Challenges For Evangelization In The Digital Age
By Paul A. Soukup, S.J.
No one would doubt the importance of the new digital technologies for contemporary society and for the Church. These technologies–particularly in their role as communication technologies-- such as the Internet, direct broadcast satellites, and cellular telephony–offer the possibility of profoundly changing aspects of human interaction. Through its various offices, among its members, and at congresses, the Church has already begun to reflect upon these technologies, their promises, and their risks. In this essay, I will review some of what we know and some of what we might deduce about the impact of the digital technologies (particularly as they touch upon the religious realm), then reflect more specifically upon evangelization, and finally examine some of the challenges before us as a Church. We must think more about the digital world and try to understand it, both to apply these tools to evangelization, not in an instrumental way, but to evangelize the very world they create.
I. Impact of Digital Technologies
When printed Bibles came from the newly invented printing press of Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the 15th century, little did anyone dream of the extraordinary consequences that would result from this new communication technology. We would do well, however, to consider what this old new technology tells us about a change in communication patterns, for, of all the communication technologies that have come before, the digital technologies resemble the printing press most in their effects. In her magisterial studies of how the printing press changed early modern Europe, Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979, 1983) demonstrates changes in both personal and social behaviors, as well as deeper changes in the very structures of European societies–including the Church.
Among other things, the printing press increased the speed of communication: by shortening the time it took to produce a book, the printing press allowed more books into circulation at a faster rate than had existed through the work of the scriptoria. This increase in speed led to an increase in the dissemination of information. And that increase, in turn, increased people’s access to information; books in circulation, available from booksellers, not chained to library walls, meant people could read more books. This, in its turn, increased the range of information available to people–they could, more or less, read whatever they wished and not be limited to the few books that happened to be close to them. As she describes the “emergence of print culture,” Eisenstein highlights some of these features:
More abundantly stocked bookshelves obviously increased opportunities to consult and compare different texts. Merely by making more scrambled data available, by increasing the output of Aristotelian, Alexandrian, and Arabic texts, printers encouraged efforts to unscramble these data... Contradictions became more visible, divergent traditions more difficult to reconcile. … Not only was confidence in old theories weakened, but an enriched reading matter also encouraged the development of new intellectual combinations and permutations. … Increased output directed at relatively stable markets, in short, created conditions that favored new combinations of old ideas at first and then, later on, the creation of entirely new systems of thought.
It should be noted that cross-cultural interchange was experienced first of all by the new occupational groups responsible for the output of printed editions …. [A] remarkable amount of innovative work in both scholarly and scientific fields was done outside academic centers . . . (pp. 43-44)
Eisenstein goes on to note the print culture also affected the presentation of information: it standardized the look of books, developed new arrangements of information, and fostered a new rhetoric.
Print culture also promoted new processes of sorting information and classifying it (for example, the index at the end of a book or a catalogue of individual books); print culture promoted new methods of collecting information, from correcting manuscripts and copies to urging collaborative work whereby readers would send data to printers. And print culture opened publishing to previously excluded groups: “humble craftsmen” authored books about how to perform various tasks, described tools, and invited people to their workshops (pp. 75-76).
The Impact of Information
Among other things, all of this increased the impact of information. The reinforcement of seeing identical multiple copies of printed books served a presumption of truth. The availability of the same printed texts in every city amplified their message better than any preacher shouting in the streets. The new print culture also offered people a new understanding of place, both through maps that located them more precisely in the world, but also through woodcuts and drawings of cities. The increased travel of the print era interacted with new ways of publicizing places to reorient people in the world.
This should sound familiar to us. We, too, can say that digital communication technologies (particularly the Internet and direct broadcast satellites) have increased the speed of communication and, in turn, have broadened its dissemination. Thus, they have made more information available to more people than before. That information comes free from library or academic structures and, very often, free from commercial structures as well. Another way of putting this is that digital information bypasses the control mechanisms created in print culture. This greater access to information opens new vistas for people, even over the opposition of governments, schools, or churches.
Like our early modern forbears, we, too, strive to make sense of the abundance of information available to us and we, too, have the possibility of creating “entirely new systems of thought” out of this mix of digital materials. In ways similar to the way the printing press moved cultural and intellectual interchanges away from the universities, the digital technologies have moved many of our interchanges into corporate, entertainment, or personal venues.
