When permanence is exalted, faithfulness promised, acceptance of biblical or other precepts (of the Koran, of Far Eastern pantheistic religions) ascertained, literacy and religion are only mimicked. Talaba, the 100 rubles (or whatever the currency of choice) per month paid by Shiite missionaries from Iran, brings many Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmenians to the new religious schools of Islam. Chances are that a higher bidder from another religion would spoil the game. Under the new pragmatic circumstances of human self-constitution, change, variety, self-determination, individualism, negation of authority, divine or secular, and skepticism are decisive for reaching the levels of efficiency demanded by a dynamic scale of existence.
Today's world is not one of generalized atheism. It is, rather, one of many partial religious literacies, sharing in some basic symbolism, although not necessarily in a unifying framework for its consistent interpretation. Many do not believe, for reasons of science or convenience, in the religious explanation of the origin of the universe and life. Or they do not care for the message of love and goodness embedded in almost every current manifestation of faith. They see in every religious book the handwriting of some groups who, in order to impose their values, invented the image of a supreme force in order to achieve, if not authority, at least credibility.
We live in an environment of compromise and tolerance, infinite distinctions, fast sequences of failure and success, challenged authority and generalized democracy. In today's huge and ineffective social mechanism, in the integrated and networked world, individual failure does not affect the performance of the system. Illiteracy, while dangerous under circumstances characteristic for the pragmatic of the recent past, only marginally affects the levels of efficiency reached. Religiosity, of consequence in the same pragmatic framework, plays no role whatsoever in the illiterate practical experiences of human self-constitution. Calling such assessments heresies, as some might be inclined to do, does not really answer the question of whether religious law can still serve, alone or together with other laws, as the binding tie of community-as it does not address the broader issues of whether literacy can serve as the binding tie of community. Because of their pragmatic nature, characteristics of religion and structural characteristics of language are fundamentally similar. If we want to understand the condition of religion today, we have to specifically address the pragmatic circumstances of self-constitution within the civilization of illiteracy.
In the events of tele-evangelism there is no place for literacy. But the video church, and computer-aided religion, the bible on CD-ROM, or CD-I, the vacation village for believers, and religious tourism are mainly forms of entertainment. Their validity is divorced from the concept of the exalted individual, critical in the context of a small- scale community. Consequently, the religious dimension of transcendence is annihilated. Ours is the time of the eternal instant, not of some vague eternity promised as reward after the present. Partially banalized through abuse of the word, concepts such as dignity, decency, and human values have become the clichés of the video church, with as many gospels as there are preachers. Religiosity today differs from the religiosity of previous pragmatic frameworks insofar as it corresponds to the accentuated insularity of the individual.
As long as the viewer is only a digit away on his or her remote control from a pornography channel, from the latest quote on the stock market, of from a commercial message-for denture adhesive, gastric relief, and home pregnancy tests-it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between sanctity and triviality, righteousness and venality. The global community of tele-viewing is splitting into smaller and smaller groups. And TV, as a pulpit of missionary activity, reveals itself as only syntactically different from the missionary work of advertisement. Mass religion proves to be as impersonal as the market. In effect, it severs the relations between religion and the mysterious, still unexplained aspects of human existence. A virtual reality package can be as good as the performance of having the blind see, and the cripple leave the wheelchair to enter the 100-meter dash. The virtual cathedral, the stadium, and the mass audience addressed in front of the camera are themselves of a scale inadequate to both the teaching disseminated and the nature of religious experience, no matter how far the effort to change the vocabulary goes.
The language of the books is rooted in experiences to which the tele-viewer no longer has a direct relation. They cannot be substituted in a medium adapted to change and variety. The categories that religious discourse centers on-faith, goodness, transcendence, authority, sin, punishment-were established in a pragmatic framework totally different from that of the present. Today, existence offers variety, immediate satisfaction, and protection from the whims of nature. The sense of danger has changed. The equity accumulated by the church in these categories may be enough to entitle claims of ownership, given people's inertia, but not to maintain them as effective means of affecting current practical experiences. It might well be true that three out of five Americans now believe there is a hell, and that people in other countries share the same assumption, but this has no bearing on their self-constitution in the world of quickly changing scenarios for fulfillment outside faith. Networking and distributed work are better synchronized with the pragmatics of high efficiency of our day. Software for interactive multimedia keeps track of a person's religious patterns, and provides prayer and interpretation integrated in the same package.
In its attempt to adapt to a new framework of human activity, religion adopted social causes (renouncing its metaphysics), scientific terminology (renouncing agnosticism), or the means of entertainment (renouncing its asceticism). With each step outside the boundaries of religion, the transcendental dimension is sacrificed. This dimension is embedded in the medium of literacy through which religious practical experience became a fixture in society. When the word does not satisfy, believers resort to other means of expression, some older than religion. It is not unusual to have a religious celebration during the day in some Catholic churches in Brazil, and at night, on the same altar, a chicken sacrificed to Yemenyá. The literate celebration, of European import, and the illiterate sacrifice to which a different group of believers connects, are impossible to reconcile. In this framework, freedom of choice, as vulgar or trivial as those choices might be, takes precedence over authority. In Brazil, "Graças a Deus!" is paired with the practice of African cults (Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba), just as "Allah-hu-akbar" is with shamanistic or Buddhist celebrations in Azerbaidjan and Kazakstan. These are particular expressions of religion in the civilization of illiteracy, as much as TV evangelism is. For as much as religion was submitted to the word, performance always seems to get the upper hand.
To blindly ascertain permanence against the background of change would only further undermine religious practice. This is why the new religions focus on the immediate and produce the reward as fast as it is expected. The continuous proliferation of new religious denominations, soon to be as many as there are people who constitute the networks of human interaction in today's pragmatic context, reflects also the ability of the church to adapt. But this was not religion's reason for being in the first place, and will not represent more than what actually happens when we all wear the same shoes, or shirts, or hats but read a different label on each, when we all eat the same food that is only packaged differently, when we all vote for the same politics (or lack of same) while maintaining party affiliations. When each has his or her own god, God ceases to exist.
With the end of the civilization of literacy, partial religious literacies emerge, developing their own languages, their own organizations, their own justification. The heterogeneity of the world, its intrinsic relativity, and its dynamics of change mark religious practical experiences in ways not dissimilar to those of scientific, artistic, political, educational, moral, and many other experiences. Consumption of the language of religion in ceremonies and holidays that promote the expectation of more and cheaper, on which the quest for unlimited satisfaction of needs and desires is based, does not qualify anyone as religious or literate. Neither does secularism for that matter, no less illiterate, and no less subjected to the same expectation of high efficiency which undermines the core of any religion.
Secular religion