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The Sacred and the Virtual:
Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality
Ralph Schroeder Department of Technology Management and Economics Chalmers University, Sweden
Noel Heather Department of English Royal Holloway, University of London
Raymond M. Lee Department of Social and Political Science Royal Holloway, University of London
Table of Contents
Abstract
This paper explores the social interaction among participants in a church service in an online multi-user virtual reality (VR) environment. It examines some of the main features of prayer meetings in a religiously-oriented virtual world and also what sets this world apart from other virtual worlds. Next, it examines some of the issues of research ethics and methods that are raised in the study of online behavior in virtual worlds. The paper then analyzes the text exchanges between participants in a virtual church service and some of the ways in which these compare with the content of a conventional church service. Finally, the paper draws out some implications for our understanding of the relation between interaction in the virtual and in the "real" world.
Introduction
It is now a commonplace that shifts in the nature and structure of communications have profound social and cultural effects. The challenge to the institutional authority of the Roman Catholic Church provided by the advent of printing, production of the Bible in the vernacular, and widespread dissemination of reformist teachings are obvious examples. In this century, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have increasingly harnessed radio and television to spread their message (Stacey and Shupe, 1982; Hadden 1988). Although, as Stacey and Shupe point out, the extent and impact of this development have been exaggerated, the "electronic church" is now a palpable presence in the United States.
The colonization of "cyberspace" by religious groups has also apparently been growing, although to date there has been little study of religious behavior in virtual environments. O'Leary (1996) has explored the ritual performances of "technopagans" as evidenced in transcripts of virtual services. According to O'Leary, within these performances there is an "attempt to recreate or simulate real space in virtual space and to sanctify a portion of this space as a theatre in which spirit is manifested" (1996, p. 803). Such performances also, however, contain irreverent, ludic or parodic elements. As O'Leary goes on to point out, while on-line text-based ritual lacks physical presence, the interaction of text, graphics, video and sound open up a range of ritual possibilities that may have profound consequences for the symbolic expression of religiosity.
In this essay, we would like to explore how religion expresses itself in a technology which makes use of these additional possibilities; namely online multi-user virtual worlds. There are now several Internet-based virtual reality (VR) systems in which many users can interact with each other via text windows in a three-dimensional computer-generated world. In these virtual worlds, users take the shape of avatars that can move around while maintaining a first-person perspective on the world. The avatars have a human-like appearance, although in some virtual worlds avatars are more outlandish or fantasy-like figures. The virtual world itself consists of a three-dimensional space with buildings and landscapes, more or less realistic depending on the particular world. The image of the world is framed by menu bars (which can be removed or modified to some degree) that contain information and icons: the worlds available and the number of users in them, web page and other sources or links to information, different functionalities for moving around and exchanging messages, and a window where the text exchanges take place. Some virtual worlds systems also feature background sounds (birds, water and the like) and music 1. Readers who are not familiar with online virtual worlds may wish to look at the web page of the Contact Consortium (http://www.ccon.org), where a number of images from different virtual worlds systems and their avatars can be found. This web page also provides information about how to gain access to these systems 2.
The E-Church world (the name has been changed for reasons discussed below) is one of many such online virtual worlds within one of the networked VR systems which are mainly used for entertainment 3. The E-Church world was one of the first examples of a religiously-oriented virtual world, and this was the main reason for studying this particular world - even though a number of other religiously-oriented worlds have since come into existence. Another reason for analyzing the social relations within the E-Church is that it provides an interesting comparison with other computer-mediated forms of social interaction, both in VR and in text-only systems. As we shall see, among networked virtual worlds, the prayer meeting in E-Church offers an instructive contrast with the playful socializing that takes place in the other virtual worlds within the system. It also makes for some interesting comparisons with church services in the real world.
This paper will explore the social interactions among participants in a prayer meeting in the E-Church world. To do this, we will first make some comparisons between the E-Church world and other virtual worlds within the multi-user VR system of which it is a part. Then, because the study of this type of computer-mediated communication raises a number of sensitive research problems, we shall briefly examine these issues and justify the approach that has been adopted here. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the language of charismatic religion. Finally, the paper relates the E-Church world to contemporary religion in the real world in order to draw some conclusions about the nature of social interaction in virtual worlds.