And, again like print culture, the new digital technologies have promoted new processes of sorting information, classifying it, and finding it, as any number of search engines can now bear witness. In fact, English usage has accepted a new verb: “to google” someone or something means to look them up using the Internet search engine Google. The Internet (as opposed to direct broadcast satellites, which are not interactive) also promotes new methods of collecting information, from online surveys to the shared resources of listservs and filesharing. And the Internet opens publishing up to previously excluded groups: anyone with access to the World Wide Web can publish. The Internet and direct broadcast satellites also work indirectly to standardize the look of information. More and more, digital information must conform to certain norms of packaging: on the Internet web pages rather than text files or FTP archives; MP3 files rather than CDs; on direct broadcasting satellites, commercial entertainment programming and sports rather than community access materials.
When we add the third digital technology–the cellular telephone to the mix, we begin to see the same reinforcement of the messages carried by the communication systems as Eisenstein found with the printed book. The ubiquity of such information amplifies it at tremendous speed, whether fact or rumor. Information spreads through web pages, text messages, instant messenger, and satellite.
Affecting Time, Place, and Community
Beyond these things the digital technologies also follow in the footsteps of print culture by affecting individuals’ senses of time, place, and community. We can quickly grasp how access to digital materials leads us to allocate our time differently: with more programming to watch via direct broadcast satellites, people spend more time viewing television, much of it non-locally produced. With more information available online, people spend more time at the computer. That shift of time subtly leads to another shift of time, to the point that some Internet commentators have suggested collapsing all time zones into one global, digital, and decimal Internet Xtime (Lovink, 2002, pp. 148-149). The same shift of time allocation occurred with widespread literacy as people spent more time reading and (perhaps only coincidentally) measuring time. The Internet shifts us more definitely away from solar time to a coordinated virtual time. Direct broadcast satellites do much the same since programming occurs independently of local times. This also means people do not spend time on other activities. Time spent online replaces time previously spent doing other things; time spent watching television replaces other things also.
The digital technologies, like the television before them, affect people’s sense of place. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) has already demonstrated this phenomenon regarding television. Briefly, the argument runs this way: by changing what people can see, by giving them access to previously only imagined physical places, the television changed their social place, how they understood themselves in relation to others. By allowing a look “behind the scenes,” the television demystified hierarchies, leaders, and neighbors; and so it changed attitudes and behaviors. By viewing “the mysteries,” the television taught social norms and inculcated social roles and particular ways of acting. Direct broadcast satellites do not merely make more television available; they also connect cultural fantasies, showing the idealized and imagined worlds of one culture to another. It is more than an amusing anecdote to hear that visitors to Los Angeles are surprised that the people in Beverly Hills do not resemble the actors in “Beverly Hills 90210.” The Internet opens the notion of place even more by making its “places” both virtual and interactive. Thus the local matters even less to people online, a phenomenon explored mostly by novelists (Gibson, 1984; Stephenson, 1992), though sociologists have begun to gather data on it as well (Quan-Haase & Wellman, 2002; Wellman, 2001).
Beyond affecting one’s sense of physical place, the digital technologies affect one’s sense of reality. Sherry Turkle (1995) has argued that a host of communication technologies prepared the way for the digital world’s virtual reality. Television, for example, creates “pseudo-events”–things that occur simply to create television content: press conferences, reality shows, instant celebrity (Boorstin, 1971). Television also creates pseudo-relationships, what Horton and Wohl call para-social relationships -- the illusion of [a] face-to-face relationship with the performer” (1956, p. 215). In these instances, people project a sense of belonging and a sense of meaning onto events and people they do not know.
Community changes, too. Brian Stock (1983) explored the phenomenon of textual communities, focusing his attention on groups that grew up before the rise of printing. Print culture intensified the experience of communities forming not only around groups in physical proximity but also around particular texts and the interpretation of those texts. In this sense, Christianity, and the Catholic Church form textual communities, gathered around the Bible and its interpretation. Print culture led to communities of scholars, reading one another’s books; to communities or nations, revering the same founding documents (constitutions, declarations, etc.); and to communities of scientists, collaborating in data collection and analysis. Print culture led to city groups reading and debating contemporary theological issues, as Edwards (1994) has documented in Strasbourg where Protestant communities formed around the texts of Luther. The Internet, in particular, has fostered this kind of community growth. Much early writing about the Internet called attention to groups whose sole contact was through email and computer bulletin boards (Rheingold, 1993). More recent studies have examined how social contact and a sense of community result from Internet contact. Quan-Haas and Wellman (2002) report survey data from North America that shows that “online social contact supplements the frequency of face-to-face and telephone contact.” They also found “frequent email users have a greater sense of online community” (p. 291), though this did not translate into greater involvement in their local civic communities. They conclude Internet activity gives “social capital” (defined as contact with friends, civic engagement, and a sense of belonging to a community) another dimension and disperses it over a wider geographical area.
