How the Internet Shapes Religious Life,or the Medium Is Itself the Message

Abstract

The Internet has become a resource for everyone for everything. It is accordingly now also a source of sermons and much more for pastors of churches in the USA. In consequence, the Internet shapes and alters how pastors and parishioners practice their religion. Because “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan observed, Internet sermons necessarily reflect and convey something of their Internet source. So, too, the nature and content religious life changes and takes on the characteristics of its new source of inspiration, the Internet. As the dominant expression of technology today, the Internet reveals technology ultimately and in the words of Jacques Ellul as “the real religion of our time.”