Computer Mediated Communications And Religion: An Evolutionary Primer

As a religious layperson and a computer novice, I decided to take a university course called Computer Mediated Communications in order to learn how religion has been impacted by the communication revolution incited by the invention of the computer. The breadth of our readings in the course reveals that computer mediated communications (CMCs) now permeate virtually every aspect of modern human culture. From politics to economics to education to social movements to capitalism to the philosophy of technology the tentacles of CMCs appeared ubiquitous. However, as we made our way though the course examining one use after another of CMCs, one major social institution became conspicuous to me by its absence; the institution of religion. Thinking I must have encountered a virgin territory as yet untouched by the computer, I determined to take the occasion of the last assignment of the course to investigate the issue. I would research CMCs in religion generally and CMCs in Christianity specifically.

Very soon in my research I began to be troubled. Contrary to my expectations of virgin territory, I encountered instead what appeared to be a wholly unmanageable amount of research regarding the topic. Notwithstanding the absence of any focus on religion in my class, it apparently was an issue that was treated frequently in the literature. The fecundity of only one researcher, Heidi Campbell, would require weeks to analyze. My attitude went from “wonder” at how religion and CMCs could be completely overlooked to “wondering” how to make sense of a research field that had been so looked over.

To order my research of the field, I determined to approach it from an evolutionary perspective. No one, of course, can know in real time which mutations will bear future fruit but I have chosen five evolutionary developmental “sprouts” in the research literature of religion and CMCs from which to navigate the morass of information available on the topic in a relative short space. They are central issues/themes regarding the recent development (evolution) of religious use of CMCs that I deem important and I have reviewed them within the context of the literature that I found best suited to illustrate them. In doing so, I do not purport to be comprehensive in my review of the literature. Instead, as one traversing a shallow but wide body of water and stepping on the best rocks to avoid getting wet, I relate my own personal sense of where the apparent random morass of information regarding religion and CMC may be headed and, in doing so, hope to offer the reader a limited conceptual primer of the area.

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Computer Mediated Communications and Religion: An Evolutionary Primer