by Jon Katz

Are the notoriously irreverent, skeptical, and prickly young residents of cyberspace awash in subliminal spirituality? Is their new liturgy the sometimes vulgar and provocative language, symbolism, and imagery of popular culture? Can institutionalized religion get off its high and preachy pulpit, embrace interactivity, and minister to the young on new terms?

Author Tom Beaudoin makes a thoughtful case that Generation-X Americans, especially those online, are on spiritual quests inspired and fed by their CDs and local megaplexes. And that stuffy, top-down churches will have to change radically to reach them.

Beaudoin is a former altar boy raised on television and videogames who graduated from Harvard Divinity School two years ago. He is a bass player in a Boston-area rock band, and survived Woodstock '94.

His brave and surprising book Virtual Faith is the sort of book about religion we rarely see in the age of the sound-bite spouting, scolding, pious moral guardian. Virtual Faith argues that the popular culture so celebrated by the young - from movies and music to TV shows and the Internet - is actually suffused with spirituality and religious iconography.

Writing about the video for REM's 1991 hit song "Losing My Religion," for example, Beaudoin describes clear intimations of Jesus in an old man resting against an angel, both of them seated on a tree limb. Gray-haired and bearded, the old man is fitted with a pair of angelic wings and clothed in orange robes; then he is stoned to death.

"The ambiguity of the final Jesus scene is disturbing," writes Beaudoin, "In a brief shot, his associates work with rope that is wrapped around Jesus' body. Are they releasing him, or are they binding him to the beam, hoping to get him up on the cross so that he might really be the messiah they are hoping for in the end?"

Beaudoin further cites Madonna, Soundgarden, various TV shows, and movies as pop-culture sources brimming with spirituality, even as the citizens of cyberspace are participants in a subtle attack on rigid institutions.

"The environment of cyberspace provides resources that are ripe for upsetting hierarchies," he says. The Net is a natural leveler of powerful institutions as so many individuals get their hands on the machinery of communications - and get to make and disseminate their own personal theologies.

In the digital world, individuals don't have to accept official dogma, but are free to seek and find their own, to join virtual communities with fresh ideas about spirituality.

Cyberspace and institutional churches thus exist in constant conflict, Beaudoin writes.

This is an elemental observation, obvious but rarely articulated. Organized religions often seem to resent popular culture in general and the cyberculture in particular, sounding alarms about addiction and the exposure of the young to so much unfiltered, uncensored information - as well as to pornography and violence. Meanwhile, the ascending geek culture is viscerally hostile to powerful institutions that tell its members what to believe.

The two cultural forces are natural enemies.

It's difficult to imagine the great religions - Judaism, Islam, Christianity - becoming more interactive and fluid when their mission is to spread the word of God as revealed in sacred texts.

But this doesn't mean netizens aren't spiritual, Beaudoin claims.

This isn't a surprising argument to anybody who's been on the Net: Religion and spirituality of all stripes thrive here. There are tens of thousands of mailing lists, Web sites, and newsgroups devoted to religious expression and contemplation.

Moreover, Beaudoin argues in Virtual Faith that the provocative, irreverent, even heretical images of the age group he calls Generation X - tattoos, body piercing, grunge, crucifixes as fashion accessories, music lyrics and videos with religious and sexual imagery - are not wholesale rejections of religion but serious expressions of a new generation's need for a faith they can believe in, rather than one thrust upon them.

Beaudoin argues that four themes underlie the new theology of his contemporaries:

1. All institutions - religious, political, media - are suspect.

2. Personal experience is critical. Religious belief must thus also be experienced, not taught or mandated.

3. Suffering is spiritual.

4. Ambiguity and doubt aren't retreats from faith, but a new kind of faith.

In the 1980s, Beaudoin began to notice the way popular culture was filled with religious references. In popular songs, music videos, and movies, references to sin, salvation, and redemption abounded.

"I started to suspect that popular culture increasingly trumped institutional religion in attracting Xers; we dedicated much more time to pop culture, and it had vastly more religious content that was relevant to our generation. Could it be that popular culture was our religious arena?"

Beaudoin is onto something important. I've come to believe not only that popular culture is a new faith and ideology, but also that the failure of journalism and politics to grasp this has marginalized both institutions for young people.

Religious leaders have for years joined with newspaper editorial writers and block-headed politicians to portray the young as dumb and desensitized by popular culture, too wanton and weak-minded to resist its sometimes vulgar and violent imagery.

That there is virtually no evidence to support this pervasive and oft-repeated belief suggests that these continuing alarms have much more to do with preserving the power of the institutions spreading them than they do with any heartfelt concern for the young.

Since young people watch TV, go to the movies, and surf the Web without becoming stupid or murdering their neighbors, many have come to view these institutions as not only clueless, but also dishonest.

Today "During our lifetimes, especially during the critical period of the 1980s, pop culture was the amniotic fluid that sustained us," Tom Beaudoin says of his fellow young adults in his new book Virtual Faith. "For a generation of kids who had a fragmented or completely broken relationship to 'formal' or 'institutional' religion, pop culture filled the spiritual gaps. It was the young's surrogate clergy, usurping the role institutional clergy played for previous generations."