The digital technologies, like the printed books and magazines before them, offer individuals a greater choice of cultural engagement. Cross-cultural interchange happens readily and easily, though not always in a welcome manner. Many countries and individuals have criticized the flood of Hollywood products and the flow of North American marketing across borders through satellite and Internet channels. Setting aside for the moment the evaluation of this, we can readily admit individuals do have access to cultural elements from across the world.
Societal Impact
In addition to these influences on individuals, the digital technologies, like the printing press before them, also have an impact on societies. These influences grow, of course, from the ways they affect individuals. The printing press changed the context for language. It helped to legitimize vernacular languages, propelling them into respectable use. While long used as the mother tongues of speakers throughout early modern Europe, the local languages acquired an orthography and a formal literature through their printed forms. Martin Luther, for example, receives credit for creating a German literature in his translation of the Scriptures. The printed works of William Shakespeare set a similar high standard for English as did the writing of Cervantes in Spain or Montaigne in France. This new perception of language both decreased the role of Latin (more and more restricted to academic circles) and contributed to the growing awareness of nations as people considered themselves German or French or Spanish rather than as members of a larger political empire. Printed works contributed both to a sense of community within nation states (speakers and readers of the same language) and to a sense of community across borders (readers of the same books). In either case, a new understanding of borders and boundaries developed.
The printing press also affected language by enabling new forms of expression. Montaigne, more or less, invented the essay: the intimate reflection on a topic, shifting public thinking from the rhetorical public speech to a personalized address to an anonymous reader. Over the centuries–and it did take centuries–printed stories evolved into the form we today call the novel. Here narrative changes from epic poems and elaborated accounts to a less oral and more text-centered form of language (a change refined yet again by the telegraph and the journalistic style of language it created).
As individuals read the same books and developed textual communities, social structures developed to support these networks of associates. Best documented in terms of science through the various Royal Academies, these networks provided support structures for people of similar interests and ways of increasing the dissemination of ideas. Individuals found greater social mobility through what John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid have termed “the social life of documents” (1995, 2000). The documents themselves created concrete manifestations of groups, replacing linkages formerly symbolized in political or ecclesiastical ritual. To apply this to the growth of nation-states, they cite the work of the American political scientist, Benedict Anderson:
Anderson argues that a document culture was a key ingredient in the creation of independent nations in the late eighteenth century. Printed documents, Anderson maintains, were essential to replacing the ideology of sovereigns and subjects by creating the idea of a self-constructed society built around shared ideals and shared practices. Anderson's foremost example is the United States. Here the documents that first come to mind include such seminal works as the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution. But Anderson suggests that “popular” cultural items, such as journals, novels, pamphlets, lampoons, ballad sheets, and so forth were equally important in creating the cultural sense of common interests necessary for the nation’s formation. (1995)
Documents themselves provide the cultural glue that holds groups together.
The ready availability of printed documents also illustrates a countervailing tendency. Recourse to printed materials made societies more diverse, at least in terms of ideas. Each nation or city now had access to more, and competing, voices. While many governments (including that of the Church) tried to limit those voices through various mechanisms of central control or censorship, philosophers and many Enlightenment thinkers argued that only through the competition of these voices would truth emerge. In the English-speaking world, the classic exponent of this argument is John Milton, in the Areopagitica (1644). Most attempts to limit the availability of books, particularly religious books, failed. In time, governments and churches embraced printing technologies and began to provide their own printed materials.
A more indirect development, but an important one nonetheless, arose with the necessity of providing an infrastructure for printing: print shops, booksellers, book traders, and the whole commercial and technical apparatus of printing. While much of the early structure built on existing groups (scribes migrated to print shops, merchants began to sell books), soon a separate class of individuals developed cooperative arrangements to foster the world of books. These groups often acted independently of other social and political structures.
Disruptive Technology
Finally, the printed book acted as a “disruptive technology.” It ushered in an era of social change and helped to motivate people to participate in such change–partially through the spread of new ideas.
