Chicago, USA - For as long as preachers have been engaging listeners, critics have been muttering nearby about the need for more enlightened leadership. Even Moses couldn't catch a break from his band of desert-wandering Israelites, who feared he was trying to kill them.
Now, thanks to Web logs, called blogs, and other Internet postings, critics in every faith tradition are getting a hearing far beyond the synagogue, church or mosque parking lot. Forced to listen, because others are, religious leaders are responding in ways that show how religious authority is shifting in the 21st Century.
In religion, bloggers well-versed in Scripture, church rules and even poignant personal testimonies are challenging official policies and winning followers of their own. Traditional authorities, meanwhile, are seeing problems and opportunities alike in the new milieu.
"It's clear that religions that are more kind of `open source'--less authoritarian, less hierarchical, less preoccupied with controlling the codified material--are doing better on the Internet," says Lorne Dawson, a sociologist who studies religion and the Internet at the University of Waterloo Ontario. Elsewhere, he says, it's a heyday for naysayers.
"The critics, the ex-members ... they are thriving online because this is giving them a voice so much more powerful than they would have ever had before. ... It really is the realm where anyone who has an ax to grind against a religion ... can find hundreds of sites online that are just dying to hear their story, dying to hear their criticism."
Denominational authorities don't always respond kindly to public airings of the religious family's "dirty laundry."
Trustees of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board initially sought to remove one of its members, Wade Burleson of Enid, Okla., after he discussed board deliberations on his blog. But other Southern Baptist bloggers were outraged and wouldn't let the controversy die.
In March, the board backed down, rescinding its request to remove Burleson. But the board approved a rule barring trustees from publicly criticizing actions of the missions agency.
"It is a controversy about the kind of practices and procedures that will characterize Southern Baptist denominational actions in the future," reads a blog from Tom Ascol, executive director of the Founders Ministries, a Southern Baptist reform movement. "Will dissent be squelched with a heavy hand?"
Bloggers are stirring the pot in other denominations as well.
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston Sean P. O'Malley pledged last year to open the diocese's financial books for public inspection after an effective Web-based campaign among disgruntled laity raised the specter that the Massachusetts Legislature would make such disclosure a legal requirement.
"I wouldn't say the church has changed its ways, but we are raising attention for these issues," said John Moynihan, spokesman for Voice of the Faithful, a lay reform group formed after the clergy abuse scandal of 2002. He said that reporters, who seldom used to quote dissenting laity, now read the group's positions on developing events and call seeking comments to balance what the church hierarchy is saying.
In light of blog mania, religious organizations are getting proactive to make the voices of their top authorities more accessible. Posting the actual words spoken by Pope Benedict XVI on any number of topics, for instance, has become a priority for church staffers in an age when people seem to value messages that come directly from "the horse's mouth."
"People want to know, `What did he say? What did the pope actually say?'" said Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "This enables people to get material without it being filtered by the media."
Meanwhile, reform-minded dissidents are finding the Internet enables them to bypass religious authorities altogether in a way that was virtually impossible, at least in terms of mass media, just 15 years ago.
International followers of Bahai pioneered such circumvention in the mid-1990s, when spirited discussions about official policies and projects occurred in an arena where authorities couldn't regulate what was said--the independent Web-based project called Talisman.
Similarly, Muslim reformer Irshad Manji is now bypassing her faith's clerics and news outlets. She's offering her book, "The Trouble With Islam," as a download from her Web site. Internet platforms are fueling a particularly thorny crisis among European Muslims, Dawson said. The reason: Islam has no universal system for adjudicating among various authority figures. Uprooted from the mosques and imams of their homelands, recent immigrants to Europe now gain access to competing authorities through the Web.
Ideologically driven fundamentalists and cultural progressives alike find fatwas from abroad to support their views and, when so moved, denounce the Koranic interpretations of local elders or imams.