The E-Church and other Virtual Worlds
In terms of appearance, the E-Church world does not look especially remarkable in comparison with the other virtual worlds in the networked VR system of which it is a part; it contains a church and various other buildings, some large crosses, advertising containing prayers and notices, and other elements of a suburban landscape. The major difference between the E-Church and other virtual worlds is that social interaction is more tightly or formally structured. Encounters are less haphazard, conversations are more focused and sustained, and the roles and structures within the group are more defined. These differences can now be elaborated.
First, the service takes place at a fixed weekly time and in a fixed locale. In the E-Church world, there will be several participants - typically between 5 and 10 - at each weekly prayer meeting. In other virtual worlds, although meetings and parties are often pre-arranged, and although there are certain places that are regularly frequented by certain types of users, the interaction in these other worlds tends to be much more spontaneous and irregular.
This "structuredness" also pertains to the organization of the prayer meeting itself. The "leader" - or what would be the priest in some conventional religious settings - begins by calling the meeting to order. The avatars will by this time have assembled in a cluster inside the front of the church near the altar after some preliminary socializing outside the front of the church. The service then starts with introductory remarks and proceeds to "requests". Most of the meeting subsequently follows a kind of "response mode" between the leader and the congregation and among congregation members ("Amen", "praise the Lord", etc.). The service will go through a number of stages; various types of prayer, a sermon, giving thanks, discussion of issues of concern to members, giving thanks, and the like. Finally, the service is called to an end by the "leader" (although it can also "fizzle out" without formal closing remarks). In short, the meeting has a beginning, a middle consisting of several parts, and end. Also, just as in the real world, there is some before and after church socializing. Importantly, this structure shapes the ebb and flow of emotional intensity of the meeting, as in any real-world ritual.
The same "structuredness" applies to the movement and behaviors of the avatars - and not just to the text and the content of the service. Participants stand in a circle close to the altar and remain fairly immobile during the meeting. They may, however, move closer to each other and try to face each other differently in relation to particular parts of the service. And although there is quite a bit of "coming and going" during the meeting (much more so than during real world church services), when new participants join they are greeted much more formally than in other worlds. Or again, when participants take a break away from the keyboard, they generally excuse themselves and say "brb" (be right back) - which often also happens in other virtual worlds, but not so regularly or formally.
This also applies to "roles". The leader is clearly "primus inter pares" during the service. He/she clearly has the right to lead the conversation and to speak in a generally uninterrupted manner. This is unlike other virtual worlds of this type where participants are generally free to speak in any order and break into conversations or groups without hesitation. The best way to reinforce this point is by noting that when the leader is interrupted by "inappropriate" responses - which happens frequently - he/she will usually, at least during the service, make an attempt to "repair" the flow of the conversation (on the "repair" of conversations, see Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974).
In relation to this "repair", we can also see how levity and "gravitas" exist side by side in this world 4: on one side, this service contains much more joking around than real-world services. This includes not only verbal clowning, but also chasing each other around after the service or "flying" and going through walls and the like. On the other side, at least during the service, a serious tone is generally maintained throughout the meeting, and it is clearly the role of the leader to set this tone.
The strength of the social relationships within this group is evident from their shared Christian identity. Although the leader and the participants will, if questioned, say that the service is non-denominational, there is nevertheless a lot of "talk", typically before or after the service, about the validity or otherwise of different Christian beliefs. Participants clearly have strong feelings against atheism, satanism, and a wariness of non-believers generally. And again, the group on occasion expresses feelings against groups which are commonly seen as the enemy by certain Christian groups, such as gays, adulterers, pro-abortionists, and the like.
In this way, the group gains a sense of "insider" cohesion. For most of the participants, this cohesion is purely related to their socializing during and before and after the service. For others, their relations will have been further cemented through e-mail contact, through socializing in other virtual worlds or religious groups on the Internet, or through non-computer-mediated contact.
