Web of Worship

Check out this piece from the Washington Post a few days ago - it's about how people can increasingly experience worship services over the internet. The piece focuses on a South Indian temple, and the website where you can order a personalized puja from anywhere in the world.

I must say the website is very cool - menus for different temples of Ganesh, Vishnu, Shiva and Navagraha, and the services you can request to have performed there. There's also information about Hinduism for the curious - who, according to the article, increasingly make up the traffic for the site.

But the real news, I think, is here:

For many cyber-worshipers, online religious life conducted at home or in an Internet cafe has replaced attendance at traditional churches, temples, mosques and synagogues. Some are coming to religion for the first time, in a setting they find as comfortable as their grandparents found a church pew, while millions of people reared on churchgoing are discovering new ways to worship.

“The first wave of religion online, in the 1990s, was mainly for nerds and young people and techies,” said Morten Hojsgaard, a Danish author who has written extensively about online religion. “But now it really is a mirror of society at large. This is providing a new forum for religious seekers.”

Hojsgaard said the number of Web pages dealing with God, religion and churches increased from 14 million in 1999 to 200 million in 2004. Religion now nearly rivals sex as a topic on the Internet: A search for “sex” on Google returns about 408 million hits, while a search for “God” yields 396 million.

In fact, I was told once that the first discussion board dedicated to one topic on the proto-internet was about paganism. And just last month, a guy from our meetup at a Greek Orhtodox church mentioned that he was becoming converted to a different shade of Judaism through a Rabbi's teachings on YouTube.

It feels right, that our fascination with God is exploding online. American religion, with its proliferation of denominations and flavors, has always incorporated the robust market mentality of this country. We are a nation of superstar preachers and new spiritual winds. According to the ACIS survey, 1 in 7 Americans ends up in a religion they weren't born into, I've wanted to see more articles like this, on the ways that Americans shop around for faith.