A number of commentators have argued that in the last half century Christianity has declined in the West and a more generic belief in the supernatural has taken its place. According to this narrative, religion has declined and spirituality has increased.

Though there are problems with some of these arguments, in general I am persuaded by them. The question that arises for me, however, is this: If traditional religiousness is declining, where are these once-religious-now-spiritual people getting their ways of thinking about God, spirit, the afterlife, and related ideas? Out of what raw materials are they fashioning new beliefs about the transcendent realms of ghosts, gods or souls? One place, I think, is science.

At the turn of the twentieth century, many Europeans and Americans sensed that older traditions had failed them. That feeling accelerated during and after the Great War. When he filled out this survey in 1904, William James was helping one of his graduate students, James Bissett Pratt, who put this survey together as part of his doctoral research. James Pratt and many others were aware that older foundations for belief were crumbling and they experimented with ways of using psychology to understand what was authentically religious. Eventually they produced normative conclusions about the best ways to worship and the most healthy types of belief. Their recommendations were hard on traditional, institutional religions, and this became increasingly true by the middle of the twentieth century. They concluded that when old-time religious concepts were updated and made less superstitious, these concepts would become more believable.

James and his students also turned to psychological studies of religion to understand the nature and sources of belief and put its power on display. Attuned to matters relating to individual religion, these questionnaires themselves suggested that the essence of religion lay in the self. In the survey reprinted here, Pratt indicates that “personal experience” was more important than second-order “philosophical generalizations” that were removed from the vital sources of the religious self. In his earlier surveys of conversion, another student of William James, Edwin Starbuck, made the same move. And James also did the same thing in his 1901-2 Varieties. Pratt’s interpretive investment in personal experience is clear right at the beginning: he believes that religious institutions, rites and communities are less important. The essence of the thing to be surveyed—the essence of right religion—is inner experience.

James’s answers reflect some of the ways that religion was being torn down and spirituality built up in its place during this particular era. Did he believe in God because the Bible or some other more traditional source of religious knowledge told him so? Did he base his faith and life on the Bible? “No. No. No. It is so human a book that I don’t see how belief in its divine authorship can survive the reading of it.” Even prayer, a more traditional religious act, is forfeited here in favor of something else, perhaps study or discussion or analysis of religious experiences. Prayer made him feel “foolish and artificial.”

For James the most reliable source of religious knowledge was located in the inner stuff of emotions, will-power, and desire. He believed God existed because he felt a need for God. “I need it so that it ‘must’ be true.” He believed God existed because he needed a “more powerful ally of my own ideals.” He also believed in God (in a “dimly (real)” way) because he sensed the presence of a germ within him that responded to other peoples’ dramatic religious experiences. He didn’t have them himself, but he was thrilled to see that others did. The testimony of others he says here “is so strong that I am unable to pooh-pooh it away.” There was an emotional power behind the breathless way he and his students collected and shared thousands of these first-hand accounts. All of it was scientific proof for God and spiritual things.

James did not initiate the shift from religion to spirituality, though I think his life and indeed this questionnaire are emblematic of that shift in its earlier stages. After all, was not the shift from a robust institutional religiousness to a more individualistic spirituality inherent in Protestantism from the beginning? The older Protestant critique was a lot like James’s: get rid of inessential, outer religious forms and cling to inner, “spiritual” essentials—faith alone! James’s work was merely an extension of the paring down of religion that Protestants performed centuries before he came along.

There is another aspect of James’s purification of religion that is central to my argument, however, and it has to do with how he turned to an empirical study of experience as a new foundation for his spirituality. As older warrants for belief waned, as the Bible and even Jesus faded into a demythologized past, where could people turn to reestablish faith in God or immortality? The answer was science. When properly domesticated by religious believers, scientific procedures were ways of seeing spiritual things with certainty. With them we saw things truly, and seeing was believing. When James saw people around him falling into fits and trances, he believed. There was, he thought, something to it.

