Religion (2002) 32, 343354

doi:10.1006/reli.2002.0410
Virtual Religion in Context
P:+rick M:xvrii
This article explores the notion of virtual religion in various ways. In part, it is a
response to a number of ideas found in the articles by Philip P. Arnold, Shawn Arthur,
Christopher Helland, Anastasia Karaogka and Mark MacWilliams which appear in
this issue of Religion, but it also discusses religion in online contexts in relation to
various important themes such as the character of cyberspace both present and future,
the multimedia Web and its alleged postmodern orientations, virtual identity, the
dynamics of virtual community, and the controversies concerning the positive and
negative ramications of online life and experience, as discussed by technomystics,
technophobes and others who hold more moderate views. The article ends by raising
some questions about the future character of religion and spirituality in cyberspace.
2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Technology is never neutralAndrew Kimbrell
The power and paradox of cyberspace is its ability to liberate
and dominate simultaneouslyTim Jordan
This article is based on my responses to the articles written by Anastasia Karaogka
(Religious Discourse and Cyberspace), Mark MacWilliams (Virtual Pilgrimages on the
Internet), and Shawn Arthur (Technophilia and Nature Religion: the Growth of a
Paradox). These three articles, all of which have to do with the worlds of religion and
cyberspace, complement one another well: Karaogkas broad and typologically
oriented discussion of the subject is accompanied by MacWilliams and Arthurs specic
studies of important species of online religious life. Not long before completing this
paper, I was asked to read and comment on two further articles: Philip P. Arnolds
Determining the Place of Religion: Native American Traditions and the WWW, and
Christopher Hellands Surng for Salvation.
Introduction
When I told someone a while ago that I was reading about a new and controversial eld
known as virtual religion, he said, But isnt most religion virtual in its orientation and
emphasis? By virtual he presumably meant something like trans-empirical, having to
do with souls and spirits and gods and supernatural realms; but in this paper virtual will
relate to something more modern and more specicthe enigmatic cyberspace contexts
made possible by the synergistic operation of computers and electronic networks. (Our
focus is of course on the socio-cultural ramications of cyberspace rather than its
technical dimensions.)
Discussions about cyberspace and religion, especially discussions in multidisciplinary
contexts involve important and complex questions. Religion certainly has many
things to say about the character of persons identities, communities, meanings, and
modes of belonging; thus any sophisticated discussion of cyberspace and virtuality
and religion cannot wholly ignore broader sociological, psychological, political and
even philosophical debates about online identity, online community and related
topics. Whether cyberspace experiences are thought to stunt imagination, to scatter
identity, to increase feelings of isolation (see Dreyfus 2001, pp. 23), to renew
community or to enhance meaning, scholars of online religion will want to know about
these viewpoints.
2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
0048721X/03/$-see front matter
Of course, the notion of religion is inevitably an abstraction. What we actually nd
ourselves dealing with (both online and oine) is a wide variety of religious traditions
and movements, from Black Muslims and Taoists through new agers and neo-pagans to
Nichiren Buddhists and Episcopalian Christians. What enriches and complicates things
is that some of these religious traditions come in a whole variety of dierent avours and
orientations: ultra-orthodox, conservative, liberal, radical, privatised, postmodern and so
on; some of these orientations may be more suited for online habitats than others.
While religion can be, and often is, manifested in cyberspace, it is clear, to me at least,
that cyberspace has many reaches and dimensions that have nothing to do with religion.
However, a few persons I have encountered seem to believe that there is something
religious about internetting itself perhaps because the Internets transmundane hyper-space
has something in common with the transmundane character of sacred space. We could
call this stance internet-as-religion. While this perception might be an understandable
hangover from the halcyon days of the earlier Internet, when just about everything was
fresh and bright-eyed and full of glory (albeit a glory with little or no multimedia), this
internet-as-religion viewpoint seems to me to stretch the connotation of religion
unnaturally far. Even if we admit that religion grants powerful meaning and belonging
to human beings, and also that some persons Internet adventures bestow on them
powerful meaning and belonging, I shall remain persuaded that not everything that
happens on the Internet has to do with religion and religiousness. But this is not the
place to pursue the problem of how widely religion should or should not be dened. As
Karaogka says, religion is indeed a uid and contested concept. (Philip Arnold
illustrates the contestedness of the notion of religion by pointing out that while
non-Indians tend to construe Native American religion in spiritual or transcendent
terms, native peoples themselves interpret it in ways that emphasise material, mundane
and common-sense orientations.
