Worship in the Metaverse

As you sit in a cartoon pew, cartoon worship leaders perform music, and then a cartoon preacher gives a message.  If there is to be a baptism, this happens in computer-generated virtual water, whereupon the candidate in the virtual reality helmet at home kneels down to simulate being immersed in the water.

Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook who changed the name of his company to “Meta” to reflect his new ambitions, says that his goal is to make “immersive digital worlds” into “the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.”  He dreams of the time when we can all stay at home wearing virtually reality helmets, enabling us to work, shop, go to school, and socialize in the metaverse.

Some churches are already offering worship services in the metaverse, as described above.  I blogged about this phenomenon in my post The Metaverse Gives Us Metachurch.  You might want to read that post again to appreciate what follows.

One of the articles in the special Religion & Liberty issue that I blogged about yesterday is Worship in the Metaverse by A. Trevor Sutton.  He is a Lutheran pastor with whom I collaborated in our book Authentic Christianity:  How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World. He is also working on his Ph.D., in which he is studying the religious implications of our new technology.  Out of that work he has published Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits.

In his Religion & Liberty article, Trevor begins with a vivid reflection on the physicality of the risen Christ and our human physicality.  He then shows how all of the major Christian traditions–Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist–agree that worship addresses the senses and is to be embodied.

He makes a useful distinction between “technology” and “media,” drawing on that great media scholar Martin Luther:

While technology and media are often conflated, they are not identical or interchangeable. Technology can be understood as tools or instruments. (To be certain, this is not an exhaustive understanding of technology.) Media, on the other hand, are often understood as conduits for communication. Media are that which convey ideas, images, or information. For example, Martin Luther in his lectures on Isaiah recognized the ways in which worship and media intersect: “As the God who is worshiped, God is clothed in the earthly media of the Word, of Baptism, and of the Lord’s Supper, wherein he reveals himself.” Although it may often go unnoticed, corporate worship—both past and present—relies heavily on media.

Trevor also works with the thought of the pioneering media scholarship of Marshall McLuhan, who said that media is an extension of the body and its senses.  He applies this to worship:

Media are conduits for communication that influence not only the message itself but also the recipients of the message. For example, livestream video of in-person worship extends the sight and sounds of the sanctuary, but not the taste, touch, and smell of the worship service. Those viewing the livestream worship see and hear the sanctuary while the rest of their senses are located elsewhere. Their eyes and ears are extended into the worship space while their nose, tongue, and other body parts are not. Digital media allows part of you—but not all of you—to be somewhere far from the rest of your body.

Digital media’s ability to extend some of our senses results in a fragmented bodily experience, hence a disintegration of the senses. Part of you may be somewhere, but not all of you. The opposite of this is common sense (sensus communis), wherein there is communion and harmony of the bodily senses. Common sense occurs when all your senses—sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell—are gathered together in a harmonious and singular experience.

In-person worship is a common sense experience: You see the sanctuary, stained glass, cross or crucifix, and candles. You smell the incense. You taste the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. You touch the pews and hymnals and embrace others. You hear the Word proclaimed, crying babies, and the din of the worshiping space. In-person worship is the communion of senses wherein taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing coalesce in a common experience.

Metaverse worship, however, ruptures the communion of our senses. A VR headset transports everything to a virtual site of worship; eyes and ears and minds extend into the metaverse, while noses, mouths, hands, hearts, and guts remain elsewhere. The sense of touch is relegated to a couch or computer chair while smelling a house, coffee shop, or dormitory. Since the metaverse is a place devoid of tastes, VR worshippers taste whatever happens to be at the ready where they are worshiping: pancakes, coffee, or Doritos. Worshipping in the metaverse is devoid of common sense—you are here, you are there, you are everywhere. In short, you are nowhere.

Trevor is no Luddite.  He is not saying that watching and hearing a service online–which the majority of churches are now offering post-COVID– is necessarily wrong or ineffective.  The Word is efficacious, after all, and we can hear that Word through the online media.  He even concedes that different theologies can arrive at different practices.  “A tradition that values proclamation of the Word may see great possibility in online worship,” he says, “whereas one that gives priority to the Eucharist may see online worship as untenable.”

And, of course, watching and hearing an actual pastor conducting an actual service online before actual congregants is not the same as the completely virtual cartoon world of the metaverse.

His point is that the technology and the media that we use affects us. “Altering where and how we worship will alter our values and virtues, possibly encouraging a more solipsistic and individualistic approach not only to worship but to the Faith as a whole.”

I would add the observation that most religions work to free us from the “web of illusions.”  This is what Hinduism and Buddhism are built around, but the Bible too warns us against teachings based on illusions and false appearances (Isaiah 30:10, Col 2:23).  I am not aware of any religion that teaches us to live in illusions, much less to worship in an illusory space.  And when religious people try to do this, it will end up undermining their religion.

Illustration: The Revetar (Avatar) of the Bishop of London interacting with users, via The Church of Fools: Virtual Ritual and Material Faith. – Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Revetar-Avatar-of-the-Bishop-of-London-interacting-with-users-Image-courtesy-of_fig8_33436025 [accessed 24 Oct, 2022]