But apart from this group identity, there is also a clearer sense of hierarchy in the E-Church world than in other multi-user virtual worlds. In other virtual worlds, too, it is possible to identify how groups are stratified by differences between "insiders" versus "outsiders"(Schroeder, 1997). There is also a distinction in the networked VR system of which E-Church world is a part, as in other networked VR systems, between subscribers (sometimes called "citizens") and "tourists" or non-paying participants - a distinction which has certain privileges and constraints associated with it (whether one can change one"s avatar, being able to build in certain places in the virtual world, access to a messaging service, text displayed in bold characters, and others). In the E-Church world, there is also a distinction between the leader and the congregation, and within the congregation between the more closely-knit regular attenders and the more occasional ones. In this sense, too, a kind of social stratification is emerging in the virtual world - if, by social stratification, we mean both horizontal and vertical stratification.
Again, the strength of this group is demonstrated by the regular attendance of a number of participants combined with the fact that there are sustained exchanges on topics of common Christian concern. A possible weakness, on the other hand, is that - as in other forms of CMC - there is always the possibility that participants may be "disguising" their true identities. How much weight, for example, can a confession of guilt or a promise of betterment carry when they take place online rather than face-to-face - even if participants have come to develop some degree of shared identity. On the other hand, again, this should not be taken to imply that the genuineness of the shared concerns within this group should be downplayed 5. Indeed, we would argue that the degree of cohesion or fellow-feeling among participants and how this structures their interaction is the most significant feature which sets the E-Church world apart from other virtual worlds. Still, it will remain difficult to pin down the degree to which this "genuineness" and cohesion is similar to and different from comparable situations in the real world.
While the relationships between participants in E-Church world are stronger than in other virtual worlds, they are, of course, in another sense, quite weak and unidimensional: what believers know about each other is typically limited to, for example, the difficulties they are seeking relief from (which form a large part of the service), their religious ideas, and the like. To these shared religious feelings we can add other forms of sociality that are common throughout multi-user virtual worlds: the "smalltalk", for example, surrounding the way people typically introduce each other to establish a rapport ("where are you from?", "what"s the weather like over there?", etc). But these forms of social interaction do not add up to the multi-faceted face-to-face relations of a real church community.
The behaviors or social relations exhibited in networked virtual worlds should therefore not be regarded as being completely reshaped by this new technology: certain of the behaviors of the participants, for example, borrow from other technologies. So, for example, the leader"s orchestration of "requests" for "healing" and other forms of divine assistance could be seen as being modeled on tele-evangelism (see Hadden, 1988). Or again, some forms of expressions, such as smileys ((-:), are borrowed from text-based CMC. And some of the frivolous behaviors after the service are akin to computer game behaviors.
Overall, the church service is the most sustained and at the same time "serious" form of social interaction that we have to date found in virtual worlds of this type. The E-Church world is thus unique among multi-user virtual worlds that are primarily used for socializing. At this point, after describing some of the general characteristics of the E-Church world, we would like to analyze the content - the text of the prayer meetings - in more detail. But in order to do this, it will be necessary to say something first about the ethics and methods of studying and disclosing information about online virtual worlds. This will explain why we have chosen to preserve the anonymity of this virtual world, and of its participants and conversations - instead of reporting the text content in manner that might identify individual participants.
Research Ethics and Methods in the Study of Multi-User Virtual Worlds
The present study is based on passive participant observation in the E-Church by the first author, who attended three services and has spent more than 100 hours in the virtual worlds system of which the E-Church is a part, and on the analysis of text transcripts of the services logged by the second author, who visited the E-Church world and other worlds within the system on a number of occasions outside of the scheduled service. (Since the researchers were based in Europe, they faced the constraint that the service took place during what was for them the middle of the night.) Apart from seeking permission from the leader, we did not have any direct contact with participants 6. During the service, systematic notes were made describing the interactions and movements of avatars. It needs to be noted here that one gets a very different sense from attending a church service or other events in the virtual worlds than one does from reading a transcript some time later: Quite apart from the fact that one can see the world and the movement of avatars, the rhythm and the pauses in the text interaction also contribute to the atmosphere in which the interaction takes place. Participant observation and data capture will surely come to complement one another in the social study of online behavior in virtual worlds, but this area of study - unlike purely text-based online interaction - is for the moment too novel to be able to say which research methods will be most useful and appropriate.
