"—that claim devoted followings.
Although there is no shortage of welcome
mats for potential believers, the purpose of most visitors is
more to find fellowship than to be converted. This was
especially apparent in the wake of the attacks. Many religion
sites saw a jump in traffic during the days that followed, as
people sought solace, shared their grief, and offered
prayers.
The message boards at SikhNet were
filled with outrage, especially over the murder in Arizona,
within a week of the tragedy, of a Sikh who had been mistaken
for a Muslim. Meanwhile, at CBN.com: The 700 Club, Pat Robertson
explained that the attacks happened "because God Almighty is
lifting His protection" from America, which has focused on
"the pursuit of health, wealth, material pleasures, and
sexuality," allowing "rampant pornography on the
Internet."
But many sites were busy building
spiritual bridges instead of roadblocks. OurFaiths suggested
that members invite a Muslim to dinner. Beliefnet encouraged
visitors to add their prayers to "an extraordinary multifaith
prayer circle," and within 48 hours an estimated 1,500 people
had heeded the call.
The Net is certainly not about to replace
the intimacy of traditional churches, or their "on-the-ground"
faithful. It's no wonder that IslamiCity, which caters to "the Global
Muslim eCommunity," carries a disclaimer on its Webcasts: "In
our opinion, you can't perform your prayers as if you were in
the congregation along with these prayer broadcasts. Please
join the prayers at your local mosque and watch these programs
during other times."
Yet religion has thrived in the virtual
world. "The World Wide Web can't really take one into the
inner sanctum of religious groups or the hearts and minds of
those who believe," writes sociology professor Jeffrey K.
Hadden at http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/.
"But without question, anyone who chooses can get much closer
to scores of religious movements than has ever before been
possible….It's a great learning laboratory."
It's also a powerful tool for
interconnecting far-flung members of a faith and galvanizing
them into action—sometimes with historic results. Such was the
case in 1997 when several leaders of the Greek Orthodox
Archdiocese of America opposed the archbishop. These "contras"
launched a Web site, Voithia (the word voithia is Greek for
"seeking God's help"), which disseminated their arguments to
church members and the media. The effort helped put pressure
on the patriarch in Constantinople, and the archbishop was
replaced in 1999. "What we're seeing," says OurFaiths' Lynne
Bundesen, "is the democratization of religion through the
World Wide Web. The implication is nothing short of the
complete reorganization of all traditional religions."
Bundesen ought to know. Before founding
OurFaiths last year, she designed the first religious
chatrooms for Prodigy and spent five years as webmaster for
MSN's religion communities. When she started at Prodigy in
1993, various groups flamed one another so often on the
Religion Bulletin Board that Armageddon threatened to erupt
daily. "It was an absolute mess," Bundesen recalls. "Not a
civil word anyplace—witches and Christians screaming at each
other, which you might expect, but then you even had Buddhists
threatening to sue other Buddhists!"
Bundesen's idea was to create a "sacred
space" inside which people could speak freely, as long as they
abided by a kind of Internet Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not
proselytize" was high on the list; the rest boiled down to a
do-unto-others ethic. Bundesen was also careful to use formal
names and terms that would convey respect, and she separated
the "text-based" Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam) from the "multitext" spiritual believers, who generally
adhere to a broader set of principles and are opener to
alternative ideas.
This format proved wildly popular, and
its success was repeated at MSN, where by 1999 the religion
communities were logging a million hits a month. At times, 150
members a minute visited the Islam chatroom. Prayer circles
were credited with curing cancer and other ills.
One popular MSN destination was a
Judaic-studies chat, where Jeff Golding, a 37-year-old network
administrator in Chicago, began tuning in on Sunday nights to
learn about his roots. "I was looking for a sense of
spirituality and to get something more into my life," he says.
He credits the insightful study sessions with helping him pull
out of a depression, rediscover his faith, and muster the
courage to pursue a relationship. He eventually became a
chatroom host himself, and last year he met, through an online
personal ad, the woman who is now his wife.
