Religions have long been fascinated by new technology, often incorporating it in ways that are sometimes beneficial and sometimes questionable. A good adaptation was when the Reformation embraced the printing press, putting the Bible into the hands of ordinary Christians.
Today Christians are making good use of the new information technology, with websites that make a wealth of resources accessible, Bible apps that put God’s Word in multiple languages on smart phones, and blogs (like this one, I hope) that promote discussion and Christian reflection.
But some people go overboard. In the early printing press era, some Christians stopped going to church, reasoning that all they needed was the Bible to cultivate their own one-on-one relationship with God. Today, some religious people are content with “virtual church,” carrying out their spiritual lives on the web instead of with actual, hard-copy, meat-computer human beings.
After the jump is a fascinating account of the religious impact of electricity.
In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity–invisible, mysterious, powerful–seemed like a spiritual energy.
Whole new religions were based around it, and some traditional Christians tried to incorporate it into their theology.
The Oneida community in New York associated electricity with sex, practicing polygamy and free sex in an attempt to create a “spiritual battery.”
Spiritualists connected electricity and its application with the telegraph as a way to explain their attempts to communicate with the dead.
And some Christians re-defined Christ and the Christian faith in terms of electrical energy, resulting in yet another manifestation of the gnostic heresy.
After the jump, an excerpt from a review of a book on the subject.
Addison Nugent, The Forgotten Religions That Worshipped Electricity | Flashback | OZY:
“Religions are constantly balancing tradition and change,” says Erik Davis, author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. “With its weird, invisible powers and suggestion of vitality and mind power, electricity played a major role in the religious imagination.”
In America, one of the more scandalous examples of electric religion was the Oneida Community of New York. Founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, the Protestant commune believed that Jesus Christ’s power was a form of liquid electricity that could be transmitted to believers through touch. As the most intimate form of touch is sex, the group also believed that, if they had enough of it, they’d create a spiritual battery that would make them immortal and create heaven on earth. So the community encouraged polygamy, orgies and generally engaging in as much sexual activity as possible. Needless to say, the Oneida members were a happy bunch, and the commune lasted more than three decades.
Across the pond, English author Marie Corelli inadvertently created an electrified offshoot of Christianity called “The Electric Creed” in her best-selling novel A Romance of Two Worlds. Originally intended to be a work of fiction, the book contained a chapter that explained how the immortal soul, heaven and even Christ himself were all made of pure electricity. It goes so far as to compare Christ to the telegraph. “Earth and God’s World were like America and Europe before the Atlantic Cable was laid,” it reads. “God’s Cable is laid between us and His Heaven in the person of Christ.” After her readers started to actually devote themselves to telegraphic Jesus, Corelli willingly assumed the rule of guru, stating in 1896 that if she didn’t believe wholeheartedly in “The Electric Creed,” she wouldn’t have written it.
But the most electrically charged sect of all was the 19th-century invention known as Spiritualism. Spiritualism started in 1848, when Margaret and Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York, claimed to have made contact with the ghost of a murdered drifter. Their communication with this lost soul consisted of a series of rappings and tapping deeply reminiscent of Morse code, or the electric language that was used to send the first telegraph (which curiously read “What Hath God Wrought!”) just four years earlier in 1844. Telegraphy and Spiritualism were so linked that communication with the dead was often called “the spiritual telegraph.”
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