fragments of faith:
helping yourself to do-it-yourself religion
Written for frAme, June 2001

1

At the fin de siecle, there is a renewed interest in all things religious, spiritual and occult. The past decade has seen an explosion of alternative, new age and spiritual ideas, products and practices. Perhaps this renewed focus on the spiritual is a coincidence rather than being endemic to the temporal shift, stemming more from other incidences and experiences than the ticking of the clock. For Umberto Eco, "the New Age, a complete syncretic movement ... accepts the truth of every position not requiring any rational warrant or any form of theology ... It's do it yourself religion. But this ... I attribute to the collapse of ideology more than the year 2000."1 At the end of the 20th century, the media is able to spread the word (and panic) like a virus. With apocalyptic fears of second comings, millennium bugs and alien visitations, it could well have been the end of the world as well.

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As the spiritual is brought into sharp focus as time ticks into the third millennium, so too the virtual. This essay will discuss several recent predictions and commentaries about religion and spirituality in the digital era and in cyberspace. In Next: Trends for the Future, Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman observe that more people are turning to Eastern and New Age mysticism and spirituality due to the increasing sense of isolation and alienation in Western cultures.2 This is particularly prevalent among the Baby Boomer generation. This generation's wanderlust aided by the accessibility of international travel resulted in treks throughout the East and Middle East. Whether purposely searching for new philosophies or not, the Boomers couldn't help but be exposed to them.

Eco identifies 1968 as a moment of generational disillusionment. He claims that the revolutionaries of 1968 turned to mysticism because "it has been shown that we now cannot change the world any longer, anything that might tend to prove the existence of another form of reality will be welcomed."3 Further, Eco says that the language of the 1968 generation was redolent with allusions to the spiritual: it was, after all, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. However, things didn't quite work out and Erik Davis observes that while some sought meaning in mystical and spiritual realms, a significant number of others drifted into the computer industry. He writes, "of all the cultural zones that wound up hosting lingering freak dreams, undoubtedly the most unexpected was the universe of digital code, a world tucked inside miniaturised versions of the very machines that once epitomised blue-suited technocracy and military command and control."4 Cyberspace and virtual reality feature large as the means to achieve another form of reality after the disappointments of counterculture and radicalism. Initiatives such as Resource One, Community Memory, WELL and even the first Apple computer were the result of this migration.

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Within discourses of cyberculture, exists a similar idea as within discourses of spirituality: that the body is corrupting and can be discarded. In The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Margaret Wertheim describes the Medieval conception of space as exemplified in Dante's Divine Comedy. The idea of heaven within this framework is that which is transcendent and beyond matter, time and space, or in other words, the Empyrean. She states, "where early Christians conceived of Heaven as a realm in which their 'souls' would be freed from the frailties and failings of the flesh, so today's champions of cyberspace hail their realm as a place where we will be freed from the limitations and embarrassments of physical embodiment."5 Wertheim also contends that the existence of cyberspace has also given rise to techno-spirtuality. Cyberspace is soul-space. The lexicon of spiritual discourse is appropriated by techno-science. Not only are webselves called avatars but Erik Davis, writing about information mysticism, states that commentators have equated the genetic code, AGCT with the Torah's name of God, YHVH. Technology and theology uneasily intersect. Wertheim argues that "such cybernautic dreams of transcending bodily limitations have been fueled by a fundamental philosophical shift of recent years: The growing view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body, but by an information code."6

Religion is a corporeal matter, very much situated by embodiment. Traditionally, we are born into religion, having it conferred on us by our genealogies. As religious subjects, we experience our faith physically through its rituals and performances. We consume and sacrifice flesh and blood. While the ecstatic state might have transcendent aspirations, it is grounded by the body as a climactic change. Ancient pagans drunkenly worshipped the chthonian. With the proliferation of new technologies and the flood of information, we are now faced with unprecedented choices about religion. Through these emergent technologies, genealogy is now couched in terms like 'resonance'.