That's not to say that the going has
always been smooth. At one point, a Microsoft executive
suggested as a chat topic the question, "Should the pope
retire?" (Bundesen replied by explaining that devout Catholics
view the pope as "ordained by God, not the CEO of a big
corporation.") At another point, an ad for a Britney Spears
album somehow appeared in the Islam Sisters chatroom,
eliciting shock and disbelief.
And if you think balancing secular
commercialism with religious sanctity is tough, try ensuring
free speech, too. MSN learned this the hard way last year
after revamping its interest communities—ousting Bundesen and
others—with the help of Participate.com, a software and
management services firm whose mission is to convert community
chat-rooms into profit engines for such companies as Whirlpool
and Procter & Gamble. The transition was bumpy: Members
were appalled when a Christian host took over the Jewish
chatrooms and a Christian teen was asked to run the
gay/lesbian room. Hackers harassed and threatened hosts,
reportedly e-mailing them pornography and computer
viruses.
Although many religious sites have rules
of conduct, they're hard—if not impossible—to enforce without
posting knowledgeable gatekeepers in every chatroom and on
every message board. A recent visit to Yahoo!'s Islam,
Catholic, and Buddhist chats found a deluge of profane and
racist rants (in the Islam room, "You pissed us off now
prepare to die scumbags" was a relatively benign comment).
"As you can imagine, removing abusive
messages is a daunting task," says Mohammed Abdul Aleem, CEO
of IslamiCity. "We have to be careful and monitor some
free-form discussions so we don't actually inflame what is
already out there. It's a very delicate situation, whether
it's coming from Muslims or non-Muslims." His site began
vetting posts a week after the September 11 terrorist attack,
when the number of non-Muslim visitors increased tenfold.
To date, it is Beliefnet that seems to
have juggled conflicting demands most successfully. Indeed,
the site has drawn enough unique visitors—3.9 million is the
latest figure—to not only show up on the radar of Jupiter
Media Metrix but also win a third round of venture capital.
The site has partnered with ABC World News Tonight
(Peter Jennings is said to be a fan) to provide content and
has made deals with Yahoo! and AOL Time Warner.
In its quest to be operating in the black
by August 2002, Beliefnet is unabashedly commercial. Banner
ads pop up on most pages, and the site links to religious
tomes, music, herbs, and other items for sale to cash in on
what cofounder Robert Nylen estimates is a $40 billion
industry. He views the commercialization not as a conflict of
interest but almost as the perpetuation of a great legacy—that
is, if you're willing to trace the origins of capitalism to
Catholic monasteries in the 11th and 12th centuries. "If we
kept ourselves in a little, tiny box and sold only rosary
beads and yarmulkes," Nylen says, "it would be boring."
Alongside spiritual quizzes and
interviews with such celebrities as Bono and Christy
Turlington (which produce traffic spikes of up to 10,000 hits
in a day), the site hosts columnists—Margot Adler, Dan
Wakefield, and Gregg Easterbrook, for instance—ruminating on
provocative subjects: Strip Malls vs. Sacred Spaces,
Born-Again Hindus, Is Heaven Boring?
"We give people the comfort of the
tradition they understand, plus the security to explore the
spiritual quest they're on," Nylen says. A typical quester is
Sunergia, a stressed-out mother and student whose
message-board post, "Big Questions," zeroes in on the issue
that haunts all seekers yearning to fill that spiritual void:
"Why do people have religious convictions? What does a person
do with the dogma?" Her query is a plaintive cry in the
virtual wilderness, and it elicits dozens of responses.
So who are all these people
channeling their spirituality through cyberspace? Are they
teachers pointing the way to enlightenment? Are they lost
souls who need to get a life? In fact, they're both—and
everything in between. Some are perpetual seekers, surfing for
a sign. Others look only for affirmation of their beliefs.
They are all experts in their own right, free to fill their
heads (or the heads of others) with ideas that range from
brand-new to thousands of years old, an infinite and ongoing
progression of religious riffs and spiritual rants. Though
faceless and ephemeral, the communities they have built are
real—and connect seekers to, if not transcendence, then
something they feel will get them a little closer to it. |
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