BishopAccountability.org
	Spirited Blogs: the Devout and the Disaffected Battle It out on the Internet By G. Jeffrey MacDonald Winston-Salem Journal [United States] May 6, 2006 http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ _BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1137835837034&path=!living&s=1037645509005 For as long as preachers have been engaging listeners, critics have been muttering nearby about the need for more enlightened leadership. Even Moses couldn't catch a break from his band of desert-wandering Israelites, who feared that he was trying to kill them. Now, thanks to Weblogs (called blogs) and other Internet postings, critics in every faith tradition are getting a hearing far beyond the parking lot of the synagogue, church or mosque. Forced to listen, because others are, religious leaders are responding in ways that show how religious authority is shifting in the 21st century. All authority structures deriving power from their claims of truth are getting tested, it seems, as bloggers match wits with established vessels of information. The news media provide a case in point. The hastened retirements last year of Dan Rather, a CBS News anchorman, and New York Times Editor Howell Raines were traced in no small part to bloggers who showcased information that proved more accurate than what appeared in news reports. In religion, bloggers well-versed in Scripture, church rules and even poignant personal testimonies are challenging official policies and winning followers of their own. Traditional authorities, meanwhile, are seeing problems and opportunities alike in the new milieu. How they respond depends to a large degree on what their respective theologies say about the value of voices from the proverbial peanut gallery. "It's clear that religions that are more kind of 'open source' - less authoritarian, less hierarchical, less preoccupied with controlling the codified material - are doing better on the Internet," said Lorne Dawson, a sociologist who studies religion and the Internet at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Elsewhere, he said, it's a heyday for naysayers. "The critics, the ex-members ... they are thriving online because this is giving them a voice so much more powerful than they would have ever had before. They would have had to publish books with small vanity presses or obscure presses, or seek a little newspaper attention. Now they don't have to. It really is the realm where anyone who has an ax to grind against a religion ... can find hundreds of sites online that are just dying to hear their story, dying to hear their criticism." Religious bloggers run the gamut of topics, but challenging their own authorities is shaping up to be a favorite: • From his post at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Summerville, S.C., the Rev. Kendall Harmon routinely uses his blog to show how the Episcopal Church U.S.A. strays, in his opinion, from scriptural mandates. • Dozens of Mormon bloggers, who often publish anonymously, sound off on church policies as well as the right-leaning politics of many church members. • In Worcester, Mass., a housewife runs a Web site to report on efforts to prevent sexual abuse by clergy in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester. • In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Va., the Rev. Jim Tucker speculates in his blog about why Catholic bishops don't welcome disgruntled clerics from other denominations, a practice he describes as "an opportunity being terribly missed." Denominational authorities don't always respond kindly to public airings of the religious family's "dirty laundry." Trustees of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board initially sought to remove one of its members, Wade Burleson of Enid, Okla., after he discussed board deliberations on his blog. But other Southern Baptist bloggers were outraged and wouldn't let the controversy die. In March, the board backed down, rescinding its request to remove Burleson. But the board approved a rule barring trustees from publicly criticizing actions of the missions agency. "It is a controversy about the kind of practices and procedures that will characterize Southern Baptist denominational actions in the future," reads a blog from Tom Ascol, the executive director of the Founders Ministries, a Southern Baptist reform movement. "Will dissent be squelched with a heavy hand? Will selected doctrinal concerns ... be elevated to points of importance such that those who disagree with denominational powerbrokers are not allowed opportunities of service in the SBC?" Bloggers are stirring the pot in other denominations as well. Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston Sean P. O'Malley pledged last year to open the diocese's financial books for public inspection after an effective Web-based campaign among disgruntled laity raised the specter that the Massachusetts legislature would make such disclosure a legal requirement. "I wouldn't say the church has changed its ways, but we are raising attention for these issues," said John Moynihan, a spokesperson for Voice of the Faithful, a lay reform group formed after the clergy-abuse scandal of 2002. He adds that news reporters, who seldom used to quote dissenting laity, now read the group's positions on developing events and call seeking comments to balance what the church hierarchy is saying. In light of blog mania, religious organizations are getting proactive to make the voices of their top authorities more accessible. Posting the actual words spoken by Pope Benedict XVI on any number of topics, for instance, has become a priority for church staffers in an age when people seem to value messages that come directly from "the horse's mouth." "People want to know, "What did he say? What did the pope actually say?"' said Mary Ann Walsh, a spokesperson for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "This enables people to get material without it being filtered by the media." Meanwhile, reform-minded dissidents are finding that the Internet enables them to bypass religious authorities altogether in a way that was virtually impossible, at least in terms of mass media, just 15 years ago. International followers of Bahai pioneered such circumvention in the mid-1990s, when spirited discussions about official policies and projects occurred in an arena where authorities couldn't regulate what was said - the independent Web-based project called Talisman. Similarly, Muslim reformer Irshad Manji is now bypassing her faith's clerics and news outlets. She's offering her book, The Trouble With Islam, as a download from her Web site, available in Urdu, Persian or Arabic. More than 30,000 readers have downloaded it in one of those languages, she said. Internet platforms are fueling a particularly thorny crisis among European Muslims, said Dawson, the sociologist in Ontario. The reason is that Islam has no universal system for adjudicating among various authority figures. Uprooted from the mosques and imams of their homelands, recent immigrants to Europe now gain access to competing authorities through the Web. Ideologically driven fundamentalists and cultural progressives alike find fatwas from abroad to support their views and, when so moved, denounce the Quranic interpretations of local elders or imams. Perhaps ironically, the Web has at times proven repressive for dialogue among believers, particularly at the official Web sites of religious organizations, according to Brenda Brasher, an Aberdeen University (Scotland) scholar who studies how religion is experienced online. She said several denominational sites originally allowed visitors to meet and mix with one another, but they have since clamped down. Example: "Ship of Fools," a Web-based worship simulation launched in 2004 with help from the United Methodist Church. For dialogue and group dissent in an official religious setting, believers apparently need to log off and take their bodies to a gathering place where religious authority is confined to a mere human being. "Digital religion is a religion of yes and no; thus, those who program it make stark choices," said Brasher in an e-mail. "In real life, religion is more nuanced, more messy."
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