Challenging Authority in an Online Context

In 16th century England, a sort of rebellion was formed against the Catholic Church, who, up until that time was the leading religious authority in the country. The movement was known as the Reformation and caused a separation and the eventual formation of the Protestant Church. Much of the ideas that challenged the Pope's authority were circulated to the "new media" of that day, which was through the printing press. Books and articles written by Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin spread like wildfire. In today's society, when an idea circulates around the internet, it spreads exponentially faster than in the time of the Reformation. Similar to the situation of the church in the 16^th century, there are people in the church who feel like the church is not doing what it is supposed to be doing, and are becoming more and more vocal about what they believe to be the problem. As Pauline Cheong points out in her article on religious authority in online context, the concept of authority can often be vague. However, the four types she identifies are hierarchal, structure, ideological and textual authority. I would argue that all four of these views of authority are challenged in some degree on the internet, but pertaining to Christians speaking out against the church and the problems they perceive it to be having, I would say hierarchal and ideological authority are challenged the most. For example, on the social networking site known as Twitter, many faith seekers sign up for an account and begin to “follow” hundreds of different pastors from around the world. Usually if the seeker is a Christian, they will follow mainly Christian pastors for their religious guidance, but even then the pastors may all have varying views on different aspects of the Christian faith. Some pastors even speak out against the church in areas where they perceive the church to be slacking, which causes those pastor’s followers to, well…follow. Sometimes people will even follow young pseudo tweet-ologians who are not even trained in seminary. A recent example of this type of phenomenon was when a young man named Jefferson Bethke wrote a spoken word and put a video on YouTube entitled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY&noredirect=1). In the video Bethke spoke out against the church in many ways, challenging the traditional ideological beliefs held by many Christians, as well as the hierarchal authority by bypassing the clergy and pastor with his message. The video has now over 20 million views, and many young Christians passionately promoted the video, saying “This is what REAL Christianity is supposed to be!” This clearly challenges the traditional authority structure of the church, as did the Reformers who spoke out against the established church in the 16^th century. Perhaps we are witnessing a sort of Cyber-Reformation?