James wasn’t the only believer turning to science to appropriate its more certain ways of knowing, seeing, and believing.

 
John M. Watson’s starting point was similar to James’s in two ways. First, though he was willing to hold onto more of Christianity than James, he also believed that older ways of thinking about religion were superstitious, simple-minded and old-fashioned. Second, like James he believed that by studying the essence of religion in experience we could make religious experience more real to people and catch real glimpses of the divine spirit acting in these experiences.

But Watson also turns to other sciences to elicit another set of emotions that we might call religious: awe and wonder. In Watson’s Science as Revelation he insisted that a new vital faith might be had by studying not just human nature but also the beauty and lawfulness of nature in general. Science, in other words, was the alembic through which modern spiritual sensibilities were developed. “The new conception of God in the light of all the sciences as the intelligent energy, with many forms but with a single identity that fills the universe, is a thousand times more convincing than our former conceptions of Deity.” Watson used science to develop a new picture of God. “By the ladder of the sciences we may rise step by step, without the slightest break or gap,” Watson wrote, “from the simplest form of matter and energy and from nature at its zenith obtain the most sublime, beautiful and uplifting religious concepts.” God is energetic—a common belief among twentieth-century religious liberals—and the appropriate response to that God is openness, wonder, and astonishment.

There is a lot to be astonished about in Watson’s lecture tour of the universe, and participants evidently were appropriately awed. This is clear from the promotional pamphlet. Science was showing us that there was more to the world than meets the eye. Telescopes demonstrated that the world was more vast and wonderful than we had ever thought. And microscopes brought into focus another world within our world, a world of intricate crystals and microscopic ecologies. Both new technologies yielded “beautiful and wonderful revelations.” Both proved that there were things that existed beyond the range of our vision and both helped us see them. What else might be out there that we couldn’t yet see? Were there unseen dimensions where other creatures resided? You had to wonder.

Conversations about higher dimensions had already begun in the late nineteenth century, when scientists used higher dimensional math to understand better the universe’s laws. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, theologians and writers borrowed these ideas to try to “prove” the existence of heaven, explain the mechanisms involved in spirit communication or understand better the fate of dearly departed souls. Films and books about higher dimensions also made people wonder. This 1959 film was only one of the many imaginative narratives that depicted scientists with new powers and access to other worlds.

The 4D Man told the story of two brothers who developed an “amplifier” that enabled them to have fourth dimensional powers. (Basically, they could pass through walls.) In the fourth dimension, however, time moved more rapidly, and passing into the 4D therefore meant aging quickly. (There were downsides to wandering into other planes of existence.) The same themes were played out in a 1963 episode of the sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits, though here the 4D machine transported people (briefly) to a plane of existence that looked like a shadowy afterlife where scientists could call out for spirits of lost loved ones. This show began with the cast around a séance table. It ended with a successful journey to the 4D/heaven in a scientific laboratory.

The film and the TV show suggest ways that Americans borrowed scientific ideas about other dimensions to help them imagine the existence of unseen realms and recover an imaginative sense for the supernatural. Books about other dimensions—some theological but many sci-fi or fiction—did the same thing. In the last thirty years, with the rise of multidimensional string theory, there are more and more popularizations of science that religious people take up with enthusiasm and wonder. Science and science fiction point the way to uncanny, mysterious, and otherworldly realities.

That the universe is uncanny and mysterious is admitted even by more sober physicists today. Fred Alan Wolf is not one of them. He is a scientific mystic with a fantastic superhero alter ego—Dr. Quantum—who, like the 4D scientists in The 4D Man, found new powers and abilities in twentieth-century science.

Wolf received his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963 and actively worked in the field until a 1971 sabbatical trip to India and Katmandu, where he had his first religious experience in a Buddhist temple. He left his academic position at San Diego State University in 1974 and set out with a few friends and left wing physicists to create the Fundamental Fysiks Group in San Francisco, a group that used quantum principles to explain ESP, psychokinesis, occult phenomena, and spirit communication. Since then Wolf has written popular books about spirituality, consciousness, and quantum physics. The image reproduced here is from one of these books.

