Religion Online
Aired December 11 and 12, 1999
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This is Internet on the Air. I’m Joan Silvi. Religious communities
on-line. Details in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan School
of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation.
While surfing the Internet borders on a religious experience for many, the Web is being
explored by religious groups of all kinds to revitalize spiritual practices. Sending
e-mail prayer chains and posting weekly sermons are a few of the ways that religious
organizations are using the Internet. But one of the Internet’s most important
contributions to religious bodies is connecting members of urban communities.
The Polis Center is a research institute in Indianapolis that studies how the urban
environment shapes congregations and religious practice. What they’ve found is that
many urban landscapes do not allow for traditional forms of connection among community
members. These days few people bump into their neighbors in stores or other public spaces,
and have an opportunity to reinforce social connections. The Internet is evolving as a
tool for citizens to get to know each other in their own neighborhoods, and religious
organizations are providing a forum for these connections.
One neighborhood in Indianapolis reflects this modern condition. Located along a
heavily-traveled highway, most of its citizens have recently arrived from other cities.
One church uses the Internet to keep its members engaged. The staff sends out weekly
e-mails with inspirational messages, member updates, and funny stories. According to the
pastor, "the Internet creates opportunities to build community in a place where there
are few ties that bind."
To listen to an interview with the Executive Director of the Polis Center visit our Web
site at www.iota.org. For Internet on the Air, Iım Joan Silvi.
Top of Page
Related Links
For further information, try these Web sites:
- Visit The Polis Center
Web site to learn more about their work. Their monthly publication Responsive
Communities: Faith at Work in Indianapolis highlights local, faith-based responses
to important social issues.
The Polis Center works out of the University of Indiana Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). They use a multidiscplinary and
partnership-oriented approach to create, manage, and apply information to problems and
issues of mutual concern to the Univeresity and community.
- The Pluralism Project, out of
Harvard University, maintains an extensive Web site on their work, which seeks to study
and document the growing religious diversity in the United States.
Their site includes an on-line directory of
over 3,000 religious centers across the country, focusing on Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and
Zoroastrian Temples, as well as Islamic Centers and Masajid, Sikh Gurdwaras.
- Read about Online Collaboration in
the American Religion Classroom in this article from Religious Studies News
You'll find it on the American
Religious Experience Web site, a project at West Virginia University.
- View a series of images and articles about God Online: Digital Religion and Afro-Asian
Immigrants, taken from a number of publications such as Time and Utne Reader
Top of Page
The Interview
IOTA interviewed David Bodenhamer in November 1999.
How did the Polis Center get interested in
religion as a research topic? What are some of the projects that you are involved in?
We picked up on the importance of religion in understanding the Indianapolis culture
when we were doing the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, one of our first projects as a center
(1989-1994). We were covering religion as a subject area and two things became apparent.
One was that religion had been instrumental in shaping several important sectors of
Indianapolis society, including human service delivery and philanthropic activity. Yet,
the role [of religion] had not been documented or well understood. It certainly
didn’t seem to be understood in contemporary terms, where religion seemed to be
absent as a functional force within the structure of Indianapolis society.
The second thing is, as we began to think about the role of religion in a society, we
recognized that it was not part of either any academic or public conversation. So one of
the things we’ve done on our project on Religion and Urban Culture is not only to
discover and document the role of religion in forming an urban culture but also looking at
the effects of that urban culture on the religious expression in this environment.
We’ve also sought to make that a subject of public conversation.
What are some of your preliminary findings in
terms of the impact of the urban environment on religion and vice versa?
Religion has been extremely important in helping to create a social service network
that began to develop in the late 19th and early 20th century. In fact, religion has been
remarkably persistent in the delivery of social services, and is still very active,
although it takes a different form.
Beyond that, religion has been vitally important in helping to reconstitute and rethink
the whole issue of neighborhoods. Many of the neighborhood organizations, the community
centers, and the benchmark neighborhood organizing projects [in Indianapolis] have
actually begun in congregations, especially in the inner-city. These are not just
African-American congregations which you might expect, but mainline Protestant
denominations, Catholic congregations, and a whole variety of others. So religion has been
important in thinking about the very fabric of an urban society; the way in which we
imagine ourselves clustered together in communities within the larger urban or
metropolitan area.
