Virtual reality Christianity

Theology Today, Jul 1995 by Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks

Welcome to the virtual world of Battletech. No guts, no galaxy. (telephone greeting for Battletech, Inc.)

The technology of virtual reality games such as Battletech permits the participant to "experience" (the word experience becomes problematic in this context) a high tech battle, including graphic moments of killing or being killed, without any risk to life and limb. You put on the helmet, strap on the sensor pads and are instantly transported o the scene of a cosmic battle where your one task is to incinerate all opponents, the evil others. When my teenage sons insisted they would be social pariahs if I continued to refuse to let them play this game, I went and did it myself. It left me breathless with how real, how graphic this violence is and with the sharp realization that this game, like the dozens of Nintendo or other video games that are its techno-parents, there is only one plot--the forces of good must attack and completely destroy the forces of evil.(1)

The meaning of this Ur-narrative is intimately connected with the technology itself: The ability to separate the mind from the body and to "experience" the world without a human body permits the high degree of abstraction necessary to separate good from evil wholly. In Christianity, this is the gnostic strain, the fight between good and evil absolutized and projected onto a cosmic screen where two gods fight it out.

THE ABSOLUTIZING OF GOOD AND EVIL

In Edward Farley's book Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, he has named this connection quite explicitly. "[T]he ghost of Mani has always haunted Christian theology with the result that theology interpreted the distinctiveness of human agents as something floating above nature and the body."(2) Farley's work is an extraordinarily detailed attempt to map the contours of the human condition philosophically and to situate thinking on good and evil within the stresses of this condition, especially the condition of being a physical and social body. In the specific spheres of human reality, evil is constantly admixed with the good--there is no absolutizing of the evil other who can be ultimately defeated. "Because they are located in the spheres of human reality, evil and redemption will partake of the entanglements and mutual transcendings of those spheres."(3)

This statement of the mutual entanglement of good and evil contrasts sharply to the way that Western culture projects this struggle. In a current Marine Corps advertisement, a gloriously shiny white knight rides his white horse across a life-sized chess board and defeats the black garbed evil wizard. He is then magically transmuted into a white male Marine. "The few, the proud, the Marines," states the advertisement. This is the Western grounding myth of the polar opposites of good and evil deliberately cast as the militarization of the fight between whiteness and blackness. It is the ground of racism in the United States and its roots are the failure of Christian theology in the West to repudiate Manichean dualisms of body and spirit and the reference of evil to embodiment.

Another statement of the parameters of good and evil that specifically names and repudiates the racist dualisms of American culture is the volume edited by Emilie M. Townes, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering.(4) "Womanist" is a term coined by Alice Walker that means, among other things, "a feminist of color."(5) As this new word has journeyed through African American women's lives, hearing and speaking have gathered into this word multiple meanings that Walker's definition anticipated but, as yet, even in her fertile imagination had not been completely conceived. It means being an ethical agent under conditions of supreme injustice (Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics); it means hearing white feminists and separating the work African American women need to do from them (Jacqueline Grant, White Women's Christ, Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response); it means doing what needs to be done, regardless (Emilie Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope), even if that means going out into the wilderness (Dolores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk); and it continues to mean as this work goes on.

If there is anyone who would be entirely justified in constructing a perspective on evil and suffering that projects evil outward onto the oppressing other, it would be the African American woman, cast by the dynamics of the white racism of American slavery to be "da mule uh de world."(6) That the fourteen African American women who contributed to A Troubling in My Soul did not choose a dualistic explanation for the evil and suffering visited on them but, instead, insisted on a far more complex analysis is striking. The poem from which the title is taken suggests this refusal to take the easy explanation:

evil is a force outside us suffering makes you stronger lies lies lies to my very deepest soul there is a troubling in my soul