These social changes should also sound quite familiar to us. Here again the digital communication technologies have effects on modern life like those of the printing press in early modern Europe. We too experience their impact on language as the Internet and digital television have accelerated the spread of English as a world language. Only very recently have non-English languages gained a foothold online. We, too, have experienced a growing sense of social groups whose identity is shaped by the social life of documents. Brown and Duguid comment:
Neither capital nor authorization was needed. From political undergrounds connected only by samizdat journals to wind-surfers, DeLorean owners, and beekeepers, people with shared interests use communications technologies (both hi- and lo-tech) to help form themselves into self-created and self-organizing groups. To a significant degree, these are held together by documents circulating among members, keeping each conscious of being a member and aware of what others are up to. … Consequently, as never before, scattered groups of people unknown to one another, rarely living in contiguous areas, and sometimes never seeing another member, have nonetheless been able to form robust social worlds. (1995).
We also have recent experience of the formation of protest groups using the digital technologies (especially the Internet and cellular telephony’s ability to send text messages). From the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas to the anti-globalization protesters in Seattle, to the growing anti-war movements–all depend on the ability of communication technologies to provide a social structure.
Like the press before them, governments have had limited success in barring the use of these technologies. The government of China has made perhaps the greatest efforts but has not managed to keep up with online materials. France and Germany have pressured online retailers and auction houses to enforce local laws against Naziism but have been less successful in curtailing English-language uses.
Digital technologies demand an infrastructure. Originally built on existing networks (telephone and television), they bring together a wide range of technologists to collaborate in making the systems work. Surprisingly, most of the original work occurred independently of government oversight: the creation of electronic protocols, the creation of email systems, the transfer of data, the enlistment of enthusiasts, even the beginning of digital commerce (Mueller, 2002). The digital world has managed a kind of parallel social infrastructure. Finally, these new digital technologies also appear as disruptive technologies. They, too, create a world that increases the expectation of social change.
Digital Impact on Religion
How, then, does the digital world affect religion? Again, we can follow the lead of Eisenstein as she examines the impact of the printing press. Then we will look more closely at some contemporary research.
Print culture made copies of the Scriptures widely and easily available to people for the first time in Christian history; moreover, people encountered these printed Scriptures privately, not through communal reading. The Protestant groups, therefore, encouraged literacy and Bible study to enable individual believers to directly encounter God’s word and to interpret it in orthodox ways. This alone seems a significant change in Christian practice. But this was not the only religious change ushered in by print.
Actually, church traditions were already being affected by the advent of printing, well before Martin Luther had come of age. When fixed in a new format and presented in a new way, orthodox views were inevitably transformed. The doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, for example, acquired a new lease on life after appearing in print and becoming the subject of a deliberate revival–even before winning approval at the Council of Trent. … Mysticism, like scholasticism, was also transformed when spiritual exercises moved out of the cloisters. ‘Meditative forms of mental prayer’ became subject to rulebooks issued in uniform editions. Attempts to inspire lay devotion, previously characteristic of a localized movement, such as the Northern ‘devotio moderna,’ became much more widespread. In Southern Europe, friars began to address the lay public through printing as well as preaching . . . (Eisenstein, 1979, pp. 314-315)
Print culture also affected the liturgical reform, as the Catholic Church could now insist on uniformity in worship, through uniform printed editions, which lacked the “local variations” of handwritten manuscripts (p. 313). Print culture, then, enabled individual variations in Christian practice but it also standardized its public expression.
More than uniform and widely available texts, the printing revolution also shifted the locus of theology away from the universities to the “scholar-printer, who was often more erudite than the university theologian” and “less likely to defer to clerical judgment” (p. 320). Religious and biblical scholarship began a shift away from the rule of the Church to the rules of evidence. The scriptural tradition moved from analogical interpretation to linguistic studies and critical editions. The printed Bible and other printed theological or religious texts became the subjects of studies, often not authorities in their own right. As noted above, the greater variety and greater availability of texts led to more people puzzling over them, as data, to make sense of them. The contradictions and uncertainties in the texts (nothing new to scholars such as Abelard or Aquinas) led people to develop new intellectual approaches and understandings.
However, the printing press did not simply remain at the margins of institutional religious use. While it did affect the religious practices of many–especially the Protestant groups–the Catholic Church also embraced printing, though in a different way. As noted already, printed texts encouraged Bible study, standardized liturgical practices, and fostered devotional life. Catholic groups, like the Protestant ones, published printed catechisms, though, unlike the Protestants, targeted the clergy rather than the laity. Here, as in the case of the liturgical texts, the Catholic Church maintained its hierarchical patterns in its use of the printing press (Eisenstein, 1979, p. 350). In this we see the religious use of technology followed the organizational patterns of the various Christian churches.
