Rev. Tim W. Jensen, Guest Minister 

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon
July 20, 1997

In a recent series of "Doonesbury" comic strips, cartoonist Gary Trudeau satirizes the impact of the "Information Superhighway" on organized religion. Worshippers at the Little Church of Walden no longer need brave the elements in order to attend services in person; instead, they can receive "Virtual Communion" at the Little Church of Walden website. As the Reverend Scot Sloane speculates about the millions of hits his sermon page must receive every day, he demonstrates some of the other features of his state-of-the-art cyber-church: interactive Bible stories, and a chat room called "Rock the Flock," where "unchurched youth can get down with their peers" in a way that resembles the "congregation of tomorrow, refugees from a deeply secular world" who log on in order to "restore values and spirituality to their lives," all made possible by the extra revenue generated from on-line liquor advertising. Meanwhile, the good Reverend is off to attend a face-to-face meeting about the most serious real-time crisis facing his congregation: a lack of parking brought about by the numerous 12-step groups, Spiritual Awareness seminars, the fitness center, food court, and interpretive dance studios that now occupy the church building.

The secret of successful satire lies in the subtle art of exaggeration, which helps us to recognize the ridiculous within the familiar. Yet sometimes history gets the last laugh. If you've ever watched an expectant young father anxiously clutching a rented beeper, you'll know that Hawthorne's tongue-in-cheek telegram: "An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment come from God!" (or some digital variation of it) has in fact been sent more often than we can count. In many ways, the world has indeed become "a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time." Yet, to borrow a phrase from the author Bill McKibben, we also live in an "Age of Missing Information," where the number of facts available to us at our fingertips threaten to crowd out of our lives things truly important for us to know.

I come to this topic on something of a dare. When William Henry Gates the Third became a father here a year or so ago, his wife Melinda offered him a challenge. Pick a church that you are willing to attend on a regular basis, and we will rear our daughter Jennifer in that faith. Otherwise, I'm going to bring her up in the church I attend — the Roman Catholic church. But Bill Gates (who himself grew up attending University Congregational Church in Seattle, and whose best friend in High School was the son of a Unitarian minister), has yet to take his wife up on her offer. "Just in terms of allocation of time resources," the richest man in America told a reporter from Time magazine, "religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."

Now as someone who married a former nun, and whose own daughter is a graduate of the Saint Mary's Academy, I can certainly think of lots worse places to send one's children than the Roman Catholic Church. I can even think of lots better ways to spend a sunny summer Sunday than sitting here listening to me (although I'm awfully grateful that so many of you chose to do so — I'd have felt pretty silly doing this by myself). But how could I pass up an opportunity to offer free, unsolicited spiritual advice to one of the principal visionaries of the "Information Revolution?" So Bill, pay attention. There's more to religion than the efficient use of time. Religion is about learning to live a meaningful life, which is not necessarily the kind of lesson you can easily learn by clicking on an icon and scrolling through a text.

When I listen to people talk about the "Information Age," it often seems to me that there is an unspoken assumption that this is something that has happened relatively recently, and that "Organized Religion" has somehow lagged behind, that the church is not on the "cutting edge." In fact, the whole idea of a "virtual church" seems a little silly — as if anyone would even bother. Yet these unspoken assumptions misrepresent the actual historical relationship between information technology and a religious world view. In his book The Road Ahead, Gates himself points out that the event which has had the largest single impact on the history of communications was Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type and the printing press in the 15th century. Prior to Gutenberg, Gates observes, all books had to be copied by hand, and there were only about 30,000 volumes in all of Europe, most of them Bibles or Bible commentaries. By the end of the 15th century, after only 50 years of the printing press, there were over 9 million books in Europe, on a variety of different subjects. Yet religion continued to be an important topic: Gutenberg's first printed book was a Bible, and there are even some scholars who suggest that the technology of movable type was the principal catalyst of the Protestant Reformation.

The ability to "publish" information for a mass audience through the use of the printed page certainly contributed much to the wider dissemination of both religious and secular ideas in Medieval Europe, but there was also a price to be paid. When a monk spent a year copying and illuminating a single manuscript, his relationship to that text was qualitatively very different from that of someone who casually reads a cheap paperback novel while riding to work on a bus. It's not just how much you know; how well you know it also makes a difference. For the medieval monk, copying texts was not just his job; in a very real sense, it was also his life: a life of study, contemplation, and devotion to something he doubtlessly would have understood as the Revealed Word of God.

The Bible has remained the world's most frequently published book right up until our own time. Yet I imagine there are very few of us, myself included, who know it as well as those medieval monastic copyists. We know different things, of course, and we know them in different ways. Changes in information technology have typically been accompanied by changing patterns of "reading" as well, assuming a rather broad understanding of that term. For example, prior to the beginning of the 19th century (when steam-driven, mechanical printing presses started to replace the older, hand-operated presses such as the one used by Benjamin Franklin, which even after 300 years would have still seemed familiar to Gutenberg), reading was primarily a group activity: someone read aloud, and the rest of the people listened. A lot of this reading took place in churches; after all, in its most basic form, a sermon is simply an explication of a reading, typically of a passage of written scripture. Mechanical printing, along with technologies like the railroad and the telegraph, created once again a revolution in the manner in which individuals acquired information, as well as in the quantity of information that was available. But not everyone viewed these innovations as progress. And the church itself was in the vanguard when it came time to take advantage of the new opportunities these technologies created. Instead of reading from a "family Bible," individuals now possessed their own personal Bibles, which were often given to them as gifts on special occasions. Reading became more of a private activity, as not just books, but newspapers, pamphlets, and religious tracts proliferated within the much larger literary marketplace made possible by the railroads. Frustrated clergymen, like the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson, likewise took advantage of the new technologies to write for and lecture to much larger audiences than those who lived within the confines of a single, geographic parish.

