Especially in the Christmas season, we hear again some of the great texts of the prophetic church. Isaiah promises peace so complete that even "natural" enemies (the wolf and the lamb, the cow and the bear) will live and lie down together, and a little child shall lead them (Isa 11.6 7) Mary's song celebrates the Son in her womb as from a God who brings down monarchs, and raises up the lowly - a God who fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty (Luke 1.51 53).
The prophetic vision of God's Kingdom or Presence on earth is of a righteous community - one marked first of all by an unqualified equality. This equality begins with the paradigmatic prophetic event, the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian enslavement - an overturning of the master/slave hierarchy immediately reflected in the more egalitarian morality and politics of the new Israelite community (including a thematic concern for the poor, the regular freeing of slaves, restoration of property, land sabbaticals in the jubilee years defined by Leviticus 25, etc.). This transformation from human hierarchies to equality in God's Presence is envisioned by Isaiah to extend into the very cosmos itself, as the predatory hierarchies of nature are replaced by the peacable kingdom of humanity and nature. And Mary's Christmas celebration of prophetic liberation is taken up by her son, as he quotes Isaiah to initiate his ministry: "The spirit of the Lord is upon me...he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free...." (Luke 4.18). Paul, finally, insists in several places that the Christian community is to embody this prophetic equality in all ways, utterly rejecting even the most basic human hierarchies: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Gal. 3.28)1
For many enthusiasts, the fulfillment of the prophetic vision may be greatly furthered through the new kinds of communication made possible by the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). But the new technologies, and the communication they make possible, are ambiguous: they are equally capable of furthering and destroying the prophetic impulse. In the following, I examine how the new communications technologies are both promise and threat for the prophetic church. Both theoretical considerations and examples of the prophetic online lead to concluding, practical suggestions for fulfilling the prophetic promise of cyberspace.
The prophetic struggle to achieve equality becomes more complicated as the church enters cyberspace. On the one hand, cyberspace is of compelling interest to the prophetic church in especially two ways. One, it is often claimed that cyberspace will democratize organizations and societies in revolutionary ways. This democratization is generally understood to mean precisely greater equality, both in terms of access to information, and in terms of communication across otherwise entrenched boundaries - boundaries between rich and poor, male and female, and "friend" and "enemy" as defined by one's membership in a given ethnic group, nation state, etc.2 Two, several characteristics of cyberspace appear to make it the ideal medium for attracting and involving the unchurched but spiritually inquisitive young people whose religious sensibilities are increasingly shaped by and developed within the new media.3 If cyberspace indeed achieves the promised equalities in communication, and in a medium better suited to new generations - then the church finds before it a set of communication tools which seem ideally suited to preaching and fulfilling the prophetic Word.
On the other hand, cyberspace, like many technologies, appears to be resolutely ambiguous in its sociological and religious implications: and there is already abundant evidence to suggest that cyberspace opens up not only the prospect of furthering the prophetic Presence of God - but also the prospect of shattering that Presence altogether. This technology brings together congregants in the First Church of Cyberspace (described below) to chat live online - and thereby may help overcome the boundaries of distance, class, ethnicity, and gender. But this same technology also amplifies communicative aggression (e.g., flaming), male exploitation and hatred of women and children, and fragmentation, as the individual withdraws from a physical/cultural community to master a private experience of Internet accessible information, "cyber pals," and fantasy.4
In particular, if the Presence of God involves democratic forms of community, the Internet offers both examples and counterexamples of such online democracy.5 Moreover, communication on the Internet issues in the equivalent of apocalyptic and Gnostic beliefs. While the prophetic vision is of salvation for the community through the achievement of moral righteousness and social justice - the apocalyptic vision holds out the hope of salvation for only the individual. While the prophetic belief anticipates the advent of God's Presence on earth -i.e., in the physical world of embodied human beings, who engage "face to face" (f2f) and "in real life" (IRL) with both the created order of the larger environment and with one another throughout the entire range of human interactions - the apocalyptic vision sees the fulfillment of God's justice in a reward for the righteous individual in an afterlife.