As noted so many times before, these patterns should seem familiar to us as we see people encountering a full range of religious texts and ideas online as well as envisioned in dramatic or filmic forms. The availability of these religious texts leads to an increase scrutiny of those texts: there are over 1.7 million websites indexed under “Bible study,” for example. At the same time, even more so than in early modern Europe, those texts become available outside any religious context. While printed religious works (Bibles, commentaries, devotional guides, for example) existed, they tended to circulate within religious places; reformers and churches used the texts to foster a wider lay spirituality. On the Internet or on television, religious materials appear without any context apart from the web page or programs themselves. Even though one can find them attached to television ministries, “virtual monasteries,” “virtual retreat centers,” or even “virtual dioceses,” religious materials appear free of external certification or gatekeeping. Viewers and readers make of them what they will. Moreover, web designers can simply assemble some texts and proclaim themselves spiritual guides. The authority of the program, text, or web page becomes completely self-contained.
Ironically, for media committed to local control, rather than promote the local, many religious web pages (as well as satellite delivered religious television) assert only one approach and one interpretation–namely their own. Even though that interpretation may well rest on circumstances local to the web publisher, the publisher claims for it a universal authority. This may well result from the authority of the printed page; whatever the source, the phenomenon seems fairly universal: we believe what we read.
The same pattern seems to take place with religious thought. Just as print led to a revival of medieval scholastic thinkers, the Internet and religious films now revive older ideas of scriptural or theological interpretation. Some of these revivals restate traditional beliefs, but many others return to “the mysteries.” Often coupled with a “conspiracy theory” rhetoric (“these texts or ideas have been maliciously suppressed by the authorities”)–a rhetoric encouraged by television drama like “The X-files” or by political or investigative programs–this revival takes an uncritical approach to anything regarded as spiritual or religious.
Here, too, we see a new beginning of a shift away from the university, the chancery office, or the church as a locus for theology. A growing popular theology has taken root on the Internet and in biblical films–a theology independent of any church or believing community. Often coupled with apocalyptic stories and end-times rhetoric, this theology interprets contemporary events and offers sometimes fantastic versions of an impending doom. Another strand of this popular theology provides a somewhat self-centered, new age interpretation of these same contemporary events.
Where the churches make use of the new digital media, they tend to act as they did with the printing press. Sponsored church sites, for example, resemble the ecclesiologies most congenial to their congregational sponsors. The Vatican site, for example, eschews interactivity for authoritative documents. It functions as a repository of official statements, reinforcing a hierarchical or institutional model of the Church. Despite statements of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication that emphasize the interactive nature of the Internet (2002, nos. 5-6), relatively little interactivity exists on Catholic Church-sponsored pages (Jans, 2002).
Like printed texts before them, digital materials also act as an impetus for community formation. A good deal of recent research into religion and religious practices has begun to examine how individuals make use of online materials. Campbell (2003), describing an ethnographic study of online religious groups, notes three key findings: “(1) Online involvement is not causing people to leave their local church”; “(2) people join online communities primarily for relationships, not information”; and “(3) the characteristics of online communities highlighted offer a picture of what individuals envision and hope a church or Christian community would be like” (pp. 223-225). Her study, and particularly the last part, indicates that digital interaction complements and challenges traditional churches. She expands on the point:
Overall members described online community as valuable in their spiritual lives and growth. Many emphasized experiencing more care, fellowship, and encouragement online than they received in their real-world church. Members also valued online prayer, support, and having access to teaching/discussion on topics not available in their local church. (Campbell, 2003, p. 223)
Campbell also points out the self-understanding of the various online Christian groups she studied corresponds quite well with Dulles’ (1974) models of the church, especially those manifesting the Church as communion, as servant/herald, and as sacrament.
In another study of online religious use, Linderman and Lövheim (2003) found that people combined both information seeking and community.
When asked about the significance of the computer-mediated interaction in which they participated, the majority of those answering the questionnaire mentioned that they had encountered new types of information, explored new issues, and thereby expanded their knowledge in matters of religion and spirituality. Some of the informants emphasized the extended ability to get into contact with people with similar interests and experiences in the area of religion. Several informants also found the religious dialogue interesting since the computer-mediated interaction allowed for a wider array of possible input compared to interaction taking place within traditional religious contexts. (p. 235)
However, after reviewing all of their findings, Linderman and Lövheim conclude that, rather than investigating whether digital communication encourages a different religious practice, researchers should ask “whether CMC [computer-mediated communication] facilitates or renders more difficult certain forms of social relations and identities.” These questions of identity and trust “connect to the processes of religious change already underway in late modern society” (p. 238).