And similarly in our own time, digital technologies like the computer, as well as improved electronic communications like radio and television, have been quite dramatically appropriated by certain religious figures in order to reinvent the ways in which individuals learn about and experience religious information. Once again, the Bible was one of the earliest examples of interactive, electronic hyper-text. The so-called "televangelists" not only took advantage of improved television technology like satellite transmission to local cable systems, but also the database capacities of the personal computer, in order to create their vast, direct-mail networks. And religion is ubiquitous on the Internet; it is almost as widespread as the sexually-oriented material, although you don't hear nearly so much about it. This church has its own website, and this sermon (which I wrote using Microsoft Works on a Macintosh Powerbook, mostly while sitting on the front porch of my mother's beach house) will no doubt eventually be posted there (as soon as I've had a chance to run it through the spellchecker!). I use voicemail, e-mail, and my cellular phone almost daily, and there are times when I wonder how I ever got along without them. Yet there are other times when my personal technology seems like a demonic barrier to my personal religious growth, and I long for the contemplative solitude of a monastic retreat. When you are constantly available, it is very hard to get away. How can one grow comfortable with the company of their own thought, when the Information Superhighway runs right through the center of their living room?

Some time ago, a former parishioner of mine asked me whether I thought that "the Church" was hardware or software. And I've been thinking about that question for over a decade now. Certainly, within our tradition we have privileged the "Idea;" we resist the notion of equating a church with mere bricks and mortar, and seek a more abstract, intellectual basis of authority for our religious life. Faith, like information, is a non-material thing; we aspire to be in the wine business, not merely the bottling business. And yet, it seems to me, even the best wine needs some sort of bottle if folks are ever going to get a chance to drink it. A church is more than just a body of doctrine, a shared system of beliefs. It is both software and hardware: a community of people, past and present, living and dead, who have covenanted with one another to create a common religious life together, sharing not only a certain set of core values and beliefs, but also a particular time and space that they have set aside as sacred, and in which they come together to connect with one another as a worshipping community. I suppose that you could try to do this sort of thing on-line, and that in some ways it might even be more "efficient" to do so. But efficient use of time is not the point. We need to be able to touch the hands of our co-religionists, to "restore their images upon our eyes" and "enlarge our voices in common speaking and singing." It is not an abstract understanding of religion that we seek; we do not come her merely to acquire information. We are here in search of an unmeditated, first-hand experience of the Holy, of the Sacred, of a higher, more spiritual reality. And we find it in our relationships with one another, and our ability to discern the truth about our own lives through the shared experience of a common life.

Marshall McLuhan was at least partially mistaken in his belief that electronic communications technology would transform our world into a "global village." It is hard to be anonymous in a small town, but the city is full of strangers. The virtual world of cyberspace is like a giant metropolis where all information is created equal, yet knowledge and meaning are sometimes hard to come by, and nobody really knows who is lurking in the chatroom. In the village, as in a community of faith, we seek to know as we are known; but in cyberspace we risk surrendering our privacy to virtual strangers, often without our even knowing it, who may well decide to use the information they have collected about us in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

I am not the sort of person who believes that all technology is essentially neutral, and it can therefore be used for either good or ill. Nor do I believe that some technologies are wholly good and others wholly evil, and that we should accept or shun them accordingly. Every innovation has its price, every tool has its limit, and, as Thoreau reminds us, our inventions are often merely "pretty toys" and "improved means to an unimproved end." Computer programs even have an acronym for this phenomenon — GIGO, meaning "Garbage in, Garbage out." When it comes to matters of the spirit, it is typically not enough simply to increase the bandwidth. It is far more important to improve the "noise to signal" ratio, so that we can filter out the extraneous nonsense of the world, and discern the more subtle, eternal truths by which we can better live our lives.

Readings:

"Then there is electricity — the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!" exclaimed Clifford. Is that a humbug too? Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, an instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!"
"If you mean the telegraph," said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the rail track, "it is an excellent thing — that is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics don't get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bank robbers and murderers."
"I don't quite like it, in that point of view," replied Clifford. "A bank robber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard with so much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by day — hour by hour, if so often moved to do it — might send their heartthrobs from Maine to Florida, with some such words as these: 'I love your forever!' 'My heart runs over with love!' 'I love you more than I can!' and, again, at the next message, 'I have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much!' Or, when a good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him, 'Your dear friend is in bliss!' Or to an absent husband, should come tidings thus, 'An immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment come from God!' and immediately its little voice would seem to have reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor rogues, the bank robbers, who, after all, are about as honest as nine people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business at midnight rather than 'Change hours, and for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we consider only its result — for unfortunate individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal world hunt at their heels!"
"You can't, hey?" cried the old gentleman, with a hard look.
"Positively, no!" answered Clifford. "It puts them too miserably at disadvantage.…"

[Nathaniel Hawthone, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)]

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements;" there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

[Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)]

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Tim W. Jensen. All rights reserved.