What happens when, as it says on the cover, “science meets spirit”? Wolf and other quantum mystics have identified several ways that scientific thinking has led to new religious ideas. I can enumerate three here:

1. Quantum science shows us that the natural world is mysterious, uncanny, and multidimensional. Nature dissolves into energetic forces that elude the epistemologies of measurement and control scientists have traditionally used. All things can look like particles or waves but at bottom are different forms of energy vibrating at different frequencies.

2. God is an immanent force in this energetic world, or perhaps is coextensive with this energetic world.

3. Mind or spirit is the source of all realities and things. If in former times it seemed true that mind/spirit was epiphenomenal and the material world was the only real reality, today the reverse is true: the material world is epiphenomenal and mind/spirit is the only reality. (Wolf and others reach this conclusion by interpreting the observer effect in quantum physics. Long story.) The preoccupation with the power of the mind or consciousness to shape or determine reality is a preoccupation that increases as the twentieth century wears on, though it is unmistakably present in James as well, who believed our intentions shaped reality and who argued that our consciousness contained mysterious powers of mystical perception.

My argument in this short piece has been pretty simple. It is that twentieth-century believers have appropriated ideas from the sciences (and especially from popular science publications) to fashion new ways of thinking about God and the transcendent. There is no doubt that Americans draw on a range of ideas and images as they reimagine religious concepts. But science has a privileged place in our culture. It is probably the most powerful source of certain knowledge. Why not incorporate its key metaphors and concepts as we try to understand where Americans get their ideas about the world, its mysterious qualities, ineradicable ghosts, and transcendent boundaries?

This last winter I was in New York City. I had two speaking gigs, but I had arrived a few days early to show my mother and daughter around the city. We did all the things that tourists do, from seeing Wicked and The Lion King to going down to Wall Street, where we watched giggling tourists from around the world take photographs of their loved ones holding the testicles of that huge brass bull. There are cross-cultural patterns, it turns out.

It was her spring break, so my daughter eventually had to go back to school. Mom was not on spring break, and she was not about to leave. She wanted more. And the more she really wanted was Live! with Regis and Kelly. So we took a cab up to freeze our butts off in an early morning line that wound around the studio building. We determined fairly quickly that we never had a chance, a fact which we discerned in a warm coffee shop, holding a piece of paper that said “41” on it, as in “41 on the waiting list.” And so we headed back downtown, to freeze in another line, this time to see Al Roker do his weather gig on NBC’s Today Show.

Mom strikes up a conversation with a police officer. He gives her a productive tip: “Why don’t you go across the street to the NBC Studios, where they are filming an episode of The Dr. Oz Show.” Oz! That was all it took. Mom, like millions of other American women, loves Dr. Oz, a fifty-something Harvard-trained heart surgeon who looks like a movie star and has his own show addressing the health and happiness of its largely-female audience.

With a name like Oz, how can you go wrong? I grew up in a little town in southeastern Nebraska called Hebron, which was wiped out in 1953 by a monster tornado—just leveled the place. Not surprisingly, The Wizard of Oz used to scare the living begeezus out of me, mostly because of the opening tornado scene and those damned flying monkeys. I hated those flying monkeys.

But there was wisdom in the Land of Oz, too. For example, it was its eponymous bumbling Wizard who taught my little psyche, somehow, that some of the most bombastic mysteries of religion, of “the great and powerful Oz,” are really little more than human projections. These fake religious projections were in turn answered by an intensely alive, literally colorful mystical dreamscape of floating orbs, magic wands, and an excess of poppy flowers. I didn’t know then what I know now, namely, that this culturally potent combination of religious critique and surreal cultural expression originated in the story’s creator, Frank Baum, who was a Theosophist, and therefore deeply critical of traditional religion. In addition to writing his Oz series, he held séances in his home, wrote about clairvoyants and nature spirits, and believed in reincarnation. As a child, I didn’t know what a Theosophist was; I just knew I liked the topsy-turvy world that this Theosophist made.