This conclusion aligns quite well with the observations of Stewart Hoover, the director of the ongoing Media and Religion Project at the University of Colorado, who finds that people make use of new technologies–the most studied are television and the Internet–in order to fill a gap; rather than the technologies replacing or somehow changing religion, the technologies fulfill a need for people who have already experienced religious change. Commenting on a study of religion in a small town in England, Hoover identifies three key trends:
First, the fact of the seeking, questing, autonomous self; second, the re-articulation of what we used to call “religion” into something else, something less problematic–most commonly “spirituality,” or “the spiritual”; and a third, the fact that a marketplace of supply exists, even in this small town, outside the bounds of traditional religion. Sociologists such as Robert Wuthnow have called these trends a “restructuring” of religion, away from a situation where religious institutions and histories are definitive to a situation where individual practice, according to its own logic, becomes more definitive. (2003, p. 12).
Subject to a wealth of information and materials and able to contact others with similar interests, individuals more and more use the interactive capabilities of the Internet, for example, to create their own religious space online.
Stephen O’Leary sees the move to digital resources and practices as a continuation, in some ways, of the Reformation movement from the spoken word to the written word, a change that led to a reinterpretation of central Christian rituals. “The theology that followed from the devaluation of ritual language, gesture, and performance in favor of preaching, thus changed the communion ceremony from its former status as an actual vehicle of God’s presence and grace to a mere reminder or analogy” (1996, p. 790). In his analysis of the online practices of religious groups, he finds them creating their own written and symbolized ritual practices to bond the group more closely together and to accomplish their religious identity. The interactive use of the Internet leads to a further reinterpretation of religious language and practices. For these individuals, religious identity comes from the online practice–something that, for marginalized groups like Wicca or atheists, benefits from the privacy and anonymity of the Internet. The world-wide interactive nature of the Internet allows these marginal groups to find similar minded individuals with whom they can create an identity and reinforce their beliefs.
Like the printing press before them, then, the digital technologies provide an enabling technology for religiously minded individuals to find information, to create communities, to perform rituals, and even to develop a systematic understanding or theology to ground their practices. Like the printing press, the digital technologies operate outside the scope of existing religious institutions, though they borrow from them–texts, beliefs, even members. Like the printing press, they also offer religious institutions new ways of enacting their own identity and recruitment. Unlike the printing press, the digital technologies empower ordinary users: virtually anyone can publish online and can do so without the support of a community.
II. Evangelization
This digital world forms the context for evangelization today. While the Church’s mission to proclaim the good news of Jesus has not changed, the circumstances in which that proclamation takes place has, as we have seen. So, too, has the place of religious institutions and histories, as Wuthnow claims. At the very least, we can say, with Pope John Paul II, that the proclamation of the Gospel occurs in yet another Areopagus:
The first Areopagus of the modern age is the world of communications, which is unifying humanity and turning it into what is known as a “global village.” The means of social communication have become so important as to be for many the chief means of information and education, of guidance and inspiration in their behavior as individuals, families and within society at large. … There is a deeper reality involved here: since the very evangelization of modern culture depends to a great extent on the influence of the media, it is not enough to use the media simply to spread the Christian message and the Church's authentic teaching. It is also necessary to integrate that message into the “new culture” created by modern communications. … there exist new ways of communicating, with new languages, new techniques, and a new psychology. (Redemptoris Missio, no. 37)
The various statements of the Pontifical Council on Social Communication that deal with the Internet (2002a, 2002b) echo this sentiment.
To better understand the task of evangelization in this digital culture, we would do well to return with Pope John Paul II to Evangelii Nuntiandi. Here Paul VI clearly states the two dimensions of evangelization, dividing it into two tasks: the evangelization of individuals and the evangelization of culture.
The evangelization of individuals requires an address to the heart of each person. It consists of “the carrying forth of the good news to every sector of the human race so that by its strength it may enter into the hearts of individuals and renew the human race” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 18). This evangelization finds expression not only in the preaching of the Gospel but in acts of charity, the witness of holy lives, works of mercy, forgiveness–the living out of the Gospel. It requires not just information, but true communication (Ong, 1996). As Campbell reports, participants in online religious groups seek more than information.
The second aspect of evangelization, the evangelization of culture, seeks to change the values and judgments of culture:
We speak of sectors of the human race that must be transformed, for the purpose of the Church is not confined to preaching the Gospel in ever extending territories and proclaiming it to ever increasing multitudes of people. She seeks by virtue of the Gospel to affect and, as it were, recast the criteria of judgment, the standard of values, the incentives and life standards of the human race which are inconsistent with the word of God and the plan of salvation. (Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 19)
This, too, differs greatly from supplying information or preaching to a group. Such a change builds on the conversion of individuals and their willingness to provide a religious context for others to hear the Gospel.