Such an afterlife seems strikingly approximated by the "virtual reality" of cyberspace -a reality defined in part just by its difference from "face-to-face" (f2f) communication as it provides for asynchronous forms of communication (e mail, first of all), and for anonymous and pseudo-anonymous forms of communication (as individuals are hidden behind often cryptic e-mail addresses, if not behind the "virtual identities" or avatars they create and choose for any given outing in a MUD or chat channel: see Baym, 1995, esp. 153 56; Reid, 1995; and Bromberg, 1996.). These various masks help free individuals from their real life identities - and thereby offer the promise of overcoming the boundaries and differences tied to those identities: those who seek the fulfillment of the prophetic vision may well be attracted by a communications environment which is, at first blush, blind to gender, ethnicity, social class, and citizenship. At the same time, however, this ostensibily egalitarian cyberspace is populated by individuals who are by definition now less engaged in their physical communities as they seek community online. For better and for worse, the fulfillment of the apocalyptic quest for individual salvation in the form of a disembodied existence in the cyberspace worlds of one's choosing, threatens to remove the individual still further from real life communities, their real life differences - and the very real life obstacles to achieving God's Presence of justice and equality on earth (as it is in heaven).6
Salvation in the form of disembodiment is further accompanied by the equivalent to the Gnostic quest for "the knowledge which saves." (O'Leary and Brasher, 1996, 262) Gnostic salvation is found through the acquisition of arcane knowledge, as the result of a largely individual quest, where such knowledge gives one mastery over the technological environment within which one spends much of his (sometimes her) time. The prophetic impulse, however, acknowledges that the Presence of God comes through God's grace and mercy, not simply through technological feats. And the Presence of God means the realization of peace and prosperity for a community, not simply for an individual. The Presence of God, finally, rests less on power in the form of individual abilities to control the environment (ultimately, a technological version of magic) and more on wisdom in the form of knowledge and ability to live with one another in just ways.
In particular, O'Leary and Brasher echo Heinz Pagel's worry that in the Age of Information, "Information tends to drive out knowledge...What we want is knowledge, but what we often get is information. It is a sign of the times that many people cannot tell the difference between information and knowledge, not to mention wisdom, which even knowledge tends to drive out." (1988, 49, quoted in O'Leary and Brasher, 262) Paradoxically, an uncritical rush to the Web by religious institutions - precisely in the name of keeping up with Generation X and in the name of the prophetic quest for just communities - commits us to a medium equally suited to a more apocalyptic salvation in the form of disembodied individuals, individuals whose Gnostic quest for technical knowledge rather results in the extinction of the prophetic vision altogether, as information floods out wisdom.
Cyberspace thus presents the prophetic church with a tensional medium - one whose egalitarian, democratic promise is countered by many anti democratic and hierarchical practices, one whose attractiveness as a medium for addressing the spiritual sensibilities of the young is countered by the medium's hostility to the prophetic vision, as the medium of cyberspace also encourages more apocalyptic, even Gnostic forms of salvation. In the face of this tension, there are two additional features of cyberspace that weigh in favor of the prophetic.
One, despite the seeming freedoms of disembodied individualism on the Net, there is much to suggest that social interaction in cyberspace is not self sustaining. Even the solitary cybergnostic must disconnect from the machine and engage with others in real life to some degree. More fundamentally, the cultures and practices of real life still seem to not only sustain, but also to shape how one behaves online (Argyle and Shields, 1996, 68; Baym, 1995; Ess and Cavalier, 1997). This suggests that individuals in cyberspace remain resolutely dependent upon their real world culture. If that real world culture includes the prophetic insistence on justice and equality in community, then individuals may in turn shape their communication in and uses of cyberspace along more prophetic, rather than apocalyptic, lines.
Two, the character of communication and the style of authority facilitated on the Internet may also favor more prophetic forms of community. Using Walter Ong's schema of stages in the evolution of communication, a number of observers argue that the new technologies are bringing about a style of communication and authority characterized as "secondary orality." (Mullins, 1996; O'Leary and Brasher, 1996) Because (more or less) everyone can speak, oral cultures tend to be participatory and egalitarian. Moreover, in contrast with literate cultures, in which the technologies of reading and writing are initially used only by elites - oral cultures distribute "authority" among the members of the community. Finally, "secondary orality" is thought to conjoin the sense of participant community or group sense of orality with the global reach of the new communications technologies: "secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of the primary oral culture - McLuhan's global village" (Ong, 1988, 136, quoted in O'Leary and Brasher, 1996, 246).
