Religion of the Book, Religion of the Screen

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So: “Religion of the Book, Religion of the Screen.” Today I’m presenting my own undergraduate research, so I’d rather think about this as a “provocation,” not a presentation. On one level, I would like to give you a tour of a site in Second Life that I find interesting and thought-provoking and that I have spent several months sort of marinating in; on another level, I would like to site, to locate, some of the questions and concerns about virtuality that seem to constantly crop up.

It’s easy to get lost in hypothetical questions about how we understand the physical world as opposed to the virtual world. But there are people in Second Life who are actually working through these questions in their daily lives. I don’t mean that they’re merely choosing to log on and show up; what I mean is that they’re actively considering how to represent themselves in this world, actively considering what relationship the real and virtual have with each other. They’re compelled to think about these questions because of the context in which they use Second Life. These people are using Second Life as a site for their religious practice. And by looking at their experiences, I think we can gain a new perspective on these questions.

Okay, but let’s get specific. There are lots of religious groups on Second Life, and I’m only going to talk about one.

I could have chosen to study the Wiccan Learning Center...

Or the AlAndalus mosque (notice my character’s head covering; they provide them at the door, as well as asking characters to remove their virtual footwear)

Or the Epiphany Anglican Cathedral...

Or the Buddhist Shrine of Varosha...

...but I chose the Campivallensis Catholic Meditation Center. I picked it for a number of reasons. First of all, I was interested in the idea of a “religion of the book” translating itself into Second Life - becoming quite literally a “religion of the screen.” I also wanted to choose a religious group that could refer to actual doctrine about virtual reality - which meant I needed a centralized group, as well. I also wanted to find a site where groups met regularly; some of the places I looked into were merely monuments erected to honor a certain religion, instead of sites that housed communities.

So, for the 07-08 academic year, I immersed myself in the life of the Campivallensis Catholic Meditation Center.

This slide is an image of the Meditation Center itself - it’s taken from within Second Life. You can see my avatar there standing on the deck of the treehouse.

Apart from some of the obvious differences - most Catholic churches or meeting areas are not in treehouses - Campivallensis was sited in a religious district in Second Life, a sim called Qoheleth. So you can see various churches, temples, and shrines from its deck. Speaking to Campivallensis’ founder, an avatar named Gonzo Mandelbrot, I found out that they moved to this area to avoid the seedier side of Second Life. But the point is, a religious gathering spot would never be segregated in this way in the physical world, would it? You don’t really see, anywhere, thirty or forty different religious sites all in one area, separated off from places of business and homes and so forth. So there was already a sense that I had chosen to explore a really curious place, somewhere that was in a sense alien to me, no matter how comfortable I might normally feel in a Catholic setting.

I eventually asked Gonzo how he came up with the inspiration for Campivallensis, and he talked a lot about a physical place close to him, in Quebec. This is the Notre Dame de Lourdes shrine. He spoke really lovingly and at length about it. Apparently, the prior home to this group - the one where they were having trouble with virtual sex clubs setting up shop next door - looked almost like a carbon copy of the shrine. When they moved, the treehouse had already been constructed, so he decided to work with it, instead of razing it and re-creating the shrine.

You can still see some of that inspiration at the foot of the treehouse, however, where Gonzo constructed a chapel. You get a sense of how tucked away and hard to find it is by looking at the image of the site as a whole...

...the chapel is hidden away down in those bushes at the bottom of the screen. From the deck of the treehouse, it’s impossible to see.

The chapel, then, is a pretty lonely place. I took all these photos at a time when I could be sure no one else would be around, because I wanted to get clear, non-distracting photos of Campivallensis without having to get people’s permission to use their avatar’s images, but suffice to say that I never saw anyone there. I found this really interesting. Even Gonzo didn’t seem to go down there much. What was it for, then?

