Scrolling Toward The Divine

Pattern recognition, non-material places, and the University of the Bleeding Obvious

On Tuesday, at short notice, I found myself on a panel responding to the question: “does the future have a church?”. We discussed, among other things, a recent and (to some) surprising wave of religious re-enchantment, and I argued that that one of its drivers is the internet. Or, to put it more pithily, scrolling can bring people closer to God.

I didn’t have a chance to elaborate, so afterwards several people collared me to ask me what on earth I meant by that very counter-intuitive assertion. In what follows, I’m going to try and explain my thinking, with the help of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabethan emblems, and the ‘wojak’ meme. But first I need to finesse the point a little: it’s not exactly that digital reading brings people closer to God. More precisely, reading in this medium retrieves pattern recognition as a mode of cognition: a way of perceiving the world that became attenuated to almost nothing over the course of mass print literacy, which is to say the modern era.

And retrieving pattern recognition implies once again being able to perceive phenomena that are real, but not physical. That shift in consciousness can have a number of different outcomes, not all of them equally good or enlightening. But one possible outcome is re-opening the door to religious experience.