The Monastery of Christ in the desert sits at the end of a bumpy half-hour drive down a ruined red-clay road that wends into the azure sky of northwestern New Mexico like a curl of Christmas ribbon reaching toward heaven. The main sanctuary, fashioned from brown adobe and perched on a small hill, is warmed by burning pinon and scented by freshly baked bread. In the late afternoon the surrounding canyon glows with a purple twilight. At night the waters of the Chama River gossip with the birds, and the stars weave a gossamer blanket overhead. No matter what your faith, it is an easy place in which to be spiritual.
It is not, however, an easy place to be technological. Twenty miles from the nearest power line and perhaps twice as far from the nearest phone, the monastery is more than two hours from Albuquerque and an hour from anything that resembles civilization. No telephone bells fracture the silence. No TV images smear the crisp evening air. No pagers chirp. If you must reach one of the monks, a hand-carved wooden sign offers a simple 16th century suggestion: "Ring this bell."
Or you can send E-mail, in care of porter@christdesert.org Remote as they may seem, the brothers of Christ in the Desert are plugged into the Internet. Using electricity generated by a dozen solar panels and a fragile data link through a single cellular phone, the monks have developed a heavily trafficked Benedictine home page and started a new business designing and maintaining other people's Websites. The order's work has even caught the eye of the Holy See. Last month Webmaster Brother Mary Aquinas flew to Rome for consultations and to lend a hand building what the Vatican hopes will be the greatest--let alone the holiest--site on the World Wide Web.
Like schools, like businesses, like governments, like nearly everyone, it seems, religious groups are rushing online, setting up church home pages, broadcasting dogma and establishing theological newsgroups, bulletin boards and chat rooms. Almost overnight, the electronic community of the Internet has come to resemble a high-speed spiritual bazaar, where thousands of the faithful--and equal numbers of the faithless--meet and debate and swap ideas about things many of us had long since stopped discussing in public, like our faith and religious beliefs. It's an astonishing act of technological and intellectual mainstreaming that is changing the character of the Internet, and could even change our ideas about God.
The signs of online religious activity are everywhere. If you instruct AltaVista, a powerful Internet search engine, to scour the Web for references to Microsoft's Bill Gates, the program turns up an impressive 25,000 references. But ask it to look for Web pages that mention God, and you'll get 410,000 hits. Look for Christ on the Web, and you'll find him--some 146,000 times.
Newsgroups like alt.fan.jesus-christ and alt.religion.scientology are among the busiest--and most contentious--of the nearly 20,000 discussion groups carried on Usenet. America Online and CompuServe, the two largest commercial online services, are each home to hundreds of electronic bulletin boards that offer everything from Confucian primers to Q. and A.s about Jewish dietary laws. (One urgent aol query: Is it O.K. to have a pot-bellied pig as a pet if you keep a kosher kitchen? Answer: Probably. As long as you don't plan to eat it.)