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Digital sacrality: the Gospel of Twitter
Translated on request of the Catholic Herald Tribune, 30-06-09
How do we google our way to God? ‘Believe 2.0’, podcasting priests like Father Roderick and twittering ministers are quite a hype these days. In the past few months three conferences were organised in The Netherlands, all about the rise of the phenomenon ‘internet spirituality’. What it's all about, this new 'digital sacrality'?
This article is an translation of a Dutch original which can be found here.
 There are numerous religious practices to be found on the web. Nowadays God has at least MySpace, Facebook and iGoogle accounts. Jesus and pope Benedict XVI have fake accounts on microblog Twitter. People sharing the same faith find each other nowadays on social networks like Facebook, the Dutch Hyves or on the Catholic Flocknote. On Twitter there exist praying groups, and the Evangelical Church in Germany has twittered the whole Bible as a reach out to young people.
Reaction religions
“The Holy Spirit goes where ever He wants: online or offline.” On a special conference about ‘internet spirituality’ organised by the Dutch catholic webportal ‘Isidorusweb’ the famous Dutch theologian professor Erik Borgman (Tilburg University) stated that on internet new spaces have developed: a digital suburb where people find each other and the divine. He says: “Maybe it’s time for the second phase of ecclesial presence on the World Wide Web. For this a new theological view has to be developed in which the internet is a specific part of the world instead of a simple tool to evangelize a certain massage all around the world. To be more specific: the first question should not be how Christ should be proclaimed on the Web, but where Christ on the Web is or can already be found.”
Some experts are more sceptical. At the same conference religion philosopher Rene Munnik ( Tilburg University) said: “By socalled ‘virtual confession’ or burning a candle digitally, the whole ritual practice is diminished into a couple of clicks of your mouse. It is like throwing a coin in one of those machines in certain churches: an electrical lamp starts to burn. What a crap!”
But most ecclesial ministers are at their wits’ end about the whole internet-thing. On several occasions it has become immanent that local parishes or religious communities have absolutely no clue what so ever about the possibilities of Web 2.0. Not out of fear of out of conservatism, but out of unskilfulness. For instance: Most of the local church officials do not know of the existence of LindekIn of Facebook.
Offline versus online ‘sacrality’
What makes (a part of) internet a sacred place? Or is it impossible? No tool exists to measure the holiness of a (digital) place. If the Divine wants to manifest itself, it could become physical, for example in Christian rituals where we use water, oil, blessings, statues of saints, rosaries, candles, icons and incense. These elements are do not (yet) exist on the web, physically speaking. It is only by touching your keyboard that you can ‘touch’ another person somewhere on the Web. You can ‘see’ each other through your computer screen. Smelling and touching are impossible. Laying your hand on some one’s shoulder is unachievable on the internet.
Hearing and reading are options though. We can read, speak and listen on the Web. You can tweet a 140 characters of prayer on Twitter. Together you can compose a SMS bible. You can meditate with imaginary, with or without music, with the help of powerpoint or YouTube. You can chat with each other in special prayer chat rooms with the help of special emoticons which represent some one’s religious feelings or functions. There are hundreds of possibilities.
Between offline and online ‘sacrality’ a few phases can be differentiated. The first form of sacralism exists exclusive in the offline world. The church building, the chapel, the convent or places of ancient pilgrimage are traditional places where ecclesial rites can take place and where the faithful can experience the sacred.
The second form refer from the online World to the ‘traditional’ real life sacred spaces as we have seen in the first form. Examples are online calendars of church celebrations, prayers and masses (very popular around Christmas time). In this form there is no religious experience and no online sacred space. It only refer exclusively to a what has to come in real life.
The third form is a combination of offline and online. It can work two ways down. There are examples who refer form the online to the offline world and vice versa. Sociologist professor Christopher Helland calls this ‘Religion Online / Online Religion’. Another example are online prayers. You can post them on a website and other visitors are praying the same text with you (while not synchronically). In some cases these online prayers are emailed to a religious community where these prayers are taken to God, almost physically. This leads to a ‘match’ between a traditional sacred place and an online prayer. A similar process can be found in some Jewish circles: Jews can email their prayer to Jerusalem where they are printed and laid down in the Whaling Wall by volunteers.
Vice versa is also possible. One example is digital registrations of religious ceremonies for broadcasting on television and/or the internet. This broadcast can be in real time (live or ‘streaming’) or not. An intriguing question is what the sacramental value is of a registrated Eucharist celebration. We will address this issue later in this article.