Margaret Wertheims The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace contains a most useful discussion
of views that see cyberspace in sacred or spiritual terms. There may be some truth in
Michael Heims claim (quoted in Wertheim 2000, p. 17): Our fascination with
computers is . . . more deeply spiritual then utilitarian (especially if this represents an
understandable desire to counterbalance technological reductionisms), but one can grant
Heims point and still reserve judgement on internet-as-religion claims.
The halcyon days of the earlier Internet are now gone, and persons online lives are
oriented signicantly to the user-friendly multimedia World Wide Web. To be sure,
much of religious interest can still be found in the listserv-type email conferences and
also in the Usenet universe. What rst got me really interested in both Scientology and
Nichiren Buddhism as livingand controversialreligious movements were the
various debates, controversies, scandals and pirate documents that were aired on Usenet
some years ago. However, since many of the Usenet FAQ documents are now easily
available on the Web, and since such documents point one repeatedly in the direction
of http resources, it makes sense to stick to the Web as our main reference point.
One can ask: is there something dominantly postmodern about Weblife? Certainly
the postmodern creature might well feel at home on the Web. Its hypertext/hypermedia
experiences t well with the novelty, playfulness, dynamism and kaleidoscopic over-
tones of the postmodern spirit, a spirit in which, to give a pastiche of Beckford, Bauman
and Featherstones contributions in Heelas Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity,
the cultural becomes disorganised, the distinction between high and low fades away;
authority rests with the person/individual rather than with the established orders of
344 P. Maxwell
knowledge; the values are novelty, rapid episodic change, and individual enjoyment;
the culture puts a strong emphasis on sensory overload; there is a celebration of
fragmentation, superciality and playfulness, and a willingness to combine symbols
from disparate codes or frameworks of meaning, even at the cost of disjunctions and
eclecticism.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that the kind of religion which ourishes on the Web
is bound to be postmodern in avoura religion that is trendy, non-dogmatic,
experimental, ironic, implicit. Religious worlds on the Web are too diverse to be
conned to postmodern atmospheres. One occasionally comes across gentle souls who
are surprised and shocked at how much Web-based religion is full-blooded, reactionary
and militant. (These gentle souls might fail to realise that while fundamentalist/
conservative religionists reject modernism and its values, they are usually quite content
to make use of modernity and its technological enablements in order to spread their
convictions.) Having said this, I concede that perhaps Zaleski (quoted by Karaogka) is
correct that in the long run the Internet will favour those religions and spiritual
teachings that tend toward anarchy and that lack a complex hierarchy; the point here
is that at the least they are likely to be signicantly unconventional (or alternative?)
in character.
The Space that is Cyberspace
Terminology can be confusing. Perhaps we can agree up front that cyberspace can be
more or less synonymous with virtual spaceboth expressions denoting a sort of space
without physical place (although geographical metaphors are nonetheless useda
superhighway, a frontier, etc.). Cyberspace is where your money is (unless you still keep
it under your bed); cyberspace is the creative interface between persons talking on the
telephone; and cyberspace is that which undergirds all the Webs hypermedia adven-
tures, whether these adventures have to do with information, communication, enter-
tainment, erotica or worship. Imagination, visualisation, magic and metaphor can be
interwoven in the experience of todays cyberspace traveller, and all of them are
obviously relevant to religious possibilities online.
When we talk about cyberspace, do we mean present day Barlovian (after John
Perry Barlow of Grateful Dead and EFF fame) cyberspace or do we mean still-to-be
realised Gibsonian (after William Gibson of Neuromancer fame) cyberspace (Jordan
1999, p. 20)? And if we do include in our discussion speculations about the immersive
super-cyberspace experiences of the future, is it a future where, like Neuromancers Case,
we jack in to cyberspace and roam around in relatively disembodied mode (amid lines
of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind . . . like city lights, receding), or is it a
future where the norm will be nely-crafted super-avatars encountering one another
(not so much Virtual Reality as powerful examples of Real Virtuality)? The future
cyber-synagogue/cyberchurch/cybermosque based on the Neuromancer-type experience
will be somewhat dierent from that based on the universe of super-avatars. But both
will be far more impressive than merely sitting at a desk in front of a small screen and
clicking on the hyperlink that will take you to the webpage of the First Church of
Cyberspace!