The study of online interaction raises a number of methodological and ethical issues. Allen (1996) points out that the technical, rhetorical and administrative structure of sites on the Internet often signal understandings of the rights and obligations of participants including researchers. For example, both "public" and "private" spaces and public and private communication channels existed within the MOO (multiuser object-oriented domain) she studied. Nevertheless, one difficulty in applying broad ethical principles to the study of computer-mediated communication is that it is not clear where the boundary between public and private lies in cyberspace. Some kinds of communication are clearly bounded; electronic mail sent between two individuals is generally considered to be private and cannot be reproduced without their permission. One the other hand, where one has an open distribution system, as is the case for much of the information on the World Wide Web, few problems may arise in the reproduction of posted materials.
One strategy for dealing with the ethical issues posed by research in cyberspace is that adoped by researchers on ProjectH (Rafaeli et al., 1998). Co-ordinated by Sheizaf Rafaeli at the Hebrew University and Fay Sudweeks at the University of Sydney, what became known as ProjectH involved over 100 researchers from 21 different disciplines distributed over 15 countries. A total of 4,322 messages from 3 networks, Usenet, Bitnet and Compuserve, were sampled and their contents analysed using a collaboratively developed codebook. Using only data posted to public lists and publicly available, ProjectH researchers did not seek informed consent for the use of material analyzed using quanitative methods or where very brief extracts were quoted in published work. At the same time they made considerable efforts to protect the anonymity of posters.
Virtual services, by analogy with a "normal" church service, take place within a relatively public context. Moreover, whatever the ostensible purpose of the service, those who attend do so on their own terms and for their own reasons. Although there is controversy about where the boundaries between public and private lie in this case (see Homan and Bulmer, 1982), the consent of participants is less obviously required here than in other less visible contexts. In addition, there are practical problems involved in obtaining informed consent in virtual worlds (Reid, 1996). In the specific instance described here there was a danger of disrupting the service itself. In some contexts obtaining consent is difficult because the population that comprises a virtual group is not always a stable one, which produces problems of tracking and contact (Herring, 1996, p. 161). Herring goes on to point out that an alternative is to gain the consent from the list owner on behalf of the group. Although it is not entirely clear that those who "own" or "manage" groups can give consent on behalf of others, we sought and obtained the co-operation and agreement of the person leading the prayer meetings before we proceeded to analyze the data. Where material is quoted we have tried to do so in a manner that does not permit the identification of participants.
King points out that, "in the past, one of the factors that helped to protect the human subjects of naturalistic observations was the statistical improbability of their exposure to the often esoteric and expensive academic journals in which the results were reported" (1996, p. 200). This insulation of research participants from research findings discussing them is more difficult, however, in research on computer mediated communication. Given some basic information, powerful search facilities on the Internet allow sites and the information they contain to be tracked down relatively easily. Beyond this, as Allen points out, those studied can be knowledgeable about research on computer-mediated communication. Participants in the MOO she studied were quite familiar with existing studies and research on computer-mediated communication in general. By contrast, Reid records that her study of a MUD attracted attention from other social scientists. The group, which by then was undergoing a somewhat traumatic period, began to close access to researchers. In this study we have tried as far as possible to disguise both the world we studied and the identities of those who participate in it.
The Language of Charismatic Religion
The language and general ethos of religious meetings in the E-Church bear all the hallmarks of informal, interactive, charismatic-style worship. This type of worship had its roots 35-40 years ago in what was perhaps (and paradoxically) a parallel to 1960s radicalism. Since then the neo-pentecostal, charismatic movement has spread world-wide and has heavily colonised many of the mainstream churches. 7 The movement has created strong bonds between otherwise disparate groups in both the Catholic and Protestant communities, though its influence has been most pervasive among the latter.