How does the Internet fit into these faith-based
activities?
It fits in a variety of ways…Congregations, by and large, regardless of
denomination or theological orientation, are using computers at least for their
administrative work -- in fact almost 90%. But when we ask whether or not they’re
connected to each other or to their parishioners, through such things as e-mail, then the
percentages begin to drop off considerably.
In our [17] neighborhoods, it’s a much smaller percentage. Something like 15 to
20% are using e-mail in any kind of systematic or sustained way. They have an e-mail
address but it’s more of a sporadic and ad hoc use. Then we asked how many of them
are using the Web, whether it’s the Internet, or publicizing activities in the
congregation, or purposes of evangelization. Here only about 10% of congregations even
have access to the Internet as congregations. Fewer than that have any sort of Web site.
Only about 8% report any Web site.
When you look at those Web sites, very few of them are dynamic (where the content
changes). Most of the sites are static, used to post announcements, sermon topics,
upcoming events, but even those don’t change very much [regardless] of whether they
have a staff person or volunteer for this purpose. Sometimes the sites are three or four
weeks out of date.
What does this lack of interactivity suggest for
your research?
What it suggests to us is that the Internet is not that important to congregations in
maintaining internal community. That’s where they’ve tried to use it but
it’s clear that they’re not receiving a lot of hits. They don’t see it as a
high enough priority in building that internal community that they’re willing to
devote significant resources to making their site an active and dynamic one.
So will be seeing virtual churches or other
religious organizations anytime soon?
The concept of a virtual church is far away from the way in which churches imagine
themselves working. They recognize that there are members who can’t be there to
interact with someone else on a personal level, and so they’re going to use [the
Internet] as the way to maintain some contact with them. As a matter of fact, some of the
most interesting and consistent uses of electronic communications via the Web have been to
maintain some contact with or knowledge of college students who are away from their home
church, or missionaries who the church may be supporting.
Are certain religious bodies establishing a
greater Web presence than others?
The most consistent of the dynamic Web presence comes from the evangelical
congregations. This is not surprising. We know for instance, from the knowledge of
American religious history that fundamental evangelical Protestants are the ones who have
leaped most quickly into the use of new media for promoting their message. Those first
media earlier in the century were radio and television.
We see increasingly that the more conservative or fundamentalist evangelical
Protestants denominations are moving quickly to a more dynamic Web site that is much
richer in terms of content. Not just simply organizational announcements, but some in
Indianapolis have what they call apologetic sections, that is where they’re
introducing people to theologians who write for a public audience, such as the late C.S.
Lewis.
In what other ways is the Web being used as an
outreach tool?
We have seen what would traditionally be called prayer chains, where people are linked
together electronically, sometimes on a listserv format, so that prayer requests might go
out over those. But again, that’s only a very small percentage of congregations doing
that.
From our study, most congregations are receiving (even those with the most fully
developed Web sites) less than 1,000 hits a month. That’s fairly small traffic.
Why aren’t more congregations rushing to
create dynamic Web sites?
There’s a lot about the culture of congregations that suggests that what is most
important is personal connection. Actually being able to touch, to see, and to talk, and
to experience and that’s difficult to do in a virtual way. Whether or not twenty
years from now congregations will have entered more fully into the Internet world,
it’s hard to say.
It does strike me that there’s something intrinsically personal about
congregational culture that suggests that people value that interaction with other people,
that ability to come together with other people for a common worship experience. It’s
hard to imagine a congregational culture operating in any other sort of way.
Congregations are interested in
community-building.
What television has proven is that it really has been a tool of evangelists, and not a
tool for community building. Most congregations see their role as building internal
community, and that internal community does not rest on information as much as it rests on
relationships.
Please direct questions or comments to iota.webmaster@umich.edu.
Last Updated December 13, 1999
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