Like the printing press before them, digital technologies can provide one aspect of individual evangelization by supplying information, making the Gospel texts and other Christian texts available to a world-wide audience (Pontifical Council, 2002a, no. 5). The interactive potential of the Internet furnishes something further: an infrastructure for community support and even for the formation of what Brown and Duguid refer to an as imagined community–the textual community shaped around the Christian message. In these limited senses, evangelization can benefit from the digital technologies and, as both Popes Paul VI and John Paul II urge, the Church should not hesitate to make use of all means possible for evangelization. It should, however, not reduce evangelization to a purely instrumental process solved by available technology. As we have seen from the case of print culture, communication technology, while exerting a powerful influence and creating some new structures, ultimately works with existing structures. As the very psychology of evangelization demands personal commitment, the digital technologies face certain limitations. Insofar as they aid the personal, they can aid evangelization.
Digital technologies also afford a context for the expression and deeper understanding of values. Indeed, as they themselves enforce a value system on two levels, they can cooperate in the Gospel task of shaping “the criteria of judgment” necessary for human life. At its surface expression, the Internet, for example, embraces values of diversity, open publication, free access to information, and cooperation. Thus, documents and websites multiply; index services guide users to what they seek; strangers interact in helpful manners. At its foundational technical or electronic structural level, the values of collaboration, cooperation, and respect are even more stringently enforced: the entire system will not work without this level of cooperation. Though people’s motivations might vary (seeking the common good, working for profit, promoting a national agenda, and so on), all embrace a strong ethic that does bear the stamp of Christianity’s presence in Western culture. Here the Church may well benefit from a dialogue with the technologists, much as it enters a dialogue with various religious bodies.
III. Challenges
Finally, with this background, we can turn to the challenges to evangelization. Just as “evangelization” has two senses, so also does the English word, “challenge”–one a negative sense (an obstacle to be overcome) and one a positive sense (an opportunity). The digital technologies provide both obstacles and opportunities for evangelization–and sometimes at the same time.
As we have before, we can begin with the lessons drawn from the similarities of the digital technologies to print culture. Both printing technology and the digital technologies change the situation for cultural groups by promoting the wider circulation of ideas, new forms for the presentation of information, new tools to manage information, new theories or understanding of cultural knowledge, new communities, and a new locus for religious thought and activity. Each of these offers both an obstacle and an opportunity to the Church in its work of evangelization. The increased flow of ideas among cultures presents the Church with the opportunity to provide greater information more directly to more people; at the same time, it also means the Church becomes one information source among many others. Here the obstacle resides in distinguishing the Church’s message from the others. As Jans notes, “the presence of ‘true doctrine’ is just one among many: in our contemporary areopagus, in the shape of the information highway, everything . . . is exhibited, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church or Christians for the Cloning of Jesus are only one mouse click away from each other” (2002, p. 62). In its favor the Catholic Church has its history as a community of faith and its widely recognized teaching authority–which, if we dare to use the language of marketing, constitutes one of the best-known religious “brands.” Even those who do not know the teachings of the Catholic Church recognize its long witness to the faith through martyrdom and works of charity. To take advantage of this opportunity for evangelization requires that the Church be present in every way in the digital world, especially by introducing people to the witness of its life.
The new forms for the presentation of ideas and the new locus for religious thought offer both the chance to make the Gospel resonate with the lives of contemporary peoples and the invitation to many others to actively and publicly reflect on their experience of the Gospel. On the other hand, these forms may well seem so foreign to traditional Christian expression as to seem beyond evaluation; moreover, those creating them work independently of Church supervision. Here, too, the Church can take its digital place by fostering the witness of its members and resisting the temptation to control what happens. The Church can also deepen its understanding of the digital world by asking important questions. For example, one key question that demands ongoing reflection is whether the content of faith changes with the mode or media of its presentation. As these new technologies offer new forms for religious expression, we should attend to what a new generation of religious thinkers might say to the Church.
These new forms remind us that the digital technologies, like the others before them, also affect language. Like the printing press, digital technologies change the context of language–where we use language and how we use it. But where the printing press fostered the various vernacular languages, the Internet, for one, seems to encourage the use of just one: English-language sites predominate. This may change over time, but for now we see a kind of enforced “orthography” in language as well as in the form of presentation (icons, gif images, and so on). The digital technologies also further a change in language use: hypertext replaces the linear patterns of essays, documents, and narratives. Finally, digital languages, as people presently use them, have a strong interpersonal force: email and chat remain by far the most popular forms. The digital languages connect people.