Partly as a result of the alternative style espoused by the charismatics, there is a major division between these groups and the more traditional believers who reject the new culture with its emphasis on informality and interactivity, as well as the general non-traditionalism of this type of worship. Another major factor is the issue of "glossolalia", or speaking in tongues, which is a defining doctrinal issue for charismatics. There are also "strong" ancillary beliefs and practices such as healing, and the popular "words of knowledge" as well as other forms of prophetic discourse, and "weaker" ones such as banner making, worship songs and raising of arms (though the latter is now much less fashionable even among mainstream charismatics). Over time, aspects of at least the "weaker" practices of the charismatic style have become widely recognisable in (mostly evangelical or fundamentalist) church groups that are not committed to the "strong" beliefs and practices of the charismatics. As a result, unless rigidly marked as being doctrinally in the conservative evangelical camp, or as constrained by one of several flavours of authoritarian ecclesiology, a large proportion of church groups in the Anglo-Saxon world have adopted at least the "weaker" charismatic habits of worship. In many areas - and to a highly variable degree - this now applies to both Catholic and Protestant communities, though, as has been suggested, the general culture is most associated with the post-reformation churches.
In the E-Church meetings members are typically from different traditions, though not from ones which are very disparate doctrinally. The general charismatic style is quite evident - informal, open and interactive. One specific noticeable feature is the position of women in charismatic communities. Take a recent Sunday E-Church meeting, advertised as happening at 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern Standard Time, at which the leader was a woman. The significance of a woman's leading the prayer meeting needs to be approached with caution, because there is currently a very wide spectrum of attitudes on the question of a worship leader's gender in the evangelical/charismatic camps. A woman's acting as worship leader in this context of virtual worlds would quite naturally suggest (at least to a sizeable number of participants who are charismatic "insiders") the ethos of a home or other small group meeting. It has in recent years become normative for charismatic Christians (as well as other fellow-traveler evangelicals) to belong to such groups. The informal practices that they favor have undoubtedly been one of the factors which have encouraged evangelicals to foreground female leadership status. This situation contrasts somewhat with the position of women in more formal church contexts in which the roles traditionally ascribed to women tend to perpetuate patriarchal leadership practices.
In contrast to how the question of the presence of a female worship leader should be interpreted, the significance of her opening words in the meeting on this occasion is much more straightforward. Her opening statement was "[First name of one of the participants], show us your life". Any charismatic - or any but the most conservative of evangelicals - would feel on familiar ground. The sharing, praying and praising that subsequently took place is standard fare for small charismatic groups across the Anglo-Saxon world and elsewhere.
One linguistic approach would be to see these opening words as evoking a well-established and, for charismatics, a totally familiar "frame" inviting participants to infer the kind of language and practices expected in the meeting. Frame theory posits the idea that human memory represents items in terms of frames containing slots and fillers. A bibliographical index card is constructed along the same lines, with slots for author, title etc., each having the relevant filler (for example, Shakespeare, "As You Like It", and so on). In their simplest form frames uniquely identify objects or classes of object. One further feature of frames is that they offer the possibility of understanding objects based on partial information - through "inference". For example, we all have a mental frame of the human body which allows us to interpret, say, the sight of a hand appearing round a doorway, or a foot in a door. In each case, although the whole body is not visible, we "infer" the presence of a complete body from our mental frame which lists typical corporeal features. In this way further knowledge can be inferred from witnessing one piece of information. A feature which exists as the filler of one slot in a frame can evoke all the other features in that frame. A similar situation can occur with aromas, taste, and music: a song, for example, may recall a whole summer of one"s teenage years. 8
These processes of inference and suggestion in religious language can now be illustrated in relation to an impromptu prayer meeting held earlier this year in the E-Church world. The meeting began at the suggestion of one of the participants (Speaker1) and was led by what turned out to be the eldest of the group (here called Leader2 to make clear that this was not the leader who normally leads the regular prayer meetings), and there were three other participants (Speaker2, 3 and 4).