In these terms, the early Christian church shows itself to be an oral, more egalitarian culture, in sharp contrast with the surrounding literate, more hierarchical culture. Acts 1-5 describe the early Christian community in tension with the religious authorities - authorities whose power resides in part on their literate access to and control over the sacred, relatively fixed texts of the Hebrew Bible. Over against the authority of text and tradition, the early Christian community finds itself given new authority - namely, the radically egalitarian authority of every member's encounter with the Holy Spirit. This equally shared authority issues in a dramatically egalitarian community - one in which, for example, property is shared, thus obliterating the prevailing hierarchy of rich vs. poor, in fulfillment of Mary's song. This community is further notable for its practice of gender equality and resistance to violence: in these ways, the early Christians realize the fully egalitarian body of Christ, in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free.7
The orality of the early Christian church, as it characterizes a more egalitarian, participatory community - one which relies first of all on the experience of Divinity to guide and shape its life - thus coheres with the prophetic. The prophets of God, including Moses as the paradigm, always hear and then speak the Word of God. The Word, further, is a liberating Word - one that calls us to free the captive, and lift up the humble: it is a Word that calls us to bring about the Presence of God - a Presence of greater equality, first of all. In this light, the early Christian community is a prophetic community - one which, consistent with our understanding of oral cultures, relies first of all on oral rather than literate authorities, for the sake of greater equality.
In this light, the "secondary orality" of cyberspace may prove to be a uniquely suitable medium for the prophetic Word of God. If the communication style favored by computer mediated environments biases us in the direction of greater participation and more equal participation in the discussions that affect our communities - the resulting community will be arguably closer to realizing the prophetic vision.8
Given the many ways in which cyberspace appears to work both for and against the prophetic impulse - can the prophetic church emerge online?
Clearly, religion and the church are online. Religion has been practiced enthusiastically in, if somewhat at the margins of, cyberspace since its inception. Pagans, ecofeminists, New Agers of various sorts, and the Church of Scientology were quick to stake out territory in the form of Usenet groups and chat channels (see O'Leary and Brasher, 1996, 248 254). Roman Catholicism and mainline Protestant denominations, along with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others, have arrived more recently.9
In particular, Presbyterians can take credit for founding and sustaining the First Church of Cyberspace. This church exists as a web site <http://www.execpc.com/~chender/index1.html> which offers sermons, music, prayer, and conversation - and thereby comes closest to achieving the very daunting goal of both replicating familiar worship patterns (sermons, music, prayer, conversation) and exploiting the new technology to expand these patterns (e.g., conversation by way of Internet Relay Chat - a way of talking "live" via computer, that allows congregants to meet and discuss online, no matter their physical location). Visitors' comments are enthusiastic, and, if words alone tell the story, their experience in the First Church of Cyberspace uplifts, encourages, and fulfills important felt needs.
But is any of this the prophetic church? In addition to informing congregants and visitors via the Web, there are a few promising examples of using these technologies to achieve justice and further equality in the real world.
A first example: it is not uncommon for faith communities to utilize the Internet for communications which fulfill the prophetic insistence on care for the poor and the suffering. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, a number of Protestant denominations used their online mailing lists ("listserves") to "broadcast" up to the minute information onf damage, casualties, and needs. The Disciples of Christ, among others, used their "DiscipleNet" listserv to help organize a national campaign to quickly supply member churches in Oklahoma City with needed emergency supplies. More recently, the "children's crusade" collected toy animals via the Internet, to replace those destroyed in Williamsport, PA, during the 1995 flood. More generally, the United Church of Christ home page <http://www.apk.net/ucc/> links to a "Justice and Peace" page as part of their home page, with action alerts, news releases, and other resources for both informing and motivating congregants to action.
Still more broadly, evangelical groups have been especially quick to exploit the Web as a means to advertise, inform, and organize believers around important political issues. The Christian Coalition and other pro life groups use the Internet and the Web to disseminate information on abortion, organize letter writing campaigns, etc. Other evangelicals - most notably Jim Wallis of Sojourners - are also using the Web in similar ways. Of course, prophetic justice for one faith community may be directly at odds with the conception of justice assumed by another, as the debate between these communities on abortion make most clear.
