For the last two weeks, I’ve been walking around with the Pope in my pocket.
Released in late May, the H2Onews iPhone app is the first news application approved by the Vatican. With a touch of my phone I can now get excerpts from the sermons of his Holiness, news from the Vatican, and even the Sunday Gospel. Sporting a sleek interface and a choice of eight languages, the Pontiff has gone 2.0.
This might sound like the Vatican is out on the cutting edge, but H2Onews was actually a little slow out of the gate. Last year, an Italian priest named Paolo Padrini devised a popular iBreviary, an application that provides the user access to the official, daily prayers of the Catholic church (offering a meager five languages). Future versions, according to the swirling rumor mill of the Catholic-technocrati suggest that future versions will include audio accompaniments, perhaps Gregorian chants.
Roman Catholics, of course, hardly have a corner on the market of faith-based apps. There are several versions of iPhone Bibles available, and the sophisticated ReadScriptures app allows Latter Day Saints to highlight, bookmark, and search the entire canon of Mormon texts. Billed as “the perfect companion to your Halal digital lifestyle,” iSalat allows Muslim users to calculate the proper prayer times, wherever they may travel. One of the many available Jewish scripture apps, iTalmud gives the user access to the entire Babylonian Talmud in the original Gemaric Aramaic and Hebrew. The iBlessing and Parveometer apps, meanwhile, can help an iPhone-wielding Jew keep kosher.
This is just the beginning: iMenorah allows you to light virtual candles; iPrayers allows you to select from sixteen different categories (joy, thankfulness, etc.), and display an appropriate Bible verse; while iChing Divination delivers a technological version of that ancient Chinese practice. There are also a variety of apps to aid in meditation practices: iMantra, for instance, divides its mantras into five categories: Buddhist, Hindu, Kundalini, Universal, and Planetary. Users can slide mala beads from one side of the screen to the other and even replace the pre-loaded image of the Medicine Buddha with another deity of their choice. And those who worship at the altar of Jeff Tweedy should know that they haven’t been forgotten as there’s an app for them too.
These innovations follow, of course, a long tradition of religious practices keeping pace with the evolution of technology. From the printing press to radio to the internet, no technological development has failed to be appropriated as a means to spread the faith. As the inventor of the iBreviary, Father Padrini, explained in a recent interview, toting around a prayer book on your phone is not that far removed from the actual books and rosaries that a devout Catholic would have once been expected carry. In this way, he said, “[t]he media can become places of reflection, also of silence… and surely they can contribute to a new socialization.”
Socialization is the key to the success of the iPhone, which itself has inspired a level of devotion frequently compared to religious faith. The cult of the iPhone revolves around the notion that its smooth, technocolor surface signals a web of connections between its owner and a network of users who are global, hip, and savvy. But it is also true that the iPhone works so well because each individual can customize the device. That’s why these faith-based applications have proliferated: The door is wide open to claim that space in my pocket for whatever form of worship that can be imagined.
Here is where the iPhone begins to become distinct from previous technologies. Unlike, for instance, radio and television, the creation of an iPhone app is relatively easy and inexpensive. Unlike a printed book, the cost of each app is relatively small (most are free or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose.
As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the profane. My Pontiff app sits next to my iLightSaber, my virtual US Constitution, and an app that can tell me how much money I’m losing each day in my 401k. But that kind of heterogeneity is only a difference of degree beyond the experiential kaleidoscope served up on cable television or the world wide web. What is distinct about the iPhone and similar devices is they that they will allow us to dabble in a variety of faith traditions—to test the waters without committing a large investment of time or money, and without risk of public exposure. Thanks to the interactivity available in a smartphone application, we can all become religious dilettantes.
A Pew Forum study published last year found that half of all American adults changed their religious affiliation before the age of 24. The iPhone is only going to accelerate that trend. With a few taps of the screen, the evangelical teen can recite the rosary, the Catholic can hear prayers in ancient Hebrew, and a Jew can begin to recite a daily Buddhist chant. It would be wrong to equate any of this testing of the technological waters with full conversion, but it may be that what exactly conversion means in contemporary life could change as well. The iPhone is not about making hard choices; it is about creating new networks of possibility.
When I watch Benedict XVI on my iPhone, he looks calm and stately; his voice is measured and even. I don’t know, though, whether the Pope has his own iPhone yet. If he doesn’t, I’m sure that the folks at Apple would be happy to help him out. He might enjoy poking bubblewrap and checking out his out his own Facebook page. I have a feeling, though, that if he starts to really understand the medium, then he might not appear so placid anymore. This technology does more than give him the chance to call the faithful home; it gives them new maps to elsewhere.