Leader2 was very open and welcoming, as when Speaker4 joined in mid-session. On his arrival, Leader2 interrupted the flow of request and prayer in a very smooth way to invite Speaker4 to participate, and received a brief affirmative reply. Leader2 then immediately resumed the flow of his prayer, in this case praying for a bereaved friend who was known to several of the group present. Similarly, just as the meeting easily absorbed a newcomer without a breach of the flow, so too it continued smoothly despite occasional anomalous remarks.
One example is when Speaker1 (who we later learned is a teenager) forgot the form of the meeting and made an inappropriate interjection. Near the beginning of this meeting, in the midst of what was clearly marked as prayer time, Speaker1 asked Leader2 whether the VR world ever hosted formal services of the Sunday-morning type with traditional components (`a choir and preaching"). He was clearly trying to come to terms with the mismatch between the current VR religious event in which he was participating and his personal frame of real world worship events. Leader2 - as well as the other participants - ignored this interjection and immediately continued with a heart-felt prayer. Later, after the end of formal proceedings had been clearly marked, Speaker1 repeated his question and received a very gracious, noticeably unpatronising response from Leader2. (He just referred very briefly and naturally to the difficulty of handling a conventional, formal service in multi-user VR.)
A great deal of Leader2's language emphasised the group's emotional commitment, in phraseology such as "for each other", and "we would love to pray for you". Openness was rhetorically affirmed through the breadth of potential content implied by "[prayer offered for] whatever or whoever is on your heart". Most of these phrases were part of a familiar vocabulary affirming the nature of the textual event and well as affirming group cohesion.
To continue with this example, the "genre" 9 of a real-world prayer meeting was constantly invoked during the virtual prayer meeting. So, for example, in the (almost tag-like) expressions - used especially by Leader2 - such as "on your heart", "her family needs prayer", and in phrases involving "care": `Thank you for taking care of Speaker1"s brother", "take care of his situation", "as you take care of us", "thank you for taking care of Speaker2", "thank you for taking care of [non-participant]", "take care of this situation". Equally important as this kind of lexical choice was the selection of syntactic doublets so typical of religious discourse of this type. In a "disjunctive" form in "whoever" or "whatever", for example, though "conjunctive" doublets (`hears and answers") were much more frequent, often echoing biblical or other canonical texts, e.g.:
God we want to "thank You and give You" the Praise, honor and glory that You deserve
show him "to do good and to be a witness" for You
the one that "hears and answers" our prayers
give him the "strength and abilities" to complete his studies
allow him to "have and seek" Your Love and that his wife might "see and understand"
I want to give him the "praise and glory"Such doublets are certainly `churchy", and appear to be pervasive in religious texts for a number of reasons. They sometimes echo hebraisms translated in the bible (especially the authorized version), as well as the cadences of ancient creeds. The metre of such devices evokes a sombre, formal note combined with a sense of timeless certainties. Such doublets reflect the power of religious words "orally" expressed - a core focus of religious language here transposed and perpetuated in written form.
Also transposed to the medium of virtual reality was what amounts to a liturgical structure. Speaker1's twice-asked question about whether conventional formal services were possible highlights a central paradox of the interactions. Although (the fifteen-year old) Speaker1 may have been be exhibiting boyish naivete as to what would naturally occur in the medium of virtual reality, his question nicely resonates with the analyst's intuitions that the language used exhibits a high level of liturgical patterning. As in the opening of the other meeting - "[First name of one of the participants], show us your life" - considered above, the leader's initial statement here that he would start and that "we can have [a prayer meeting]" evoked a metanarrative instantly understood by all (even if there were lapses from expected behavior due to unfamiliarity with the exigences of the medium of virtual reality). Most obvious is the pattern:
Leader: elicits prayer requests for others
Speaker (or often Leader himself): quotes a prayer request (often) for somebody not present
Speaker: responds with prayer
All participants: group affirmation ("Amen" etc)
The end of the "formal" part of the meeting was signaled by Leader2 as the termination of the whole cycle of the meeting, but with the addition of upper-case letters and an exclamation mark used as a written transposition of the slower and emphatic "amen" which typically marks the completion of proceedings in the real world:
Leader2: Thank You Lord in Jesus name AMEN!