But the abortion debate also provides a final example of how computer-mediated communication may contribute to the realization of the prophetic vision. In a recent online dialogue, representatives of Protestant and Catholic communities took up the abortion issue within a framework carefully designed in terms of both the technologies of computer-mediated communication and the ethical groundrules for discussion. Participants agreed to carry out their discussion following the rules for discourse articulated by Jürgen Habermas - rules which stress equality, freedom, and solidarity in dialogue, especially dialogues about possible norms for democratic communities. Habermas argues that if participants can reach consensus on important norms through dialogues shaped by these rules - such norms thus stand as the outcome of a democratic process and thereby contribute to the democratic process in general, and stand as expressions of positive freedom in particular. Such norms, moreover, are "quasi-universal" - i.e., they stand between a pure ethical relativism that tolerates any possible norm and an ethical dogmatism which insists on the truth of only a single set of norms: and given that different discourse communities, following the same set of discourse ethics, may arrive at different norms, Habermas's notion of democratizing dialogues allows for a plurality of communities (see Ess, 1996a). These elements of equality, freedom, democracy, and plurality in Habermas, I have argued, are at the same time essential characteristics of prophetic communities: the success or failure of such a Habermasian dialogue in a computer-mediated environment will be suggestive of the potential of cyberspace for realizing prophetic communities on-line (Ess, 1996 b).
As the organizer of the dialogue, I frankly did not expect participants to arrive at any sort of consensus. Indeed, the expected differences quickly emerged (on such questions as "When does human life begin?" "Is abortion ever permissable - and if so, under what conditions?" etc.). At the same time, however, a surprising consensus also emerged in the exchange, a consensus which holds together three distinct moments of (1) intractable and irresoluble disagreement, (2) agreement on some fundamental values and goals, and (3) agreement on the means of achieving these goals and values, while these means at the same time reflect intractable differences between participants and the religious communities they represent.10
The results of this forum suggest that CMC environments, at least as the use of these environments is guided by a carefully considered ethics of discourse, can indeed facilitate the rational forms of dialogue necessary for democratic polity - and thereby, for prophetic communities. If participants holding deeply-rooted religious disagreements over one of the most contentious and destructive issues in U.S. civil life can nonetheless engage in civil dialogue in a CMC environment coupled with a specified discourse ethics, and arrive at important agreements and a pluralistic consensus - this would suggest that there is indeed hope for realizing the prophetic vision in cyberspace.
While these examples of the prophetic online are promising, they represent the exception, rather than the rule, to religious presence in cyberspace. Like the prophetic promise in the real world, the prophetic promise of cyberspace - its potential for egalitarian, just forms of community, its promise as the medium of choice for new generations, its "secondary orality" which evokes the shared authority of the earliest Christian - remains largely unfulfilled.
I have suggested that there are manifold obstacles to the fulfillment of the prophetic vision in cyberspace. Cyberspace can replicate, even amplify existing disparities between rich and poor, male and female, friend and enemy. Cyberspace is as capable of fulfilling more apocalyptic and Gnostic visions of individual freedom and fulfillment as it is of facilitating the prophetic quest for more egalitarian communities. But our uses of cyberspace appear to remain dependent upon the real world cultures and communities we inhabit. In this light, one of the most practical moves individuals and communities may make in the effort to realize the prophetic vision online is to redouble their efforts to sustain and expand the prophetic community "in real life," so that such real life communities may nurture and sustain our efforts to realize the prophetic online as well.
Individuals and communities may well be inspired by the promise of cyberspace to extend the prophetic vision of an egalitarian community, one whose shared authority as equal interpreters of the Word of God recalls the earliest days of the Christian church - while at the same time, one whose diverse and changing interpretations of the Word of God promises to keep that Word accessible and thus vital for new generations of seekers. Most optimistically, the prophetic church will couple this inspiration with redoubled attention to the embodied, real life communities in which we still live. At the same time, especially if congregants come to expect the sort of shared authority characteristic of their online communities to also prevail in their real life communities, including their churches, the orality of cyberspace may foster and enhance the prophetic community in the real world in powerful new ways. In addition, recognizing the importance of real world community for any prophetic ventures into cyberspace will counter the chief obstacles to the prophetic communities online - namely, the temptations of individualized disembodiment and the pursuit of more apocalyptic and Gnostic forms of salvation.
Given the prophetic spirit and equipped with a clear understanding of the promises and threats of cyberspace for the prophetic vision, individuals and communities may well succeed as they work carefully and intentionally to extend the Presence of God in this new communicative and social space.