If religion is really to ourish online, then the fully immersive cyberspaces of the
future will give it depth and dimension. Yet MacWilliams reminds us that
Virtual Religion in Context 345
even the present day multimedia Web, as an eective vision machine, can provide
more of a total sensorium than other forms of internet life, and such a sensorium can
help in providing suitable atmospheres and contexts for things like worship and
pilgrimage. Some religions websites oer an impressive range of multimedia
resourcesquality images, Macromedia Flash presentations, realtime webcams, 360-
degree panoramas, streaming audio clips, short downloadable video pieces. The point is
not merely that the Web is full of colour and animation but is increasingly a dynamic
and interactive arena which can often be personally tailored and congured to ones
own preferences.
It is common to argue that the space of cyberspace is a curious sort of space, one that
shrinks and collapses distance. (Wilson and Corey concede this point but stress that the
shrinking of distance does not necessarily mean the irrelevance of place [see Wilson and
Corey 2000, p. 2].) Some see the collapse of distance as a good thing, as the tyranny of
distance supposedly gives way to new and creative forms of encounter; yet cynics might
point out that technically contrived nearness is not the same thing as genuine human
relatedness.
Taking the Internet as our paradigm example of cyberspace, it is worth emphasising
that cyberspace experiences can operate in dierent modes. The asynchronous modes
(i.e. there is no realtime encounter) include straight email, email conferences, Usenet
newsgroups, and Web-based forums/clubs; the synchronous modes (i.e., there is an
encounter in realtime) include Internet telephony, IRC/Web chat, MU*s and
multimedia avatar worlds, and Web whiteboard exchanges. We cannot go into detail
about these contexts, but it is worth remembering that dierent nuances of online
endeavour continually confront us.
Finally, while I endorse fully the peculiar character of cyberspace, I am not at all sure
about Wertheims statement to the eect that cyberspace is not subject to the laws of
physics, and hence it is not bound by the limitations of those laws (Wertheim 2000,
p. 226). In my relative ignorance, I continue to believe that electricity, holograms,
cyberspace, VR experience and related phenomena are rmly part of the natural
universe as characterised by science.
From Technophobes to Technomystics
Opinions about personal and social and, by extension, religious life on the Internet can
be ranged on complex spectrums of debate. One important spectrum stretches from the
anti-technology ultra-luddites at the one end through the more moderate responsible-
technology luddites (some of whom are present in Stephanie Mills interesting book
Turning Away from Technology), all the way along to the enthusiastic technophiles,
technovisionaries and technomystics at the other end. Technomysticism can, of course,
be dened and interpreted in dierent ways. William Stahl, who is critical of the
phenomenon, uses the term to denote the implicitly religious understanding of
technology that has developed in our society and more specically, the widespread
faith in the universal ecacy of technology (see Stahl 1999).
Writers like Rheingold, Gilders, Negroponte, Odone and Mitchell argue that the Net
is capable of enhancing the human condition and improving mutual understanding and
human well-being. A more skeptical line is taken by relative pessimists like Roszak,
Talbott, Postman, Stoll and Slouka, who regard the Net as dangerous because it leads to
shallowness, escapism, individualism, elitism, addiction and capitalistic commodi-
cation. Indeed, just to access the internet on a regular basis brands you clearly as a have
346 P. Maxwell
rather than a have-not. Robins and Webster, in the midst of a sustained critique of
William Mitchells book City of Bits, write:
For the most part, virtual culture is a culture of disengagement from the real world and
its human condition of embodied (enworlded) experience and meaning. We might
think of it in terms of the progressive disavowalboth intellectual and by technical
meansof the real complexity and disorder of actual society and sociality . . . Virtual
culture is a culture of retreat from the world. (Robins and Webster 1999, pp. 2445)
Or, as Kevin Robins puts it elsewhere, cyberspace often oers psychic protection
against the stimuli of reality (Robins 2000, p. 83), and the intense forms of this can be
psychotic or narcissistic. If these claims are true, and I am not simply assuming that they
are, then those who see religion in a positive, serious and realistic light will doubtless try
to nd ways to rescue online religious endeavours from superciality, self-indulgence
and vulgarity.
Mark Slouka (War of the Worlds) is worth reading as a classic and undiluted example
of the pessimistic view of cyberspace life. Giving a number of examples of the dark side
of the digital revolution, he argues that cyberspace life represents a decisive and
comprehensive assaultan assault on identity, an assault on community, an assault on
place, and indeed an assault on reality itself.