Speaker2: Amen
Speaker4: Amen
Speaker1: Amen
Another feature which is similar to the procedures in a real world meeting is the fact that Leader2 asks whether prayer requests may be passed to the world controller for display on a public space within the E-church world. This space, to which all will have access, fulfils the role of a church noticeboard or prayer letter, or the wider informal sharing of requests and needs which would naturally ripple out following the group meeting.
A final interesting illustration of the nature of interaction between participants at this prayer meeting was an exchange concerning marital problems. Suddenly in the midst of the meeting two of the participants - Leader2 and Speaker2 - began to discuss their respective marital problems. Leader2's handling of the divorce issue on this occasion seems to reflect a fairly standard fundamentalist position supported by biblical allusion.
Leader2's response to Speaker2's sudden revelation that he was "thinking about divorcing" his wife started with a reference to divine caring support which is consonant with the earlier language cycles ("you are the one that hears and answers our prayers"). After this initial evocation of divine concern, Leader2 then alluded in quite fundamentalist terms to the canonically-recorded legal situation: "[addressing Speaker2 by avatar name] God hates divorce but allowed it because of man's hard hearts". This sentence is a clear summary of Christ's explanation of the divine rejection of divorce being tempered by toleration of divorce "because of the hardness of your hearts" (the words used here are probably based on Matthew 19:8 in the Authorized Version).
From a traditional viewpoint there then occurred a quite remarkable exchange in that Leader2 followed his standard care-but-observe-the-law response with a revelation that his own personal marital problems were bringing him close to divorce. Overall the treatment of marital problems points up the combination of what is traditional and what is novel in this text. The language of the prayer meeting with its charismatic style lends itself quite naturally to the VR environment. At the same time the novel combination of notional anonymity and intimacy which the VR world fosters led in this case to a surprisingly open airing of major personal problems. The whole was "bathed" in the intertextually-supported "lingua franca" of the genre to which the language strikingly belongs.
Virtual Worlds and Contemporary Religion
So far, we have given an account of some of the main features of the social interactions and text exchanges in the E-Church world. At this point, we can move on to a more general comparison between the service in the E-Church world and conventional church services. Unsurprisingly, there are both similarities and differences: many practices and modes of communication - the formal structure of the meeting, some of the content, as well as the roles - are transferred from real world services into the virtual world. Some practices, however, are transformed by the technology, and may detract from the sense of a religious gathering: verbal exchanges become shorter, emotional solidarity with co-participants is weaker, and there is less orderliness to the prayer meetings. But the technology also brings certain gains: the virtual church allows for more candid exchanges between participants, it enables a kind of access from all over the world that is not available in conventional services 10, and it permits experimentation in the use (and prior to that, the design) of the virtual space that is less constrained than a church in the real world.
At this point it is possible to speculate about some of the implications of the potential spread of virtual religion for religion in the world-at-large. The question that can be posed is: will the spread of virtual religion have a corrosive or an invigorating effect on religion in contemporary society? To answer this, some brief comments about the sociology of contemporary religion are in order. First, as mentioned earlier, new religious movements have been very adept at incorporating new technologies into their activities (Hadden, 1988). Secondly, there has been a proliferation of new religious movements which has led to a "supermarket" of religions, particularly in America, with the effect that the role of religion in society has become more fragmented and more diffuse. And finally, as Martin has argued, "by combining traditional and modern elements [the charismatic movement] is the most viable of all the reactions" to the secularization process attendant upon industrialization (1978. p. 94). It should be clear from what has been said that the E-Church world can be seen as good illustration of all three trends in contemporary religion.
