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By the time evangelism was ready to make the leap to television, however, that resentment had dissolved. In the 1950s a new generation of media-savvy ministers--Bishop Fulton Sheen, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts--started directing their crusades at the TV audience. And if the subtext of the awesome Catholic liturgy had always been God's immutable power, the plot of these TV revivals was tailored for the medium of Father Knows Best. In broadcasts from million-dollar sets-cum-cathedrals, TV evangelicals preached not just about the miracle of Jesus but also about the blessing of communications technology. Religion and TV became so indistinguishable that it took a neologism, televangelism, to fully capture what was going on.
And now we stand at the start of a new movement in this delicate dance of technology and faith: the marriage of God and the global computer networks. There's no sure way to measure how much the Internet will change our lives, but the most basic truth about technological revolutions is that they change everything they touch. Just as the first telescopes forever altered our sense of where we sit in the cosmos, so the Internet may press and tug at our most closely held beliefs. Will the Net change religion? Is it possible that God in a networked age will look, somehow, different?
The Net is so new, and changing so fast, that scholars are still struggling to answer that question, or even make sense of it. Most traditional religious thinkers are skeptical. "I don't think the computer revolution has any cosmic implications for religion at all," says Notre Dame's Plantinga. "We already know God."
But for a whole culture of technology-loving--and in some cases, perhaps, technology-worshipping--futurists, such words smack of 1st millennium thinking in the face of 3rd millennium faith. They tend to see in the Internet something larger than themselves, an entity so much greater than the sum of its parts as to inspire awe and wonder. "People see the Net as a new metaphor for God," says Sherry Turkel, a professor of the sociology of science at M.I.T. The Internet, she says, exists as a world of its own, distinct from earthly reality, crafted by humans but now growing out of human control. "God created a set of conditions from which life would emerge. Like it or not, the Internet is one of the most dramatic examples of something that is self-organized. That's the point. God is the distributed, decentralized system."
"It seems as though the Net itself has become conscious," says William Gibson, the science-fiction writer who coined the term cyberspace and used it, most famously, in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. "It may regard itself as God. And it may be God on its own terms." Gibson hastens to add, however, that he is "carefully ambivalent" about whether anything that exists solely on the Net applies to the real world.
These radical notions dovetail with a spiritual movement known as process theology, whose proponents argue that God evolves along with man. In their mind, the immutable God embraced by scholars like Plantinga make no more sense today than an unchanging computer operating system. "If God doesn't change, we are in danger of losing God," says William Grassie, a Quaker professor of religion at Temple University, "There is a shift to [the idea of] God as a process evolving with us. If you believe in an eternal, unchanging God, you'll be in trouble."