Digital religion: everyone has their own altar on the internet

End-time predictions, digital candles or skype with a witch: Frank Smit’s eyes have been sliding over the most exuberant online forms of religion and spirituality over the past eight months. “I already knew that the Netherlands had great diversity in this area, but seeing it for yourself is something else,” says the Digital Humanities master’s student. It made him more humble. “Your way of life is just one dot on the map.”

As an internship and graduation project, Smit compiled a 596 websites collection Religion & Philosophy, which the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) will add to its collection this Monday. collection of thematic web collections (see box). “Our religious landscape is extremely fragmented. We wanted to structure that,” says Kees Teszelszky, curator of digital collections at the KB. He helped Smit and is ultimately responsible for the collection.

Not only world religions with deep roots were given a place in it, but also the smallest spiritual niches. Also based on the idea that the web has no hierarchy. “As a technological object, the website of the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands is equivalent to a website that someone has built in his basement,” says Smit.

The collection items range from the ordinary – the site of a Protestant community in Hoogeveen – to the eccentric, such as that of Gerard Lenting, who the digital portal of his one-man religion decorated with glittering gifs of butterflies and doves. The user can, among other things, draw a tarot card with ‘corresponding’ Bible verse.

Such apparently contradictory combinations, according to Smit, typify how online the boundaries between movements blur. Another example: a site of a spiritual entrepreneur on which Buddhism and crop circles, kabbalah and the Hawaiian ho’oponopono are promoted.

The KB collection is not a representative sample of religious Netherlands. “What we declare in Amsterdam as a monument is not necessarily representative of the history of the city as a whole,” says Teszelszky. “The most important question is: can a site in the future serve to help researchers understand a phenomenon or development in thinking about religion and philosophy?”

In what sense does that apply to Gerard Lenting’s glitter site? “A site in itself often says nothing, but in a broader context things start to stand out. Later people may say: ‘This was so typical for that period, because: individualistic, own truth.’ We don’t always see that now, because we are so close to it.”

Conspirituality

The new collection is related to the ‘Social Critical Collection’ of the KB, which contains many conspiracy sites. The overlap lies in what scientists conspirituality call, a contraction of spirituality and conspiracy. A single site sits in both collections, such as “End-Time Information Web,” where 9/11 theories and biblical end-time prophecies meet. ‘End Times Information Web’ is also a rare example of a site with a 1990s design that is still online – most of these types of ‘web cradle prints’ have long since been devoured by time.

Smit, who previously completed a bachelor’s degree in history, and PhD historian Teszelszky are not religious scientists. Isn’t that problematic for a collection that aims to interpret this subject for future historians? Teszelszky: „As a religious scientist you quickly get stuck with the classic CBS definitions of religion. We look at the online atmosphere with an open mind, through the lens of digital culture and heritage.”

And then you come across other things that fall over the edges of classical definitions. Smit opens the website heksenopleiding.nl, run by witch Margarita from Appelscha. Interested parties can get acquainted via Skype and register for video lessons. “Old Pagan religion is combined here with the typically modern fixation on self-development and self-improvement.”

They are phenomena for which you have to go on the internet to find them. That used to be different, says Teszelszky. “In every place there was a church tower, there were public processions. Now many religious expressions are online. If it’s not in your bubble, you don’t come into contact with it.”

The major institutional religions are not necessarily dominant online, Teszelszky says. Sites of Christian congregations in the collection do not focus so much on winning souls and more on the believers who are still there. Although there are still plenty of sites in the collection that are indeed “mission” oriented, such as Christian creationist sites aimed at children who argue that standard knowledge about evolution and dinosaurs rattles.

An altar on the internet

According to Smit, the collection mainly shows that the Netherlands is not a post-religious society, as is sometimes thought. “Religion is less central to society, but not necessarily to people’s lives.”

In the description of the collection, the student concludes that a mosaic of worldviews goes together peacefully on the internet and that this ‘precarious moment’ must be guarded. Is it really the task of a neutral institute like the KB to argue for religious tolerance? According to some, religion is actually a source of misery. “I think it is objective to establish that religion can be a source of good and evil,” says Smit. “But that’s why we also use the term philosophy of life. Everyone has a philosophy of life.”

He refers to a much-discussed report by broadcaster Rijnmond about a spiritual meeting in Ahoy about which parliamentary questions were asked because of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “I don’t want to approve or leave that unquestioned. But if you write people off as crazy, they get stuck in it.”

The Ahoy event was an example of how the digital undercurrent shot into the analog world like a geyser. This also means that many other Dutch people vehemently turn their backs on this kind of thinking. The contours of a new pillarization? Smith thinks not. “Pillarification was also related to location: you lived in a village with a fixed community and one or two religions.” That is a thing of the past because of the internet, where everyone can build their own altar.