To make a somewhat more direct comparison, we can briefly return to the form of the church service itself and compare the E-Church service with a conventional church service by drawing on Collins' account of religious ritual. Collins argues, following Durkheim, that a religious ritual consists of three elements: the physical co-presence of people to enhance emotional energy, the ritualization of actions which includes "coordinating their gestures and voices", and a symbolic sacred object that reifies and reinforces the group's sense of itself (1992, p. 42).
In the E-church world, none of these features is as straightforward as it would be in a conventional church service. At at the same time, it is possible to find all three elements: there is a sense in which participants feel that they are co-present, they do coordinate their "voices" and their gestures (their attentiveness at the keyboard, for example, as well as the turn-taking responses and the way in which the avatars stand in relation to each other during the service within the virtual world), and they also focus their attention on the object of their worship (the "leader", God, and the group itself) in such a way that the cohesion of the group is reinforced.
A prayer meeting in the virtual world may not provide the same type of religious experience as a conventional church service, but it certainly reproduces some of the essential features of the latter - albeit in novel ways. It seems appropriate therefore, by way of conclusion, to quote Durkheim: "To strengthen those sentiments which, if left to themselves, would soon weaken, it is sufficient to bring those who hold them together and to put them into closer and more active relations with one another" (1976, p. 210). The E-Church world, for all that is said about the ephemeral nature of virtual reality or virtual worlds, perpetuates - even if it also transforms - this role of the sacred in society.
Footnotes
We would like to thank Ann-Sofie Axelsson, Eileen Barker, Jeffrey Hadden, Margaret McLaughlin and an anonymous referee for JCMC for the helpful suggestions that they made.
1 In the case of the E-church world that will be discussed here, the background music is of a religiously uplifting type.
2 For a more detailed description of social interaction in online virtual worlds, see Schroeder (1997). Damer's (1998) book provides technical information about these worlds.
3 Put differently, these virtual worlds are places for socializing, or "hangouts" as described by Oldenburg (1989).
4 This is a feature that O'Leary(1996, 800-804) has also noted in relation to text-based online religious rituals.
5 Again, the reader may wish to compare O'Leary's analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of text-based online religious groups. It is important to keep in mind that the text-based online interaction that he studied is different from interaction which combines text and graphics. These differences and similarities have not, to our knowledge, been systematically investigated in this context, but some comparisons can be found in the study made by Becker and Mark, who examined Active Worlds, Onlive Traveller and LambdaMOO (1998).
6 Although we feel it such contact is desirable. One attraction of research on computer-mediated communication is that it permits researchers to obtain large volumes of data in a machine-readable form at low cost, and with relatively little effort compared to traditional methods of data collection in the social sciences. Data collection sometimes follows the path of least resistance. One consequence is that the off-line correlates of on-line behavior, and their ethical implications, remain understudied. For a study which includes both online behavior and behavior in the "real world", in this case in relation to Internet use generally, see Kraut et al. (1998). This study, however, is part of a much broader much research program with a different set of research issues.
7 See for example the discussion of "Charismaticizing of Mainstream Evangelicalism" in Tomlinson's study (1995: 15-16).
8 For discussion of the usefulness of frame-based methods for identifying agenda in contemporary religious discourse, see Heather (1998).
9 In basic terms, the term "genre" can be defined as "a relatively stable set of conventions that is associated with, and partly enacts, a socially ratified type of activity, such as an informal chat . . . or a scientific article"(Fairclough, 1992, p. 126).
10 At the meetings we observed, participants were mainly from North America and the United Kingdom.
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About the Authors
Ralph Schroeder is Professor in the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg. He is the author of Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture and Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamic of Virtual Reality Technology.
Address:Department of Technology and Society, Chalmers University, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden.Noel Heather is lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of a monograph on the French Huguenot poet Bartas and his humorous ambivalence.
Address:Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX United Kingdom.Raymond M.Lee is Reader in Social Research Methods in the Department of Social and Political Science at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written extensively on the problems and issues surrounding research on "sensitive" or dangerous topics, and about the impact of new technologies on research methods in social research. His publications include Doing Research on Sensitive Topics.
Address: Department of Social and Political Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX United Kingdom.
