CAN THOR MAKE A COMEBACK?

When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, they entered the German zeitgeist with seemingly supernatural speed. “It almost appeared,” marveled one 16th century writer, “as if the angels themselves had been their messengers and brought them before the eyes of all the people.” The real catalyst was slightly more prosaic: the magic of technology. The printing press, which decades earlier had carried the Holy Bible to the masses, now brought them Luther’s heresies. Affixed to All Saints Church on Oct. 31, 1517, the 95 theses were by December rolling off the presses in several editions.

When technology cuts the cost of spreading the word, strange things happen. Potentates grow insecure and marginal dissenters feel their oats. Monoliths splinter and the splinter groups splinter again. (There are now hundreds of Protestant denominations.) The effect is hardly confined to religions; the era of computerized mass mail and desktop publishing has seen the number of political-interest groups grow by an order of magnitude. But religions, with their aspirations of human brotherhood, uniquely highlight the paradox: communication is supposed to be a social cement, yet new communication technologies are often fragmenting.

The Internet, which pushes the cost of spreading the word down near zero, could carry this atomizing trend to unplumbed depths. Of course it may not, but already it has taken the first step: empowering legions of obscure but enterprising people who harbor ambitions of spiritual leadership. Out on the fringe of the World Wide Web, beyond mainstream religion, storefront preachers and offbeat theologies are springing up like mushrooms. Here–as in many realms of culture and politics these days–the forces of fragmentation compete with the forces of integration.

The growing smorgasbord of upstart religious movements ranges from earnest, even plausible, efforts at finding a new creed for a new era to theologies that could be described as, um, eccentric. In the latter group is, for example, the Aquarian Concepts Community Divine New Order Government. On its Website you can learn about “Interuniversal Genetics,” enroll in the “Starseed Schools of Melchizedek” and perhaps arrange a “personal transmission” with “Gabriel of Sedona.” Gabriel, by the way, carries the endorsement of the “head administrator of our universe” (the two of them “fuse” once a month) and, moreover, is “the only morontia counselor/soul surgeon on Urantia (Earth) at his level of healing ability.” (Accept no substitutes.) This Website also offers you the chance to pay money for sacred texts, learn about “Ascension Science,” even explore the “Deo-atomic body” or “tron therapy.” Godspeed.

Moving toward the less theologically ornate part of the spectrum, we find the First Cyberchurch of the Scientific God (a quasi-Christian effort to found an “empirical” faith on the teachings of the historical Jesus); the First Internet Church of All (a 10-month-old endeavor that has yet to develop much clear doctrine but whose founder says he has already ordained four ministers); and a movement that some will consider a predictably nerdy product of Internet culture: technosophy. It aims to foster a “spiritual appreciation for technology”–and defines technology to include all life forms, notably us. The closest thing to a mainstream movement on the religious fringe of the Net is “ecospirituality.” An attempt to give the environmentalist ethic a spiritual dimension, it often invokes the icon of Gaia–Earth conceived as a living, even divine being–or elements of Native American mythology.

This reliance on existing mythical traditions highlights a stiff challenge facing religious entrepreneurs who seek distinction: the difficulty of saying anything fundamentally new. God, after all, is a topic that has been kicked around for a few millenniums now. Once you have rejected the Gabriel of Sedona approach to starting a sect–inventing wholesale an arcane new theology–originality is hard to come by.

Maybe that’s why much of the ferment on the Web’s religious fringe consists not of inventing new faiths but of resurrecting half-forgotten ones. These golden oldies range from Druidism, the ancient, mysterious Celtic religion, to Pantheism, which dates back to ancient Greece. Pantheism holds that God is not a personal deity, but rather is immanent in the natural workings of the universe. In late July, Paul Harrison of Britain started a Pantheist Website that now gets 500 visits a day. “There is no other way I could reach those numbers,” he says (via E-mail). “Imagine touring the backwoods, organizing meetings in echoing community halls. I might, if I were very lucky, get five or 10 people a night, in return for huge expense and effort.”

A revival of dormant religions could amplify the Internet’s fragmenting tendency. There are lots of them, after all, and most were not known for their ecumenical outlook. Further, many come with ethnic overtones. Consider a Website devoted to Asatru, derived from the old Norse religion, featuring Thor and assorted other gods. The Webmaster explains why Asatru is the right religion for (and only for) “us,” meaning people of European descent. Because “we” have European “mental, emotional and spiritual traits,” Asatru “is better suited to us” than Christianity or Judaism, which “started in the Middle East among people who are essentially different from us.”

The point here is not that a major Asatru comeback is in the cards. Thor’s best days are almost certainly behind him (though no fewer than 12 Asatru Websites are listed in the Yahoo! Web-indexing service). But there are plenty of other nearly extinct or quite localized creeds that could expand their compass via the Internet and thus heighten the world’s already ample multiculturalism, for better or worse. Paganism, shamanism, voodoo, gnosticism, santeria–these and scores more are out there, accessible worldwide. So is the expanding pool of freshly coined sects, some of which will presumably survive. All this may seem unimportant now, with so many Websites looking so gray. But as bandwidth grows, the Web will become a dirt-cheap form of television. Imagine hundreds of Billy Grahams, each preaching a different message to a different audience.

The religious fringe of the Web does have some harbingers of mutual tolerance, even convergence. Many Websites exhibit one hallmark of the scientific age: theological minimalism. Confident claims about the afterlife are rare, and notions of God are often vague. The ecospiritualists may pay homage to Gaia or indulge in tribal drumming rituals, but for many, Gaia is simply a metaphor, and drumming a way to unwind. Even ancient religions, as rendered by their excavators, lose some theological bite. The Asatru Webmaster admits his beloved Thor is just a symbol.

With theologies this fuzzy, what’s to fight over? (Especially given another common theme on these Websites: an explicit aversion to dogma, rooted in the Internet’s famously antiauthoritarian culture.) Pantheist proselytizer Harrison says he is heartened, not threatened, by movements ranging from paganism to Native American spiritualism. Since Pantheism holds that God is in every bit of the universe, all forms of reverence for nature are roughly consistent with it.

Certainly an environmentalist refrain does seem part of the liturgy of almost everyone on the religious fringe of the Web. And not surprisingly, this green perspective is typically global (the Web is, after all, worldwide). The generally amorphous teachings of the First Internet Church of All have one crystal-clear theme: “saving the living organism known as Earth.”

This biophilic notion of a living planet–of Gaia–partly converges, oddly enough, with a kind of technophilia that is indigenous to the Internet. The central notion of techno- sophy–that life is a technology–has as its flip side the idea that technology is a form of life. Strange as this sounds, it is an increasingly common refrain in cyberculture. If the idea is valid–if indeed fiber optics are living tissue–then it is easier to think of Earth in the Age of Internet as a coherent living system, a giant organism complete with a giant brain. Gaia with a high IQ.

The image of a literal planetary nervous system was laid out a half-century ago as a kind of prophecy by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit mystic whose writings were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Teilhard envisioned the technological evolution of a “noosphere”–the “thinking envelope of the Earth.” The noosphere, he believed, entails a “sort of etherized universal consciousness” that will lead us, at last, to an era of brotherly love. Needless to say, Teilhard has a following on the Net.

Was Teilhard right? Is the Internet God’s will? For all we know, yes. But bear in mind that this is not the first time an information technology has been nominated for that honor. The art of printing, wrote Martin Luther, was “God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”