I nd it dicult to understand why verdicts about these matters often tend to be so
polarised: surely, like many other contexts of life, the Webs psychological and social
virtuality can be good and bad at dierent times on dierent occasions, depending on a
whole host of variables. I also smile at the somewhat loaded tendency of the pessimists
to contrast the tedious and stunted superciality of virtual life to the alleged richness of
the real world, with its fullling activities, worthy aspirations and meaningful
face-to-face relationships. Some of the real persons I know dont seem to live in this
pollyanna version of the real world.
Dierent positions on our spectrum give dierent answers to the question: Is
technology no matter how sophisticated still largely a neutral tool from which we can
benet socially and culturally and religiously if we make the right choices, or do
technological implementations inevitably carry with them the inbuilt legacies of
political, power and value commitments? Stahl, Postman, Mander and others emphasise
the Faustian bargains thrown up by every new techno-culture: even if some people are
beneted, this inexorably means that many others end up experiencing some sort of
disadvantage. For Smith and Kollock (1999), online life carries signicant economic,
cutural and moral pricetags, not least increasing commercialisation, commodication
and social control.
Among the technomystics at the far end of our spectrum are a small group of
bright-eyed radicals who genuinely believe that it will soon be possible to put aside our
eshly bodies in favour of inheriting a shining/shimmering electronic immortality (as
whatminds? cyberangels?). Sometimes this view goes hand in hand with a gnostic
tendency to signicantly devalue the body, regarding such meatspace as bondage that
can and should be gratefully transcended.
Amongst the various debates taking place between the optimists and pessimists, there
are certain questions which are of particular importance to the ourishing of religion in
cyberspace, namely, questions about virtual identity and virtual community.
1
Those
who strongly question the viability of these two phenomena are unlikely to become
excited about the prospects of virtual religion in any sustained sense.
Virtual Religion in Context 347
Sometimes virtual identity/community and realworld identity/community are dis-
cussed in isolation from each other, or it is assumed that oine identities are simply
irrelevant online. But Tim Jordan reminds us that the boundaries between the two can
sometimes be blurred, and that inuences and elements from the one can be imported
into the other, and vice versa (see Jordan 1999, p. 67). Why should not virtual
encounters, whether religious or secular, often have real-life eects?
Amid fairly wide agreement that virtual identity is prone to be more ambiguous,
more uid and more diversied than realworld identity, divergent value-judgements
immediately emerge. Is this diversication a dangerous thing, leading to a scattering of
identity, an unhealthy fragmentation of identity, in an atmosphere of deception and
escapism? For Slouka (1996), persons inhabit these alternate spaces mostly from the
desire to escape the problems and issues of the real world. Or is the diversication of
identity a liberating thing, enabling people to be more exploratory and experimental
about themselves and the many roles they can adopt in a fast-changing world?
Some see talk of virtual community as largely utopian rhetoricvirtual communities are
merely communities of interests, not of people (see Robins and Webster 1999, p. 232,
quoting Sivanandan. The spaces they generate are banal, comfortable, escapist, regres-
sive, nostalgic. People may experience exchanges online and even a certain sociability,
but whether this experience ever amounts to community is to be questioned. Others
believe that virtual communities can indeed be positive phenomena; such networks of
relationality (Wertheim 2000, p. 298) can ll the vacuum left by the decline of
informal public spaces in todays world and perhaps even recapture the warmth of the
churchyard and the village green. Perhaps such virtual community life can also help to
re-enchant the world to some extent and reverse the process of disenchantment
tracked by Max Weber.