The fourth form is exclusively online. Not only the announcement is online, but also the participation and the religious experience takes place online. The religious praxis has been fully transferred to the virtual world. The website Virtual Rituals (www.religiousworlds.com) gives multiple examples of these kinds of experiences. There is a cyber mosque, there are online synagogues and one can experience virtual pilgrimages. Christians can find each other on chatrooms like WorthyChat. Hindus are gathering on Prarthana.com for online temple services. Muslims can follow a Virtual Hadj. Irish Catholics can virtually visit Croagh Patrick as modern paganists can visit digital Stonehenge in Second Life. Some religious communities are exclusively online, like the First Church of Cyberspace and others.
Sacramental?
The most intriguing theological question is what religious relevancy remains for these forms of online sacrality. Maybe it is useful to recall an old division between ‘sacraments’ and ‘sacramentals’. Sacraments are the Seven traditional sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church: from Baptism to Confession. The word ‘sacramental’ covers a much wider region of meaning: it refers to everything that brings people in touch with God and each other, and vice versa ‘brings God to the people’ with or without the help of certain physical symbols or objects we mentioned earlier in this essay.
Of course, sacraments are intended to bring God and the faithful closely together, but the old Catechism tells us more. According to the Patristic and Scholastic definitions a sacrament is a tangible and visible sign that signifies to the sacred and at the same time effects what it signifies to. The water of Baptism refers to the cleansing of sins in Christ. At the same time Christians believe that the water itself in some way canalizes God’s mercy by washing the sins away. Sacraments do not just refer to grace, they are grace. This is not a magician at work: grace can not be forced by mystical rituals. It does mean that the divine grace had connected itself to our tangible world. God has become man that is: with a mortal human body. This is the same commitment or entanglement between divinity and humanity within the essence of the sacraments in Christian tradition.
'Internet sacralilty'
For sacramentals the internet seems a perfect medium. Praying together on the internet, burning digital candles together, setting up some kind of digital altar et cetera. They all seem to bring God and men more closely together. Since centuries we all know offline variations like the semi annual Urbi et Orbi blessing on Christmas Day and Easter. This papal blessing effects all who feel connected to this celebration, live on Saint Peter’s Square or via television broadcasting.
For the more severe category of sacraments the internet seems problematic. The central problem is: if you witness a mass on the internet, do you really participate in it? Digital confessions has been rejected multiple times by ecclesial authorities. Ecclesial marriage (or marriage all together) by internet seems difficult if not impossible. We believe the problem with internet and sacraments is the problem of ‘being at the same time at the same place’, or sharing the same place and time.
Sacraments are collective happenings. This is best to be seen at masses and marriages. Even in confessions three persons are believed to interact with each other: the penitent, the priest and God. Sacraments are dynamic, communicative happenings. If a sacrament is efficacious to a certain group, all members of this group, how temporarily and accidentally in nature, have to share one place at the same time. This collective element is essential for the sacrament to be efficacious at all by dogmatic theological definition, but also in social religious terms. The dynamics of a sacrament are collective dynamics. The meaning of a given group is lower than the sum of the meaning of all individuals shaping the group. This surplus is the ‘space’ in which God’s mercy can be given to the faithful who share (maybe very temporarily) time and space to focus themselves on the same religious ceremony and experience.
One of the most eminent characteristics of Web 2.0 is the possibility (and the reality) of every individual to just ‘hop on’ to whatever he or she seems to like at that specific moment. This very individualistic characteristic collides with the notion of being at the same spot at the same time which seems to be so crucial for sacraments. Even television registrations or masses keep distances and cannot diminish the distance felt. The same time is shared, but the space is not. Only indirect contact with the sacred space is present.
According to us the Web is a long way off before it will achieve a level of virtual reality where it is possible to share time and space on a deeper level. Until then it is secondary only. Enthusiasm for the possibilities of Web 2.0 for Christianity has to be complemented by a certain restraint for its limitations.
Frank G. Bosman is theologian and working at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, Tilburg University (The Netherlands). Info: www.goedgezelschap.eu and http://twitter.com/frankgbosman .
Eric van den Berg is information scientist and initiator of the ‘best Dutch Christian website of 2009’ www.isidorusweb.nl . Recently he started a weblog on Church and Web 2.0: www.internetspiritualiteit.nl . Info: http://twitter.com/isidorusweb .
This article has been published earlier in the Dutch newspaper Friesch Dagblad (30th June 2009).
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