The new technologies connect people in ways unimagined in an earlier era; but they can also pull people from their communities of physical location. The more time spent in an online community, the less spent with the local or parish community. The research into people’s online religious activity suggests some lessons here. More and more online participants seek a sense of community they do not find in their local churches. To supply it, the Church’s evangelization efforts can and should promote interactive connections among people, but obstacles lie on either side of this effort. The Church wants neither to take people from the local community nor to stifle their proper longings for what Brown and Duguid (1995), quoting Benedict Anderson, call an imagined community.
An imagined community is quite distinct from an imaginary community. It is one, Anderson notes, whose members “will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Where an imaginary community does not exist, an imagined one exists on too large a scale to be known in any other way. And the central way they can be imagined is through the documents they share.
Traditional sources of Catholic community have rested on precisely such shared documents, which in the past encompassed the liturgy (particularly the highly standardized Latin liturgy), doctrinal formulations, catechisms, papal documents, devotional practices, and other markers of Catholicism. In this context, evangelization today must bring people simultaneously into physical and imagined communities–into the local community that participates in a larger, universal community. For this to work, the local communities must themselves undergo transformation and become places of welcome, caring, and warmth.
Just as the Church’s message appears as one among many in the abundance of the digital world, so too does the Church’s community. The research into online religious activity indicates that people’s definitions of religious identity do not arise first from religious institutions. Instead, individuals seek ways to forge their own identities, often from multiple sources. The same impetus moves individuals to seek a “spirituality” rather than align themselves with a religious group. While this sociological insight deserves greater study (Lyon, 2000), it holds out an opportunity for evangelization through an invitation to the rich spiritual tradition of the Church. Here, one needs a spiritual guide–something the interactive nature of the digital technology can enable. This kind of evangelization must be personal and demands a certain humility, so the digital presence of the Church become such as not to “bruise the broken reed.”
The Church’s evangelization efforts can also learn from the errors of print culture. Two stand out: authority and structure. At the beginnings of print technology, governments and churches sought to control the new media and to assert their authority by coercion and censorship rather than, in our terms, to evangelize the culture. This kind of evangelization rests less on force than on understanding. Since the Church exists within human cultures, it both shapes and is shaped by those cultures. Effective evangelization begins with dialogue, a dialogue symbolized by the interactive qualities of digital culture. Since the culture of the digital world expresses itself through an ethic of equality and exchange, the Church must “learn the local language” in evangelization. This need not mean that the evangelical message has no authority, but that the authority draws its expression from its own integrity, much as St. Paul preached Christ crucified rather than the wisdom of the Greeks. A similar lesson applies to structure. The early period of print culture tried simply to move the dominant oral and manuscript culture to print, along with their supporting university, chancellery, and ecclesiastical structures. But the print culture itself so dramatically changed schools, governments, and churches that it took centuries for the existing institutions to adjust. The digital cultures demand flexibility: one cannot simply transfer print resources to an electronic form–the structures do not work the same way. An evangelization in the digital culture will differ from the evangelization developed by the Church over the last centuries. Here, too, the focus must remain on Christ and not on any past method.
IV. Evangelization in a Digital Culture
An effective evangelization combines four activities of the Church: witness, service, worship, and reflection or theology (see Scharer & Hilberath, 2002, chap. 1). The four appear in a different form when Dulles (1974) refers to them as models of the Church (herald model, servant model, sacrament model, held together in a communion model by an institutional structure). Dulles uses the models or activities to identify ways to understand ourselves as church. But these activities also can help us understand how the Church presents itself and proclaims the message of the Gospel; they can offer a guide to evangelization today. Some of these activities seem more suited to the digital world than others (witness, service, community, for example, seem more amenable to an online manifestation than do sacraments or institutions). Therein we can find the opportunity for evangelization in the digital age.
The question, even in its modern form, bears ancient marks. In the sixth century, Cassiodorus pondered writing as a means to proclaim the Gospel. He urged monks to take up “the apostolate of the pen”:
…to preach…by means of the hand, to untie the tongue by means of the fingers…to fight the Devil…with pen and ink. Every word of the Lord written by the scribe is a wound inflicted on Satan…Though seated in one spot, the scribe traverses diverse lands through the dissemination of what he has written. (qtd. by Eisenstein, 1979, p. 373)
We might say the same about evangelization in the digital age.
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