4

Recently, Faith Popcorn7 made some predictions about the future of spirituality and religion, stating that the future will become more customised and cater to user tastes and desires in a very personalised way. As markets become bigger and increasingly depersonalised in this information age, consumers will expect to imprint themselves on products. Popcorn calls this focus on the individual, 'egonomics'. At the same time that 'egonomics' is redefining consumption, the trend of 'anchoring' is emerging. 'Anchoring' is about finding spiritual roots, and when 'anchoring' meets 'egonomics', worshippers cut'n'paste their faith to suit. Basically, we don't want rules to live by, don't want to be told what to buy and don't want to have our moral lives mapped out for us. What we do want is to make our own rules and develop our moral lives to reflect our own identities and circumstances. This self-definition and self-centredness provides a different take on the classical dictate, 'know thyself'. Where once the church provided the pivot for community, people are gathering (or 'clanning') in physical and virtual spaces as 'Mystical Tribes', formed around shared experiences.

Consumption research shows that when we shop, we do so to 'join a brand' and to make it a source of identity. The same approach applies to religion: we are not just shopping, we are defining who we are. It's about finding and doing what 'clicks'. Faith is constitutive of identity. Foucault defines technologies of the self as those practices which produce personal identity. Technologies of the self "permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."8 While faith might be considered a technology of the self, so too the internet, consumption and any number of practices or devices through which an individual produces their identity, clicks and/or transforms their self.

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It's not that we don't believe in anything anymore, just more like we seem to believe in a little bit of everything. Perhaps we are not of one faith, but of all faiths. Postmodern accounts of online subjectivity and identity embrace multiplicity. As Davis states, "multiplicity rules on the internet".9 Adopting multiple religions is in keeping with the idea and practice of multiple identities in cyberspace. Different contexts might call for different faiths or parts of faiths. We have come to understand online environments as fluid, multiple, fragmented, dispersed, networked, connected. Similar accounts of the subject proliferate. Like the explorations of the Baby Boomer generation that made it possible for firsthand experience of different realities, now virtual travels and access to information also provide different realities. While the world has indeed become smaller, knowledge and awareness of its diversity has expanded.

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When it comes to religion and the 'moral transformation through marketing', Popcorn10 claims this is what we might expect:

_ The Religious Cocktail: people will develop personalized faiths by blending parts of belief systems, rituals and laws most meaningful to them.
_ Customized 'bibles' will be created merging passages from Animism to Zen.
_ Club God (Allah, Buddha, etc) will replace Club Med.
_ Attendance at Fundamentalist colleges will explode, as young people make spiritual and religious structure a priority in their lives.

In terms of faith, we will believe in what clicks and what can anchor us. According to Popcorn,

we're all at the start of a great awakening, a time of spiritual and religious revival. What's different about this awakening is that there's very little agreement on who or what God is, what constitutes worship and what this outpouring means. ... The need to Anchor has found expression in all of the world's religions, whether they celebrate the Old and New Testament God, Buddha, Allah, Brahma, unnamed higher powers or self-discovery.11

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Gods, like machines, have always been made in our own image as modes of the self. With unprecedented access to information and the re-emphasis of the subject, retaining a single faith is both unsustainable and undesirable. That's undesirable in the sense that desire is, as Rosi Braidotti states, "productive because it flows on, it keeps moving, but its productivity also entails power relations, transitions between contradictory registers, shifts of emphasis".12 The undesirable might be 'counter-productive'. In the world of personalised, no strings religion, an individual might perform operations on their self in order to, as Foucault suggests, attain a state of 'purity', 'nothingness', 'ecstasy' or other desired spiritual state. Davis, describing the self as a "virtual reality molded by the myriad conditions that compose its becoming", explains that

the self is an alchemical vessel, and it is shaped by the practices our bodyminds engage in: arts, diet, sex, dance, learning, sport, contemplation, friendship, ethics. Such technologies of the self are often largely automatic, but when the practices themselves begin to awaken and integrate, they become spiritual, in the broadest sense of the term. The postmodern avatars of fragmented identity ultimately lose the thread: the self has many avenues and powers, but this multiplicity is raw material that allows creative modes of integration to emerge. Not mutation but transmutation.13

8

The internet recombines religion and informatics. It recombines because there has always been a relationship between religion and informatics. The authority of the church - any church - was once absolute. Power was predicated on who had the word and passed it on, who had the authority to reproduce the word. And the word exhalted a deity. Yet, like bygone eras, there are those that claim that the internet confers an agonistic quality where the word can be spread 'orally', through community. The internet is a veritable supermarket of faiths, as well as the means by which to spread the word. It is a space of connections and recombinant logic. In online environments, religion can be re-mixed or recombined. Is it really a spiritual [re]awakening as Popcorn suggests? Popcorn states:

The future will be so radically different from anything we've known before, that having a spiritual connection will become more profoundly important. Spirituality and religion, however, will become much more self-defined. In essence, people will mix and pour their own religious cocktails. There will be a morphing of traditional religious practices and denominations ...We'll see some people at the center of organized religions react to this by becoming more and more fundamentalist.14

9

Popcorn predicts that the world will become more personalised. For many, faith is a personal matter in the sense that one's heart is opened to their deity or the thing they worship: passion, fetishism or love are at play. It is a complex thing and for some, any threat to the church hardens their resolve and fervor. It depends on how much one identifies with their faith. While some are cutting'n'pasting their spiritual experience, others become more inured with technology providing both tools of worship and a medium for worship. As a Muslim, you can install a Call to Prayer on your desktop which will tell you when it is time to pray. Witches can exchange spells and goddesses or cyborgs can rise from the virtual sea. Born Again, you can attend a Revival Meeting via the internet and discuss religious matters. However, the Vatican has recently announced that confession will not be permitted on the web. You can find information about any religion from any era of history on the net. Dotted along the information superhighway are shrines for all beliefs and places to worship all gods.

Even though consumers are sufficiently empowered to make conscious decisions about what clicks, there is still the idea that in any religious context, people are followers, the flock. Ostensibly, devotion is about being in the service of a deity. So these anchors and things that click seem to reverse the idea of service. People don't serve religion or even worship in the traditional sense: religion is what serves them, grounds them or gives them satisfaction. It's something that doesn't sit comfortably with the orthodoxy of faith. Wertheim comments that "unlike genuine religions that make ethical demands on their followers, cyber-religiosity has no moral precepts. Here ... one gets the payoffs of a religion without getting bogged down in reciprocal responsibilities."15 As Wertheim continues, the social and communal dimensions of religion are negated in cyberspace and yet, it is in cyberspace that new forms of community and network are flourishing.

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The languages of spiritual virtuality are conflicting. While Wertheim speaks of abandoning the body, Popcorn speaks of anchoring. While Popcorn speaks in the tongues of marketing and PR, other voices are reinscribing the spiritual to accommodate new (virtual) forms of knowledge and articulations of self. For Sandy Stone, the virtual community is a community of belief.16 With the internet, there is a resounding call to believe, to have faith. The internet now forms and informs our cultural and spiritual lives. Engagements with this technology have impacted on the construction of knowledge and authority.

A Medieval maxim, credo quia absurdum translates as 'I believe because it is irrational'. In the spirituality predicted by Popcorn, there would seem to be a strange return to faith (not necessarily a return to the Middle Ages). It is no longer a matter of whether particular religious doctrines are true. Rather, the cyberfaithful will find certain aspects of those doctrines true, recombining them to generate multiplicities: shifting points of identification and turbulent belief systems for each individual. In that experience of truth and faith, people can and do connect in virtual spiritual spaces and networks. Spiritual journeys will diverge, flow and converge, emerging as new virtualities and rituals, along those pathways.

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Notes
1 Umberto Eco in Catherine David, Frederic Lenoir and Jean-Philippe de Tonnac (eds), Conversations About the End of Time, trans. by Ian Maclean and Roger Pearson, Allen Lane, London, 1999, p 168
2 Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman, Next: Trends for the Future, Pan McMillan, Sydney, 1998, p 82
3 Eco, op.cit., p 168 - 169
4 Erik Davis, Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information, Serpents Tail, London, 1998, p 164
5 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Doubleday, Sydney, 1999, p 19
6 ibid., p 262
7 Faith Popcorn website <http://www.faithpopcorn.com>
8 Michel Foucault in L.H.Martin, H. Gutman, P.H. Hutton (Eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1988, p 18
9 Davis, op.cit., p 328
10 Popcorn, op.cit.
11 Faith Popcorn in Terry Mattingly, 'Testament of Faith Popcorn', PolkOnline, March 6, 2000, <http://www.polkonline.com/stories/060300/rel_faith-pcorn.shtml>
12 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Thought, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, p 14
13 Davis, op.cit., p 333
14 Popcorn in Mattingly, op.cit.
15 Wertheim, op.cit., p 282
16 Sandy Stone, 'Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures', in Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1992, p 105