Back in the midtown Arctic, mom and I got to the Rockefeller Tower and spent about an hour winding our way through the elaborate security lines, escalators, elevators, and young NBC pages, who happily shepherded us from this to that initiatory level in what looked increasingly like some great cosmic chain of being. We eventually got to the waiting room for The Dr. Oz Show. Physically speaking, I had absolutely no idea where we finally were. We could have been on the third floor, or the fiftieth, or in an underground alien base.

We sat in a really drab room for about thirty minutes. The actual studio was just on the other side of the wall. We could watch the comedian get the audience ready for the taping on a large television screen. We could also hear him through the wall.

Most of the people around us began complaining. Okay, it was more of a bitching. They had been promised a seat on the show, and this was no seat on the show. It was a seat behind a wall of the show. More pleasant pages entered and left, vaguely promising this or that. The people weren’t having it. They kept bitching. Except for mom. She just smiled and talked about how cool it was to be this close. She also loved it when Dr. Oz appeared at the back of the waiting room, surrounded by make-up artists and what I took to be script supervisors.

Then it happened. Dr. Oz made his grand entry onto the studio floor and introduced the show’s topic: “Psychic Mediums: Are They the New Therapists?” The guest was John Edward, the television medium and author. Edward and this particular topic, it turns out, was why we were in the waiting room in the first place. As Dr. Oz explained in his opening lines, this topic had attracted more audience attention than any in the show’s history.

As any scholar of spirituality can tell you, there is a long history of engagement between the medical sciences and the mystical arts. Furthermore, the appeal of such mediums to a mass audience has an equally long history, including stages and pulpits much different from this drab corner of network headquarters. So, I wasn’t surprised at all that John Edward had solicited such attention for Oz’s viewer audience.

I was surprised by the sophistication of the show’s writers. They were not asking, yet again, the same old question: Is it all real or all fake? Instead, they asked: Do psychic mediums sometimes function in a therapeutic fashion for grieving individuals? (Answer: Absolutely.) In effect, they did an end-run around the question of belief, evading the classic debunking postures that had populated so many of these magic-science encounters. And they covered their bases, too. Dr. Oz and his producers invited a representative from the American Psychology Association to sit in the front row. And Edward himself spoke about his strong feelings that newly grieving parents should not visit a medium and how one should never substitute a visit to a medium for needed psychotherapeutic or psychiatric help. In the contest between faith and science, Dr. Oz and his guests had one clear reply: therapy first.

Within this therapeutic certitude, however, there was some intriguing ambiguity. One might expect from Dr. Oz—or from any doctor, really—an arrogant dismissal of mediumship and its therapies. However, this is not what we got from Oz. Instead, we got a thoughtful, open-minded, even humble heart surgeon who began by confessing that, “I have seen things about life and death that I just cannot explain, and that science can’t study.” Later, he would gently identify himself with the quarter of the American population that does not believe in an afterlife, but he was obviously intrigued and moved by what he witnessed John Edward doing with his audience. Mom was right. Dr. Oz was cool. I immediately liked him.

Edward began by explaining how he gets the messages—like daydreams—and how the message is seldom, if ever, perfect because of its medium, that is, him. He can only interpret what he senses, much like one must interpret a dream. Edward explained that he can only do this through his own terms of reference. In short, he explained that his ability is not a direct line to the beyond. It is something mediated, filtered, and interpreted again by him. Sounded right to me. Edward began with a young woman named Jen. The hits started immediately. He somehow knew that Jen’s mother had died of breast cancer. He asked her if “she got the car.” She had. She had been given her mother’s Lexus, which her mother had purchased right before she passed. He also knew that Jen and her sister had been discussing “sexting” on the way to the studio. What they had actually been doing was obsessing over which bachelor party photos to post to Facebook. Close enough. Meanwhile, as Edward thought through Jen, I was observing pretty much what I am always observing, namely, that the erotic always finds a way to peek through, even when you are talking to the dead.