Sometimes members of virtual communities arrange to meet each other in the real
world, but I am sure that this would be a genuinely rare occurrence. In most cases,
participants do not (and mostly cannot) encounter each other in the esh, but have to
compensate for this by signicant acts of imagination:
The dening interaction of Internet culture lies not in the interface between the user
and the computer, but rather in that between the user and the collective imagination [and
visualisation of the vast and virtual audience to whom one submits an endless
succession of enticing, exasperating, evocative gments of ones being. (Porter 1997,
p. xiii [italics mine])
Towards the end of Shawn Arthurs article, he highlights some general drawbacks
regarding the orientations of some virtual communities. These include: (1) a signicant
naivete about the pricetags (moral, economic, philosophical, social) of internet life; (2)
inadequate support structures for continuing psychological wellbeing; and (3) signicant
decline in face-to-face encounters with realworld human beings and nature. A related
point mentioned by MacWilliams, quoting Derek Foster, is that CMC in many respects
reinforces individualism. To what extent this drawback can be compensated for by the
collective imagination just referred to, and by the fact that at least in synchronous
cyberspace transactions you are aware that many others from all over the place are
participating at the same time as you are, remains to be seen. Despite the somewhat elusive
and constructed character of online communities, Allucquere Rosanne Stone makes
the important point that members of electronic communities act as if the community
met in a physical public space (Stone 1991, p. 104).
348 P. Maxwell
Cyberspace and Religion: Some Typologies and Examples
What kinds of religions resources ourish on the Web? The simple answer is: an
amazing variety. I wont go into detail about this, as many examples can be found in the
articles by Karaogka, MacWilliams and Arthur. My own recollections of religions-
oriented Web resources include material about Krishnamurti, Adidam, the controversial
Buddhist teacher Sangharakshita, highlights of the hermetic and alchemical traditions,
the history of the Branch Davidians, the radical Sikh Bhindranwale and the Golden
Temple crisis, the various C.S. Lewis resources, Falun Dafa, and the rightwing Christian
groups that were listed on the Hatewatch site. Of course, sometimes one has to scrabble
through tons of mud to nd the worthwhile jewels, but, for me the eort has proved
worth doing.
Karaogka is right that we need typologies to help us come to terms with the diverse
and sometimes bewildering character of religions on the Net. In the wide, sprawling
universe of cyberspace religious resources, there are many dierent motives and
purposes at work. Some persons with a religious interest have a presence in cyberspace
for academic or informational or discursive reasons; others are concerned with public
relations or propaganda or evangelism (or hostile attack); and still others are trying
actually to practise their religion in cyberspace in a committed way. These dierent
contexts could also be described by using terminology drawn from Karaogkas rst two
typologies e.g., objective, academic, confessional, personal and subjective. Of course,
the lines that these various distinctions draw are blurred; in the end, as
Karaogka reminds us, religious discourse . . . in cyberspace cannot be classied in
terms of solid, polarised types, but as uid arrangements which blend in a spectrum.
Before I had seen Karaogkas third typology, religion on cyberspace versus religion
in cyberspace, I had already discussed with two colleagues at my university a basic
framework that worked for us, involving a basic distinction between religion online
and online religion. We used the expression religion online as the broader term to
denote the various religious existences and manifestations in cyberspace as a whole and
we used the expression online religion specically for those situations where persons
are endeavouring to practise their religion in cyberspace, especially in the sense of online
worshiping, online ritual performances, online prayer meetings and online funeral
services. The feasibility of this kind of endeavour seems to me to depend powerfully on
adequate network stability and network speedyou cant have people getting proxy
errors and overloaded line errors while they are sincerely trying to hold a worship
service in online space. But I admit that this framework of mine is somewhat crude,
partly because the ambiguity of the notion of practise. For many religious persons,
everything they do online, even if they were merely looking up important information
about Nanak or Martin Luther or the history of Easter would count as religious practice
and service.
Karaogkas third typology, which distinguishes between religion ON cyberspace
and religion IN cyberspace=cyberreligion, clearly cuts across the one I have just
mentioned. By religion on cyberspace Karaogka has in mind the contexts of internet
as tool i.e., religious material existing on the Net but also available oine); by religion
in cyberspace, she is emphasising internet as environment, i.e. religious expressions
existing exclusively in cyberspacefor example, Partenia. I do see some blurring
between Karaogkas religion on cyberspace and religion in cyberspace, partly
because I can envisage situations where the distinctions between online and oine
occasionally shift.
Virtual Religion in Context 349
Helland introduces another typology which can be distinguished from the substance
of both my typology (religion online/online religion) and Karaogkas third typology
(religion on cyberspace/religion in cyberspace).