Things got more intriguing when you looked inside. This image is taken through the stained glass wall. You can see that my avatar is kneeling in simulated prayer and that there’s a pulpit - it really does look like a little chapel. The Bible is not present anywhere in this chapel. On the pulpit are some papers, and by clicking on them one could access a daily reading. This was provided in the form of a website outside Second Life, run by a group of Irish Jesuits. Okay - interesting. But no one ever preached from this pulpit; certainly no one ever used the Jesuits’ readings to preach. Why? What’s going on here?

Part of what was going on is that the weekly Bible study group that met at Campivallensis met far above, up on the deck of the treehouse, in a special area created for their use. This is the only part of Campivallensis where I regularly saw other avatars hanging out. It was as if the rest of the place didn’t exist. So this is half the deck, and then if I were to move my avatar a bit further forward...

...you can see the seating area where the Bible Study took place regularly. (It’s a little disarranged because I took those two photos on different days, but as you can see pretty much all that’s changed are the number of chairs.) So one of the things that intrigued me about this is that, if anything, the religious aspects of Campivallensis are even less evident. There’s the statue of St. Francis and the cross up on the deck, but that’s pretty much it. And there weren’t any images of simulated Bibles or anything like that. Instead, when people showed up for Bible study they were given a “notecard.” To give you an idea of what Bible study is actually like from an interior perspective, with the user’s controls all up on the screen...

This is what the basic user display looks like, with the avatar in the center and the various controls surrounding - I have a couple extra windows up for illustrative purposes, which normally one could move around or close to get a better view. In this case I have...

...a notecard open, which the red arrow is pointing to. This is how you’d get your Bible verse. So as you can see, my avatar isn’t limited to sitting down and simulating reading in order to interact with this chunk of the Bible. Avatars could - and did! - choose to dance or do pretty much anything they wanted to.

And furthermore this decontextualized each verse. You don’t get to see what happened before this chunk of Romans or what happened after. You could open another window in your computer, or have a Bible open on your lap, but I didn’t notice anybody doing this. Then, too, the Bible study asked the same questions every week:

These questions basically guided the members of the Bible study to make deeply personal interpretations of the text. And they did! The Campivallensians frequently drew their interpretations of Scripture from their own lives, both online and offline. They seemed to feel free to speak about their experiences in both the virtual and the real world, relating stories of childhood bullying and stories of griefers harassing them in Second Life in the same metaphorical breath. They felt quite free to get very personal with each other. And this despite never having met physically - none of them had ever met up in “First Life.”

This personal focus is of course one of the concerns that the Catholic church has about online interactions.

The Campivallensian attitude towards Biblical interpretation and the role of the Catholic church might be symbolized by the way the chapel nestled at their tree’s roots and the Bible study met in the branches, far above. In the chapel, one could access an orthodox interpretation of Bible verse; above, however, the Bible study cheerfully took verses out of context, mashed them around, reinterpreted them, and read them through the lens of modern life. People rarely bothered with the chapel and its distanced, conforming interpretations of scripture; on the other hand, they joyfully joined the personal conversation in the treehouse.

But that’s a pretty direct challenge to orthodoxy and orthopraxy, really. [quote]

The Church and the Internet is put out by the Pontifical Council for Social Communication. This is its primary concern; it recognizes the idea that there is no top-down, one-way communication on the Internet, at least not when you’re doing it right, and basically sees the potential perils of the thing. In Second Life this is really interesting because, unlike in First Life, one doesn’t just wander around until one finds a Catholic church, goes in and has to like it or lump it when the priest says something you don’t like. Instead...

...you can use a search function. I talked about this earlier. But the point is that if one didn’t like Campivallensis - which was very liberal, very cross-denominational, Catholic but focused more on Biblical exegesis and Christian fellowship in general than on Catholicism in particular - one could go find something else. One could go find something that very specifically fits one’s needs. One can find a very fine grained specific community one wants to be in. And that isn’t good from the standpoint of a religious group that focuses on large congregations coming together, or one that’s interested in creating a set of standard positions across the board.