In fact, this embrace has gone even further than Beaudoin suggests. Popular culture is the universal reference point of the young, a new measure of community. People understand one another by the music they like or loathe, by the movies they embrace, and the TV shows that mirror their lives. X-Files's fans share one set of values, while Ally McBeal lovers treasure another.

It's dangerous to generalize about TV shows or their viewers, but anyone who works around younger people understands that, on Monday mornings, what nearly everyone is talking about at work isn't the latest news from Washington or a sermon they heard at church, but the weirdest indie film of the weekend or the gruesome battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan.

This passion is often cited as a prime example of how apathetic and uncivilized the young are. Look at how much they care about stupid music, TV, and movies, when there are so many serious issues, books, and other matters to consider.

Mostly, what's clear is that the young are creating a different kind of culture. Whether it's better or worse is for historians to sort out. Beaudoin seems to understand that institutions like journalism and religion have fairly narrow choices. They can change, or they can die.

"Far from residing in a cultural wasteland devoid of spiritual symbols, Generation X matured in a culture of complex and contradictory signs, some of them religious," Beaudoin claims. "Some currents within that Gen-X pop cultural stream carry more than mere microbes of an inchoate Gen-X spirituality. They are sufficient to begin funding a new theology by, for, and about a generation."

But the ferociously independent culture of the geeks challenges churches to preach and practice not from a position of power and righteousness, but from a sense of humility and weakness in the world -- a radical departure from the pious and hectoring stance taken by most religious leaders. When religious or political elders reach out to "young people," it is often in the most unbearably patronizing and ineffective of ways. Beaudoin is suggesting something much more radical and difficult.

His charge? "By shunning the trappings or privileged socialstatus and seeking to serve, not be served, churches will respond faithfully not only to the prophetic change brought by Gen-X but, more important, to the example of Jesus," he writes.

Although Beaudoin rarely uses the term, he seems in Virtual Faith to be advancing a new kind of spiritual interactivity.

Interactivity is both leveling and humbling for the columnist, the politician, the pundit, and the priest. It alters the relationship between dispensers and receivers of information. It does, as Beaudoin suggests, demand a different way of thinking, a rejection of the imbalance of power between so many institutions and individual human beings. If journalism considers interactivity a bitter pill and resists it nearly to its own extinction, imagine how churches will respond.

"Being willing to sacrifice power and status for the sake of service to the gospel will do more for the church's message about Jesus than any amount of rhetoric from pulpits," Beaudoin says. "It will also go far in addressing Xers' suspicion of religious institutions."

He's right. He understands the culture he grew up in and its many problems with dogma and elitist institutions. It will take a lot more than humility to spread The Word in cyberspace. Even younger netizens have experienced unprecedented freedom of expression and access to diverse points of view. Why should they give that up to embrace dogma and somebody else's revealed words?

Still, real interactivity -- a realignment of the relationship between the dispensers and receivers of dogma -- would offer Christian churches (and other faiths) a radical opportunity to reinvigorate themselves and minister to netizens, rather than simply wag their fingers at the webheads' naughty and irreverent ways.

The Web is, at its heart, a rationalist culture. It's hard to imagine how fixed theologies like those of most organized religions could survive intact the online scrutiny given to ideas, opinions, and proclamations.

Religious interactivity would alter churches, just as it would probably alter the attitudes of many netizens. And Beaudoin seems to grasp that while the young resist the proclamations, they do instinctively embrace spiritual imagery all the time, from the fervent faith in the unknown (à laThe X-Files) to the poverty evoked by grunge. Spirituality seems to thrive and grow even when dogma fades. Email, the idea of human beings connecting powerfully to one another out in the ether, is inherently spiritual.

Beaudoin is issuing a powerful challenge to ecclesiastical authority by asking religious institutions, moral guardians, and political elders to stop fearing the irreverence of pop culture. And to listen, rather than lecture.

"The more popular culture is explored," he writes, "and the more irreverence is viewed as a legitimate mode of religiosity (in all its illegitimacy), the more Generation X will be shown as having a real religious contribution to make.

"Gen-X can also make great strides not only toward fostering its own spirituality but also toward reinvigorating religious institutions and challenging the faith of older generations."

If there is a weakness in many of Beaudoin's arguments, it is the presumption that, approached in a different, humbler, and more modern way, the young inhabitants of cyberspace will choose to make a conventional religious contribution at all. This is far from clear. If anything, this is a generation that makes up its own mind on its own terms at its own pace. Armed with new information -- with the new power to communicate with one another at will all over the world and with the ability to see and hear every imaginable point of view - Beaudoin may not grasp just how independent and different the group of people he calls Generation X really is.

Beaudoin has written a smart and compelling book. He makes much sense and writes about his generation's culture knowingly. Yet it's almost inconceivable that religion will respond to this vibrant new culture any more thoughtfully than politics or media have.

Our experience of the digital age so far suggests that powerful institutions would rather die than change and would rather decline than voluntarily loosen their iron grip on ideas and influence. And that the young people Beaudoin is so eager for religion to reach will end up shaping new kinds of institutions rather than accepting or embracing the ones we already have.

This article originally published 4 August 1998 in HotWired.