It looked as if Jen had asked to go first, since she explained that Edward had done a reading for her mother while she was still alive and she herself was a fan. So his reading of Jen was impressive, but not quite spontaneous. Dr. Oz now opened the show up to Edward’s own intuition. He quickly turned to his left and identified a spot in the audience where he sensed something coming through. Something to do with St. Patrick’s Day. Audience members on the other side of the studio tried to get his attention. Hey, they wanted to be on TV too, and, apparently, they had a St. Patrick’s Day story. But he would have none of it. Edward knew exactly where he wanted to go: somewhere around a woman with a red shirt and a black jacket. He described again getting hits around “St. Patrick’s Day” and, now, a sense of being run or rolled over by a tractor or train.

Nope. Nothing. The woman in red and black knew nothing. Then the opposite side of the studio tried to get Edward’s attention again. No way.

Finally, a young woman (to the immediate left of the identified target) sheepishly stood up and told the story of her friend’s roommate, who was struck by a car on St. Patrick’s Day. Close enough.

And so it went.

Just as this segment was ending, one of those happy pages appeared in our waiting room and scooped up two people: mom and me. The room, I now realized, was a kind of testing pen. The pages had shut us all up in that room because they were looking for the right person, the right character (read: the right woman). That would be my mom. They walked her down to the front row, middle seat, and sat her down for the show’s next taped episode, this one on how to prepare turkey meatballs. They took me for one reason: I was with mom. They sat me in the thirty-something row up somewhere where it really didn’t matter if I had three heads.

To my great amazement, within minutes Dr. Oz was hand-feeding turkey meatballs to my mom on national television. All the pages were smiling and clapping. They had hand picked her, after all. Mom was beaming.

Then it was all over. Mom walked out giddy over Dr. Oz. I walked out marveling at what amounted to a new, and very old, theatre of the occult. If the Spiritualists had mixed entertainment and mediumship on stage in the nineteenth century, their present day inheritors were now doing it on national TV. It seemed to me that they did so with more or less the same paradoxical, ambiguous, fantastic results, through that surreal brew of trick and truth, fact and fiction, dream and daylight, constructed stagecraft and inherent gift that has long defined the performance of what we so clumsily call “the spiritual.”

Frank Baum would have loved it.

(Watch the episode here.)

The real question is: why are you reading this?

I’m just the writer here, someone else will provide the headline or the title, but chances are that headline or title lit the fuse of your imagination. A curiosity was ignited. You now have the impression that herein “the fringe” will be explained. A kind of light will be shined on something a little weird, and probably a little “spiritual.” It will be well outside the mainstream, a thing hot with danger, with a warmth that has drawn you in just as the candle pulls the moth. That’s why you started reading, or scrolling down, or clicked.

So here goes.

As Heraclitus wanted us to believe, the fringe, like everything, boils down to fire.

A few decades ago, to burn something—a flag, say, or oneself—was a measure of righteousness. Passionate flames registered indignation at ideals betrayed by power. Long before then, of course, burning had a completely different meaning. It was a kind of punishment—of witches, books—a literal fire that stood for hellfire.

Not long ago, when a zany small town pastor attracted international attention with a threat to publicly burn a Koran, the misguided hate of the latter masqueraded as the conviction of the former.

All of this was quite openly a stunt. Pastor Terry Jones said plainly that he knew nothing of the Koran, and that he was only doing it for attention. The most remarkable thing was that it wasn’t even a stunt—yet. It was talk of a stunt. The “narrative”—to slip for a moment into journalese—flopped back and forth. The burning was on, then it was off, then it was off “for now.” From the perspective of the zany pastor, it didn’t matter if he actually burned the Koran. The goal of the stunt was achieved long before he reached for the matchbook.

