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For all their fire and testosterone, these chat rooms and bulletin boards draw scores of believers hunting for new ways to understand their old religions. For Fundamentalists prohibited from openly discussing such social issues as homosexuality and abortion, the Net has become the best--and sometimes the only--way to get exposed to a wide range of religious opinion. aol users this fall have been able to follow the life of an Egyptian girl expelled from her family after converting to Christianity. "My mother gave me up," she wrote, recounting the apostasy that cost her her family even as an online debate raged around her. "I understand your anger and frustration toward Muslims," one man replied. "What I don't understand is why you keep posting these messages in areas where your views are not welcome."
Alvin Plantinga, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, says that despite the surface discord, these electronic exchanges will ultimately help people from many religions understand the common ideas that bind them together. "One of the sustaining causes of religious disagreement has been the sense of strangeness, of pure unfamiliarity," he says. "The communications revolution will not wash out the important differences, but we will learn to grade our differences in order of importance." Rached Ghannouchi, an Arab philosopher from North Africa, argues in a Webzine called The Electronic Whip that it is imperative that the inhabitants of the small, networked village the world has become find a way to understand one another. "Otherwise," he says, rather apocalyptically, "we are all doomed to annihilation."
Is it possible that this global network that pulls in so many different directions could somehow bind us together in a way that other technologies--particularly television--have failed to do? TV seems to have lured people away from their communities. Could it be that the Net is starting to bring them back together? Can it create new communities of spiritual consensus not in real time but in virtual space?
Just as urbanization brought people together for worship in cities--and ultimately led to the construction of larger and larger cathedrals--so the electronic gathering of millions of faithful could someday lead to online entities that might be thought of as cyberchurches. Already some Conservative Jews are considering the idea of convening a minyan (the minimum of 10 Jews needed before a communal service may begin) via speaker phone.
In France, Roman Catholics are closely following the online activities of a controversial bishop named Jacques Gaillot. Exiled by the Pope to an abandoned diocese in 1995 because of his liberal social views, Gaillot has established what he calls a virtual diocese to replace it. He marvels at the freedom he enjoys loosed from the hierarchy of the church. "On the Internet there is no question of someone imposing rules on the way people communicate," he says. "The Net has no center from which will can be applied."