References
Adams, Carol J. 1996. "This is Not Our Fathers' Pornography": Sex, Lies, and Computers. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 147 170. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Argyle, Katie and Rob Shields. 1996. Is there a Body in the Net? In Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, ed. Rob Shields, 58 69. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Barlow, John Perry. 1996. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. <http://www.eff.org/pub/Censorship/Internet_censorship_bills /barlow_0296.declaration>
Baym, Nancy K. 1995. The Emergence of Community in Computer Mediated Communication. In CyberSociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones, 138 163. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bromberg, Heather. 1996. Are MUDs Communities? Identity , Belonging and Consciousness in Virtual Worlds. In Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, ed. Rob Shields, 143 152. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Brown, Robert McAffee. 1984. Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
Cooper, Wes. 1996. "Wizards, Toads, and Ethics," in Ess, ed., Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine (ISSN 1076-027X), Vol. 3: no. 2 (January). URL: <http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1996/jan/toc.html>
Ess, Charles. 1996a. The Political Computer: Democracy, CMC, and Habermas. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 197 230. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
____. 1996b. Prophetic Communities Online? Threat and Promise for the Church in Cyberspace. Presented at "Media, Religion, and Culture," University of Colorado at Boulder, January 11, 1996.
Ess, Charles and Robert Cavalier. 1997. Is There Hope for Democracy in Cyberspace? Philosophical Dialogue On-Line as a Microcosm/Case Study. "Technology and Democracy - Comparative Perspectives," Conference Proceedings (in press). The Center for Technology and Society, University of Oslo.
Handler, Michael. 1996. "rec.music.white-power fails 592:33033" E-mail notice to Usenet, 3 June 1996. Copy archived at <http://www.drury.edu/faculty/ess/church/nazivote.html>.
Haraway, Donna J. 1990. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149 181. New York: Routledge.
Herring, Susan. 1996. Posting in a Different Voice: Gender and Ethics in Computer Mediated Communication. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 115 145. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Lawrence, John. 1996. Intellectual Property Futures: The Paper Club and the Digital Commons. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 95 114. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
MacKinnon, Richard C. 1995. Searching for the Leviathan in Usenet. In CyberSociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones, 112 137. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Marty, Martin. 1993. Where the Energies Go. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 527 (May), 11-26.
Mays, James L. 1992. The Phenomenon of Prophecy. In The Oxford Study Bible (Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha): A Complete Guide to the World of the Bible, eds. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, James R. Mueller, 164 171. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, William J. 1995. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mullins, Phil. 1996. Sacred Text in the Sea of Texts: The Bible in North American Electronic Culture. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 271 302. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. being digital. New York: Knopf.
O'Leary, Stephen D. and Brenda E. Brasher. 1996. The Unknown God of the Internet. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 233 269. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Ong, W. J. 1981. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
_____. 1988. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge.
Pagels, Heinz.1988. The Dreams of Reason. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Reid, Elizabeth. 1995. Virtual Worlds: Culture and Imagination. In CyberSociety: Computer Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones, 164 183. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1985. Feminist Interpretation: A Method of Correlation. In Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty M. Russell, 111 124,. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen; Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster
Yoon, Sun hee. 1996. Power Online: A Poststructuralist Perspective on CMC. In Philosophical Perspectives on Computer Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess, 171 196. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
1 As we will see below, the early Christian community in Acts lives out this prophetic rejection of hierarchy in several ways as well. For more discussion of the prophetic tradition as I understand it here, see Brown 1984, Ruether 1985, and Mays 1992.
2 Nicholas Negroponte (1995), director of the MIT Media Lab, offers a more recent example of what I characterize as the enthusiast's position. To his credit, Negroponte acknowledges the dark side of the new technology - but only in the last few pages of his book, ("Epilogue: An Age of Optimism," 227ff.), and only as a foil over against which he insists that "being digital" is nonetheless an unstoppable force, one destined to triumph because of its specific powers of decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering. (229)
Negroponte's litany of the positive powers promised by cyberspace is familiar: it echoes claims made by numerous advocates of the computer and cyberspace as democratizing (see Ess, 1996, 198 201). But these claims are also open to serious criticism on several fronts (Ess, 1996).
