IT IS difficult, in Synod week, to suppose that Christianity has a future; but the decline of old-fashioned rationalism continues apace. The Economist looked at the rise of TikTok religion. “TikTok offers a cacophony of liturgy, which sometimes baffles as much as it enlightens. . . Videos offer new rituals (‘holy girl habits’), slogans (‘God is so cool!’) and counsel in verse (‘When in doubt, worship it out’). [Influencers] who tout ‘the Jesus glow’ have seen great success on a platform where personal beauty advice flourishes.

“FaithTok is awash in religious disinformation, from AI-generated hate speeches to deepfakes of prominent religious leaders.”

The piece was clearly written by someone who grew up on the web, and thus remains unaware of the great uprooting and disruption of authority which digital media of any kind brought. Someone such as Calvin Robinson would have been an entirely local phenomenon — at best, a clerical eccentric — before the worldwide web.

This disruption was partly a result of the limited bandwidth in the early internet: when everything was text, many of the extratextual clues that we had relied on to suggest the authority and provenance of a preacher disappeared. One of the things that makes a bishop seem more considerable than a street preacher is the size and splendour of his or her cathedral.

But, if the sermons are written out, and presented without even the kind of information contained in the way a book is bound and printed, all that distinction disappears, and it seems that the two are interchangeable.

But that particular disruption did not last: with the enormous growth of bandwidth that brought video into everyone’s pocket everywhere and all the time, quite different signals of worth appeared. Intimacy and sincerity trumped clarity of argument, and both could, with increasing ease, be faked. The studio replaced the pulpit — and a backdrop is a much less costly signal than a cathedral.

ONE of the shrewdest watchers of these digital transitions is Nick Carr, whose book The Shallows (Atlantic Books, 2010) was the first to point out how Google — so, not just the obvious suspects — is making us stupid.

In a recent Substack, he has an elegant argument for the return of demons to this world: “Contemporary man’s faith in reality, in an objective world defined and limited by its material qualities, is breaking down. We’re seeing a rebellion against the constraints of materiality, one manifestation of which is an increasing openness to supernatural visions. I don’t mean the visions of the imagination. I mean visions of a spirit world that appear as real as or realer than perceptions of the physical world. . .

“Perception is a neurological phenomenon but also a social one. In seeing things, we mimic the way others see things. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the re-enchantment of sensory perception is happening just as people are habituating themselves to living in a technologically mediated world, a world constructed of images rather than things. . .

“We viewed the information age as an age of reason, governed by the scientist and the mathematician. We’re now coming to realize it’s altogether different — an enchanted age, governed by the myth-maker and the mystic. To render the world as information is a process of de-materialization, and in de-materialization’s wake comes enchantment. In replacing objects with representations of objects, with information, we have slowly but inexorably dissolved reality. We have opened — ‘widened’ might be the better word — a portal to the paranormal. Aberrations of vision spread through media as easily as aberrations of behaviour do.

“The demon is the perfect manifestation of the hyperreality in which we live today and of which Baudrillard was the prophet.”

BUT it’s not just popes and archbishops who are losing their authority in this strange new world. Even the prophet Dawkins is mocked. The excellent science writer Philip Ball concludes an essay in Aeon magazine with the reflection that metaphors “are hard to dislodge when their utility has passed. . .

“Thus, genes may still be ‘selfish’, and organisms may still be ‘machines’, brains ‘computers’, genomes ‘blueprints’, so long as we give those metaphorical words different interpretations to the everyday ones — thereby, of course, negating their value as metaphors. . . For what, after all, is extraordinary — and challenging to scientific description — about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency. It seems odd to have to say this, but it’s time for a biology that is life-centric.”