Whereas my typology makes a basic distinction between the overall genus of internet
religion and the more limited species of religion actually practised online, and whether
the nub of Karaogkas third typology makes a basic distinction between religion on the
Net as extensions of familiar oine religion and religions in cyberspace without
remainder, Hellands classication turns on (1) the degree of interactive participation that
is aorded the web user and (2) the degree of control that is exercised by the website
which is acting as host to the web user. For Helland, religion online implies contexts
where the Net is used as a tool by the one to present religion to the many in ways that
reinforce control and hierarchy and exclude the participation and interaction of the
many. By contrast, Hellands online religion implies contexts where the Net supplies an
open and non-hierarchical environment (or place) that fosters communitas and that
encourages many-to-many communication, participation and interactionin short, the
doing of religion rather than merely the receiving of information about religion.
Both Hellands and Karaogkas schemes make a useful distinction between internet
as tool and internet as environment, as far as religious contexts are concerned.
The important point is not to split hairs about terminology or to insist that terms like
virtual religion or cyberreligion be used only in particular ways. The point is to be
aware of the diversity of contexts and motives in connection with religious resources
online. I think also that it is important to study the whole eld with one eye always on
the changing discussions concerning the character and viability of virtual community
and virtual identity especially if our interest is focused on the interactive environment
within which cyberspaces sincere religious practitioners can participate and hopefully
ourish.
One example of the mobilisation of virtual community is discussed by Arthur. He
highlights an interesting paradox: that the adherents of nature religion, who value nature
and try to recapture its resonances in the face of the alienations of the modern world,
nonetheless are capable of paying a lot of attention to computers, cyberspace and the
Internet. This paradox is signicantly lessened in the light of two factors discussed by
Arthur: (1) the call by some for modern pagans to see the value of science as a
contributory part of the holistic cycle of natural reality in which they have their being
(despite its limitations, science can help one to gain an increased understanding of
nature); and (2) as the consequence of nature religionists understanding of sacred space
as construed in crudely geographical terms, that they are able to utilise their computer/
network systems in innovative and imaginative ways to practise their religion online
(e.g., by performing virtual rituals and creating profound spaces in cyberspace). The key,
says Arthur, is the exploitable parallels between the traditional wiccan sacred space and
the hyper-reality of cyberspace; both represent a space outside of space and a time
outside of time. If humans and nature can be sacred, why cannot their creations enjoy
a sacredness as well? If even in traditional nature religion the physical tools are less
important then the focused will and mind of the practitioner along with the necessary
visualisations, then performing such religion in contexts of virtual simulation, where
physical tools are replaced by symbols and words, becomes both feasible and
understandable.
In dierent ways both Karaogka and Arthur point to a strange kind of t
between various new religious movements and the cyberspace enablements of
hyper-technological society.
350 P. Maxwell
MacWilliams article raises many interesting questions about the dierent contexts
that underlie and relate to virtual pilgrimage, which is already a well-travelled Internet
phenomenon, allowing people to re-imagine the sacred in creative ways. There are
many variables regarding virtual pilgrimage. The avour of such a pilgrimage may be
individually oriented eminently suited to a solitary person sitting in front of a computer
screen, or it may be constructed as more of a communal/collective enterprise. A
particular virtual pilgrimage may have strong realworld bases and counterparts, or it
might exist exclusively as a cyberspace phenomenon.
The more that pilgrimage generally is conceived as a state that embodies spiritual
ideals more than physical, geographical movements, the more virtual pilgrimage will not
be seen merely as a weak and diluted form of realworld pilgrimage, though the fact that
most virtual pilgrimages lack the rigour and hardship of realworld pilgrimage might
worry some of the faithful. But perhaps not too many of the faithful? After all, much
realworld pilgrimage in todays world has already been signicantly technologised.
Arguably, the heart of pilgrimage (however performed) has to do with mythscape rather
landscape.
MacWilliams emphasises that pilgrimage is a strongly visual experience and then goes
on to discuss the suggestion that traditional pilgrimage has certain liminoid character-
istics which would include ludic and populist elements as well as a sense of transcending
normal constraints/barriers. Given this, it is not surprising that the Web, which is
nothing if not visual and ludic and populist, can serve as a potentially appropriate vehicle
for pilgrimage activities. Indeed, the Web is fast replacing lm as the obvious mode of
contemporary liminoid experience. This makes sense. If a person can become subject to
any degree of liminality in an environment as straightforward as a darkened movie
theatre, there seems little doubt that some forms of virtual religion mediated through the
vision machine that is the networked multimedia computer can prove to be even more
powerful catalysts of liminoid mutation.