In particular, Negroponte seems blissfully confident that free market capitalism is the best vehicle for developing the new technologies and their applications (cf. 76). Yet he also acknowledges the radical maldistribution of material resources (20% of the world consumes 80 % of its resources, 230) - again, only to assure us that digital technology, as it overcomes geographical barriors, "can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony." (230)
But such economic maldistribution is hardly promising for the democratization claimed for cyberspace. Cyberspace exists only through an expensive infrastructure of telephone lines, fiber optic cable, and computer networks. Any equality promised by cyberspace and its various modes of communication is more or less restricted to those people who have access to its supporting infrastructure. Whether or not free market capitalism will work to overcome or only exacerbate the problem of economic maldistribution is, at the very least, a controversial issue. In light of this controversy, to assume that the free market, of itself, will tend towards the (rough) equality of economic resources needed to guarantee the much touted and hoped for egalitarian access to information resources is, at best, a very shaky assumption. More directly: such maldistribution of economic and information resources hardly fits the prophetic paradigm.
3 Consider Martin Marty's account (1993) of the differences between the religious sensibilities of contemporary youth and those of their parents and grandparents: "religion" for the young
is personal more than communalis private more than public
stresses individual autonomy instead of inherited authority
stresses personal meaning more than belonging
is local and particular
more than cosmopolitan and ecumenical
is practical more than mystical
is affective more than intellectual
involves particular expression more than civil religion
If Marty's account is accurate, then it suggests that the religious sensibilities of the young are indeed coherent with cyberspace in its decentering, fragmenting, affective directions. While this match between the medium and the intended audience is a central reason for why the church enters cyberspace in the first place - it is by no means clear that the medium fits the message of the prophetic church. In particular, the emphasis on the decentered individual stands in sharp contrast with the stress on the community characteristic of the prophetic. We will explore this contrast more fully below.
4 For representative discussion of these communicative phenomena, see Herring 1996 and Adams 1996. In particular, Adams' discussion of the infamous 1993 rape in cyberspace (160) and examples of women who are harrassed in real life as a result of adopting male identities in cyberspace (161f.) are especially powerful examples of how pseudoanonymity, far from working to enhance equality between male and female, can work instead to amplify existing patterns of patriarchy and male aggression against women.
5 A central example of anti democratic use of the new CMC environments is the "Panopticon," a technology of perfect surveillance and control first envision by Jeremy Bentham and elevated into a central symbol of totalitarianism in modernity by Foucault (see Yoon, 1996, 178f.; Mitchell, 1995, 156 59). More generally, as is widely documented, discussion groups and other venues (MUDs, MOOs, IRC chat lines) frequently devolve into the communicative equivalent of the Hobbesian war of each against all - resulting in the search for the political authority who can impose order, either through authoritarian (i.e., anti democratic) means - or through such democratic means as self moderation, elected representatives and moderators, etc. (Ess, 1996, 216 220; Lawrence, 1996, 100 104; Cooper, 1996; MacKinnon, 1995)
Perhaps the most pernicious - because it is most subtle - way in which CMC works against democracy is suggested by David Kolb, who notes that the medium of the Web is biased in favor of the short, episodic, ephemeral text and visual image, in contrast with longer, largely textual argument structure. Kolb observes that this bias works in favor of French intellectual style - and against the intensive, extended argument characteristic of especially German philosophy (1996). I would add that such a bias may work against democratic institutions. As the works of Locke, Jefferson, Rousseau, Kant, Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Habermas suggest - democratic polity depends for its justification, if not for its exercise, on relatively complex and sophisticated argument - argument concerning the nature of human freedom, rationality, concepts of equality and justice, etc. But if we shift to a medium possibly biased against extensive argument - what happens to our capacity to debate and dialogue in ways arguably central to democratic polity (and thus, prophetic communities)? What happens in such a medium to our capacity to debate, or even recall and understand, the foundational arguments of democratic polity?
In my view, the predominantly liberatarian tenor of the Internet and the Web is consistent with the suspicion that the medium does bias us - not towards communitarian and pluralistic forms of democracy, but rather towrads potentially anti-democratic plebescite forms of democracy.
For that, and as a last example of what I take to be democratic behavior on the Net, consider the 1996 Usenet community's formal rejection of a proposed Neo Nazi discussion group (Handler, 1996).