This problem, of course, is also brought up by secular scholars, with a different emphasis: the idea that the online world erases alterity because a new, unchallenging discussion is only a few keystrokes away.

And this is also related, more than a bit, to the question of the Catholic church’s history - the question of the Protestant reformation, the question of reading the Bible to yourself, interpreting it for yourself. There’s a fascinating resonance there.

But this while discussion sort of skims over one of the big questions I had when I came to this virtual world, which is is there a problem with trust? I mean, as you can see from what my avatar is wearing above, people are presenting as things very different from what they are.

And in fact the members of Campivallensis have dealt with this among themselves. In fact, the leader of the Bible study I was looking at, Grizzy Griswold, wears a female avatar but is male in First Life. She (or he?) has another avatar, Jayson Kanjon, that directly reproduces his (or hers?) First Life appearance. This is almost a textbook illustration of Sherry Turkle’s “slippages” concept, the idea that Grizzy is playing with his/her own identity.

But. In “Cyberstudies and the Politics of Visibility,” David Phillips asks, “How do we even know ‘where we are’ in online contexts, and how do we know who is sharing that space with us?” Grizzy/Jayson’s case illustrates the reality of this question. When Grizzy is leading a Bible study, who is there - is it a woman or a man? This question of gender suddenly becomes very important. And it’s particularly important in the context of religion, of forming a genuine connection with people.

My informants were incredibly emphatic about what they felt was going on, though. They insisted not that they had always known Grizzy was male - many of them hadn’t - but they insisted that it did not matter. They cited the above Bible verse and found it offensive, even insulting, to have the remotest suggestion that they weren’t “really” gathered when they gathered in Second Life. I had expected much more ambivalence. But when I asked about the religious utility of meeting in this space when Catholicism is so rooted in the liturgy, in the physical presence of the Eucharist, they responded,

The Campivallensians were adamant. They believed firmly that they needed offline interaction to be good Christians and participate in the Sacraments, and to fully experience God, but they also believed that they were making connections in this space, believed that they had in some sense mastered the space to a point where they could penetrate the mediation and somehow reach other people’s souls.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite the amount of time, effort, and money he pours into Campivallensis, Gonzo Mandelbrot has not discussed its existence with his priest. “The problem is that my parish is entirely French-speaking, and my work in SL has been entirely in English,” Gonzo explained, adding, “I’ve also found in general that it can be a tough sell to get people to look into SL.” The fact that Gonzo’s French-speaking, Quebecois priest would literally not understand the language of the Campivallensis Bible study has a pleasing resonance with the difficulties that a non-initiate might have in recognizing the body language, the avatar language, of the Campivallensians.

And that’s something that’s interesting - something that I’m interested in exploring further. It sounds as though the next presenter is going to talk about that, the idea of mastery. So perhaps we should move over to them.

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Religion of the Book, Religion of the Screen - Presentation Transcript

Religion of the Book Religion of the Screen Flourish Klink, MiT 6
Wiccan Learning Center
AlAndalus Mezquita
Epiphany Cathedral
Shrine of Varosha
Campivallensis Catholic Meditation Center
The view of Qoheleth from Campivallensis
Notre Dame de Lourdes
Campivallensis Catholic Meditation Center
The Campivallensis chapel
The Campivallensis chapel interior
Campivallensis’ deck
Bible study area on the deck
• What strikes you about the text? • What bothers or troubles you about the text? • What does the text call upon you to do?
Campivallensis Catholic Meditation Center
Data suggest that some visitors to religious websites may be on a sort of shopping spree, picking and choosing elements of customized religious packages to suit their personal tastes. The Church and the Internet (2002)
“For some reason this person I’ve made up takes away my shyness and inhibition, I guess because it’s not me, but regardless of which av I use or which life it is, I have the same opinions, morals, values, likes and dislikes, and sense of humor.”
“Where two or three are gathered, God will be among them.” Matthew 20:18
“I experience God whenever I interact with another human being.”