In the literate forms of language experiences, not only religion,
but also science and the humanities, literature, and politics
are established and subjected to the practical test of
efficiency. Each projects a notion of permanency and
universality, which is influenced by the practical experience of
religion, sometimes in contradiction to the archetypal
experience resulting in the notion (or notions) of God (or gods).
Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale of
human practice makes permanency and universality untenable, the
tendency to escape from the confines of religion becomes
evident. There is a strong sense of relativism in science, an
appropriate self- doubt in humanistic discourse, and an
appropriate understanding of the multiplicity and open-endedness
in almost every aspect of our social and political life.
This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregard
of it, through the many partial literacies reflecting our
practical self-constitution. The reality of the global nature of
human experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributed
nature, and of the many integrative forces at work, renders the
centralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people. At
the same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes the
Book even more necessary than ever for many, and at different
levels of their practical life. The many religious literacies of
these days-promoting permanent modes of life, exotic and less
exotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes for
a happy future or some form of afterlife-maintain dualistic
schemes of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular in
a world of extremely subtle and painfully vague distinctions.
The question whether love and reason can undergird community
awareness, social action, political activism, and education if,
as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues to
decline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective. This
perspective is common to both partisans and enemies of religion.
It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religious
suppression-either under communism, or wherever a dominant
religion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion.
And it is becoming the argument of the many emancipatory
movements promoting the religions of atheism and agnosticism as
a substitute for religion. The subject is ultimately one of
faith, concerning very intimate aspects of individual
self-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed.
Still captive to dualism, brought about and nourished by
experiences constitutive of literacy, we have problems coping
with a world where the enemy is us and where religion is
different from what it was at the time of its inception, or the
time we were first were exposed to it.
In view of these developments, we wonder how the rules and values
established in the original religious framework are to survive.
If the literacy through which these rules come to us is seen
only as a vessel, a means of expressing values and criteria for
evaluation, then any other means could perform the same function.
The Crystal Cathedral of television fame, no less than the Web
sites of many churches, proves the point.
Since we are our language, and we constitute ourselves as
spiritual and physical entities in the experience of language,
writing cannot be seen as a passive medium, nor reading as a
mechanical rendition. Accordingly, the medium through which
religion is expressed affects the religion, changes its
condition. Applied to contemporary religious experience, this
argument is confirmed again and again. From the entire practical
experience of religion, what survives is the liturgy, transformed
into a performance of limited cathartic impact.
Merchandising completes this new condition of faith. For
millennia, a community considered its priests vital to its
survival. In the civilization of illiteracy, the situation is
reversed. Ministers, and to some extent priests, depend on a
community for their survival. Ministers are in the business of
selling themselves as much as they are in the business of
selling their church or even God. Some evangelists remain
independent in the sense that they package their own programs
for presentation to large crowds in tents, in auditoriums, or on
television. These religious enterprises create a vast business
empire around a persona. As long as the enterprise can deliver
what the preacher promises-through his performance act and the
merchandise he sells to the faithful-then the
tele-congregants-no less fascinated by celebrity than the rest of
society-will buy him.
A newer phenomenon is less personality dependent and more
message- oriented, but the goal is the same: ministers need to
make a living. Relying on information polled from hundreds of
middle-class non-churchgoers, some enterprising ministers came
up with a product bound to please: nothing boring or aggressive;
cost- efficiency; comfortable seating; no organ. According to a
study by the Harvard Business School, the resulting church was
the embodiment of the phrase "knowing your customers and meeting
their needs." Church attendance grew by relying on customer
recommendation. Soon, the ministers franchised their operation in
localities with a target market: 25-to-40-year-old seekers ("a
growing market"), with middle to upper middle class salaries.
Other seekers look in different directions. Almost anyone with a
message can establish a religion, and sometimes entire sects are
based on just a few words from the Bible (the Seventh-Day
Adventists, for example, or the snake handlers of the
Appalachians, or the Pentecostals). Participatory forms of
worship are another trend. They may derive inspiration from the
book, but they aim to involve avenues of perception not bound to
literacy: song, dance, meditation, the inhaling of aroma,
touching minerals. Some religions hark back to nature, animism,
and what can be called neo-paganism, as in the Wikka religion.
No matter how far back some of these religions claim to go, they
are religions of the civilization of illiteracy. They do not
repeat the original pragmatic framework but respond to today's
framework of self-constitution and the individual needs or
desires of the people who constitute themselves as religious
through these new manifestations.
While observations made in language can be subjected to
confirmation, religious assumptions are expressed through the
inner reality of language, and are only subject to language
correctness. It is impressive how language houses concepts for
which there is no referent in practical experience, but which
are constituted exactly because some aspects of practical
experience cannot be otherwise explained. In the history of how
ideas, generalities, and abstractions are formed, the experience
of religion is of particular interest. Values and beliefs that
cannot be submitted to the physical senses, but can be
comprehended through language-written, read, sung, danced, and
celebrated-are transmitted through religion.
Many assume that the new status of religion in our day is due not
only to market pressure and obsession with consumption, but also
to the advancement of science. Supposed to debunk the
rationality of faith and offer its own rationality as the basis
of new ways of understanding the origin of life, the role of
human beings, the source of good and evil, and the nature of
transcendence, science introduces a positivist conception of
facts, irreconcilable with that of the relativity of religious
images. Research in artificial intelligence discovered that "97%
of human activity (is) concept- free, driven by control
mechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but with
insects." If this is indeed true, the role of rationality,
religious or scientific, in our practical experiences of
self-constitution has to be revisited. The various manifestations
of religion subtly address this need because they recognize
dimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced to
scientific explanations and logic, or cannot be explained
without explaining them away in the process. One interesting
tendency in the civilization of illiteracy is less to assimilate
the new science and technology-as was the case only 20-30 years
ago-and more to subject it to what religion considers right.
Fundamentalism of any kind corresponds to the dynamics of this
illiterate society, in the sense that it promotes a very limited
and limiting subset of the language of religion, in a world
segmented into more religious denominations than ever before. If
over 350,000 registered churches serve the religious needs of the
population in the USA, and almost as many meeting places are
available to small groups of believers, nobody will seriously
argue that people are less religious, rather that they are
religious in a different way, often integrating the latest in
science and technology. Among the most active Internet forums,
religion maintains a presence supported by the best that
technology can offer. With each new scientific theory unveiling
the deeper structure of matter, more subtle forms of
interconnectedness among phenomena, new sources of creativity,
and new limits of the universe, the need for religion changes. To
cope with complexity means either to have a good command of
it-which seems less and less possible-or to accept a benevolent
underwriting. The challenge of complexity generates its own need
for creed. Social, economic, and political realities are not
always encouraging. Integration based on pragmatic motives
increases, as does individual anxiety. No matter how much we
learn about death, we are still not free of its frightening
randomness. Realistically speaking, the belief in an afterlife
and the dedication to cryonics are less far apart than they seem
at first glance.