6 Perhaps the most positive - yet from the prophetic viewpoint, highly problematic - example of disembodiment as freedom is the cyborg, the conjunction of human and machine which populates much science fiction. O'Leary and Brasher (1996) endorse this form of disembodiment for women, especially as it frees them from gender roles - and thereby from the inequalities incumbent upon women in a patriarchal society (see 259f., and the essay by Haraway (1990) to which they refer). I would argue, however, that achieving equality in cyberspace by way of a Gnostic elimination of body and gender is a less preferable form of equality (i.e., equality through the elimination of difference between male and female) than what I take to be the equality envisioned in the prophetic tradition between embodied males and females - i.e., in a society in which gender is not the occasion of hierarchical difference and inequality. Rather, in the just, embodied society, equality occurs across the perhaps irreducible differences between male and female: these differences are preserved, not eliminated.
Nor is such Gnosticism restricted to Haraway's version of feminism. Rather, the same sort of Gnostic dualism - and its accompanying difficulties - can be found in the writings of John Perry Barlow, one of the co founders and primary spokespersons for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Consider, for example, his definition of cyberspace: "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." This implicitly Gnostic dualism, and its hostility towards the material world (which Barlow refers to contemptuously as "meatspace," in contrast with cyberspace) leads to a complete rejection of the material order, including the legal system:
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. ....We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. (1996)
7 The commitment to equality in oral tradition further issues in an acceptance of pluralism: as the story is appropriated and re shaped by every re telling, it thereby comes to reflect the perspectives and experience of both the individual and the community. Hence we find not a single tradition ultimately recorded in texts about Jesus, but a considerable diversity - four Gospels, not one. And even once our texts are (relatively) fixed in canonical form - a process that took centuries, allowing for still further reshaping by diverse communities - diverse religious communities continue take up and interpret the texts in continually changing ways today, as they sponsor the various paraphrases and translations of the Bible either officially or unofficially taken as "canonical" for a given faith community (e.g., the King James and NIV for more conservative Protestants, the New Jerusalem and American Catholic Bibles for Roman Catholics, the translations of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible used in Reform Judaism, etc.)
8 This recovery of more oral, more egalitarian senses of authority will likely come at a significant cost for those of us whose sense of religious authority is especially tied to the Bible as a printed text - i.e., as the product of literate culture. As Phil Mullins has persuasively argued, the sense of the Bible as a fixed, standardized text sharply contrasts with the "fluid word" of oral communities - especially oral communities in an electronic medium, which allows for easy alteration and distribution of text by anyone with access to a computer and the Net.
If the prophetic is fairly associated with the oral, then as we celebrate the promise of embodying the prophetic community more fully through online communications - we may also need to prepare ourselves for a corresponding shift in our sense of the Bible as a fixed authority to the fluid word of orality, one much more amenable to reshaping and retelling in light of interpretive communities' new experiences and insights. Such a shift will not come easily, especially for those of us who have devoted our lives to a study of the text as an ultimate authority in our lives.
9 The advent of religion online was given official notice by a Time magazine article, "Finding God on the Web" (Dec. 16, 1996). The associated Web site <http://www.time.com/godcom> provides as good an introduction as any to some of the more helpful resources in religion on the Web.
10. Somewhat more carefully: participants (1) resolutely disagreed on a variety of claims shaped by their religious commitments: for example, the Catholic representative, following incarnational theology, relied more strongly than her Protestant counterparts on biology as helping answer the question, "When does human life begin?" - while the Protestant representatives held to more "metaphysical" understandings of personhood as defined in ways independent of biology. Nonetheless, participants agreed that (a) abortion is not a positive good and thus (b) the world would be a better place if we could alleviate those conditions which have us consider abortion in the first place, and (c) education is an important means towards achieving this goal. This (2) agreement on important values, in tension with (1) the irreducible differences anchored in diverse faith commitments, led to (3) a pluralism of views with regard to the means as to how we might reach our commonly-shared goals and values. That is, education aimed at reducing and/or eliminating the need for abortion will be different in different faith communities as such education is shaped by the commitments and values of each faith community. But this plurality of educational programs, as it preserves the intractable differences between religious communities, at the same time allows them to work in common towards a shared value and goal.
See Ess and Cavalier, 1997, and discussion archives <http://www.lcl.cmu.edu/CAAE/Home/Forum/abortion/archive/archive.html> of Forum III: Abortion - Religious Perspectives, <http://www.lcl.cmu.edu/CAAE/Home/Forum/abortion/abortion.html>, a part of the
Academic Dialogue on Applied Ethics <http://www.lcl.cmu.edu/CAAE/Home/Forum/ethics.html>.