Conclusion
The articles of Karaogka, MacWilliams, Arthur and Helland have yielded
many interesting questions to ponder regarding cyberspace-and-religion. Some
examples are:
1 To what extent will cyberspace religion increase and become more signicant?
2 If cyberspace religion does increase, what forms of religion will prove to be good
fodder for virtuality? Mainly new religious movements and emergent/alternative
religions and religions that resonate with postmodernism? Or a much wider range?
3 Will cyberspace religion have a corrosive or invigorating eect on religion generally,
e.g., will cyberspace religion weaken conventional religious authority in certain
ways? Will cyberspace religion pose any signicant threat to realworld/oine
religion?
4 What is the place of the body in future cyberspace exploration, in terms of avatars
(e.g. in fully immersive VR surroundings), cyborgs, andsurely of interest to some
religious peoplethe feasibility of actually discarding corporeality to the extent that
a meatless (yet meaningful) immortality ensues?
This is not the place to try to answer these questions, but here are a few reections on
the rst three. I am sure most of us would be surprised if virtual religion did not grow
Virtual Religion in Context 351
(at least in a quantitative sense), but that does not mean that every form of religion will
allow/tolerate virtual embodiment. I can imagine some observers arguing that forms of
religion that are (1) privatised and internalised (echoing Peter Berger), and (2) anarchic
and anti-authoritarian, will nd it easier to take on sustained virtual forms than religions
with heavy traditional, institutional, hierarchical and congregational emphases. This
links up with the Zaleski quotation cited earlier: in the long run the Internet will
favour those religions and spiritual teachings that tend toward anarchy and that lack a
complex hierarchy . . . (quoted by Karaogka at AK 15; italics mine)perhaps in
the long run, yes; but I am not at all sure about the picture in the short run and the
medium run.
I cannot see that cyberspace religion will seriously threaten oine religion in the
foreseeable future for at least two reasons. (1) Many millions of persons in this world still
aspire to a telephone or far less, let alone an onramp to the multimedia internet. (2) A
number of times in recent history, certain prophets have declared that various electronic
innovations would soon render earlier entrenched media and cultural forms obsolete
and they seem to have been proved wrong time and time again. Why should virtual
religion not live alongside more conventional religious contexts, however each of them
might develop and change and relate with one another? A related point is made by Steve
Woolgar (see the webpage Under the Net
2
) who has formulated what he calls the Five
Rules of Virtuality. One of these is the more virtual, the more real, which refers to the
way in which electronic technologies do not simply substitute new virtual lamps for old
real ones but can in fact also increase use of the old (i.e. new virtual forms of social
organisation may reinforce non-virtual practices. For example, says Woolgar, when
museums go on-line, more persons visit them in person. Perhaps we can extrapolate
Woolgars point to the situation of virtual churches/temples and realworld churches/
temples.
I think that in these early days of cyberspace religion many of its supporters will still,
even if unconsciously, be a bit defensive about it, taking pains to show that it is a
worthwhile thing even though it is not regular realworld religion. What really intrigues
me is the suggestion that came up at the international congress (IAHR Congress,
Durban, South Africa, August 2000) at which these papers were rst presented, namely,
that cyberspace religion might actually lead to more profound understandings of
realworld religion and of religion in general. This issue most denitely needs further
investigation.
Notes
1 See the Peculiarities of Cyberspace website, available at: http://www.pscw.uva.nl/
SOCIOSITE/websoc/indexE.html and also the Cybersoc website, available at: http://
cybersoc.com
2 The Under the Net webpage (which is part of the Features section of the Oxford Today online
magazine) is available at: http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/archive/0001/13

3/07.shtml
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PATRICK MAXWELL is a South African who lectures in the School of Human and
Social Studies at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Lecturing
interests include Hinduism, Buddhism and some of the new religions. He took a B.A.
Honours degree in Religious Studies at the University of Natal, followed by an Oxford
M.A. in 1981. A founder member of the Association for the Study of Religion in
Southern Africa, he was Executive Editor (from 1993 to 1997) of the Associations
journal, Journal for the Study of Religion. He is currently Production Editor of the journal
Theoria: a Journal of Social and Political Theory. He is joint author of the book Hinduism in
Natal (University of Natal Press, 1993) and is co-editor of the forthcoming book
Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion (Rodopi Press).
Religious Studies, School of Human and Social Studies, University of Natal, Private Bag X01,
Scottsville, 3209 South Africa. Email: maxwell@nu.ac.za
354 P. Maxwell