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That's a sentiment echoed in the U.S. by postdenominational Protestantism, a religious movement that links thousands of U.S. churches in informal networks outside the boundaries of mainline Protestant or evangelical denominations. The churches fill their services with rock 'n' roll, recovery counseling and a nonjudgmental approach to a wide range of life-styles. The movement has been making increasing use of computer communications technologies. Says University of Southern California sociologist Donald Miller, who has followed the rapid growth of postdenominational churches: "There's definitely a congruence between these technologies and the outlook of these churches."
Even holy texts have begun to be adapted to the new technology. The interconnection of religious documents through so-called hyperlinks has produced a new form of scholarship called "hypertheology." Clicking on Lot in an electronic Bible, for instance, might connect you to similar stories in the Koran or pertinent 20th century moral commentaries. Just as the first illuminated manuscripts exposed readers to early theological debates, these hypertexts open up thousands of interpretations of God's words to anyone curious enough to click a mouse.
For all its seeming newness, however, the marriage between technology and religion is an ancient one. Man has always used state-of-the-art communications technology to convey his deepest thoughts. Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians etched their fears and hopes in cuneiform. Centuries later, the Egyptians glorified Ra on papyrus scrolls. The Old Testament was hewed and edited in the 1st century A.D., when the scrolls were turned into primitive books called codices. Forced for the first time to assign to the Holy Story a beginning, middle and end, Christian and Hebrew scholars took different paths--creating a schism that endures to this day. For example, Jews pray from a Bible (known as the Tanach) that places the prophecies right after the book of Deuteronomy; Christians don't encounter the prophets until the very end of the Good Book.
The first codices had another, equally historic impact: they gave upstart Christianity an edge over Roman paganism. While pagan scholars stuck with their scrolls like modern Luddites refusing to embrace E-mail, liberal Christians leaped at the efficiencies and portability of books. The result, argues Jack Miles, a former Jesuit who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 book, God: A Biography, was a "technological advantage" for early Christianity. It was too much of one for the Roman Emperors, who quickly developed their own innovation: book burning.
Still, the lessons of these defiant early believers stayed with the church, whose devotees spent much of the next millennium obsessively copying and recopying their sacred texts. It was a brutally inefficient process. Cloistered Benedictines toiled for years in musty scriptoriums, transcribing copy after copy of the Bible into leatherbound books. This medieval Xerox system was painfully low-tech: a monk would slowly copy from exemplar Latin Bibles as he and his brothers inked and gilded lavishly illustrated pages at the rate of roughly one a day.