Which returns to our original question: why did you read that story? And why are you reading this one?

In other words, the story is as much about you—presumably, the norm—as it is about the fringe. What is the basic attraction of the fringe and the extreme for normal people? Why do fringe religions fascinate us—why can a tiny movement command the international stage—while, at the same time, one can level no greater political criticism than that something or someone is “extreme.”

Some kind of door has opened. Long gone are the days when fringe movements or ideas had to resist blanket charges of godlessness, or dodge anti-witchcraft laws, or struggle for time on public television. It’s not particularly shocking to suggest that the Internet has created an unruly egalitarianism of information. But is the fringe always bad? Maybe not. With no fringe, arguably, you have no variety, no diversity. Like sterile conformity? Abolish the fringe. It’s the fringe that gives us fringe festivals, and it’s the extreme that gives us “extreme sports,” which have been around for more than a decade. The fringe is where curiosity leads us. The fringe is the first name of the new. Without the fringe we have no idea what normal is.

Nevertheless, sociologists who study religions prefer the term “new religious movement” to “fringe religion” or “cult.”

Back in the nineties, two fringe religions in Southern California heralded the imminent arrival of friendly aliens. They weren’t the same aliens, and neither arrived. One of these movements you’ve never heard of: they confronted their failed prophecy with introspection and went on with the quiet self-help work of their “Star Center.”

The other, Heaven’s Gate, performed the stunt of all stunts. That’s why the name alone raises the hair on the back of your neck.

But now we’re past even that. Even a chess player can tell you that the threat of a good move is more powerful than its execution. If we’re honest we should acknowledge our complicity in the Koran burning episode. Our talk of Pastor Jones’s stunt left us stunted.

In 1903, the philosopher and psychologist William James, having just produced what is still the go-to book on fringe religions, wrote to a former student of the media coverage of his moment: “Our American people used to be supposed to have a certain hard-headed shrewdness. Nowadays they seem smitten with utter silliness. Their professed principles mean nothing to them, and any phrase or sensational excitement captivates them. The sensational press is the organ and the promulgator of this state of mind, which means … a new ‘dark ages’ that may last more centuries than the first one.”

The fringe tickles our imagination. It fascinates because we either hope or worry that it will become the mainstream. In the best of cases, we entertain the fringe to knead and stretch our sense of the possible; in the worst, as with the attention paid to the would-be Koran burners, we try to tell ourselves a cautionary tale about what the future may hold.

This time, however, the tale backfired—and our attention transmuted into a kind of Heisenberg propulsion system.

When the New York Times beefed up International Burn a Koran Day into “a bonfire of Korans” (there were fifty members of the pastor’s flock; at one Koran each, a campfire, at best) their readers’ curiosity fanned the flames of the very blaze they would have preferred extinguished. When Pastor Jones at one moment called the burning off, the Times asked whether the media might have contributed to the problem, quite as if the Times were not the media itself, as if they were not the country’s paper of record.

What even Pastor Jones knew is that the media is only an organ, and, like fire, organs remain silent if nothing breathes air into them.

Fire represents change, the way things shift from one form to another; and the mainstream, like actual streams, also has a tendency to change. The Koran burners, whose rhetoric was as incendiary as their stunt, would like to instigate change, to fight fire with fire, and we unwittingly armed them. It was a “norm” that got burned.

Ablaze with information, we have yet to figure out what we ought to ignore.

By the time its cables had reached the Pacific Coast, the telegraph had already come to occupy a prime place in the American imaginary, providing (among many other things) a metonym for what Catherine Albanese has called the “kinetic revolution” that was placing new priorities on motion, transformation, and progress in all facets of civil, cultural, economic and political life in the Jacksonian era. Alongside the extension of roads, bridges and tunnels across even the most mountainous terrains, the expansion of the railway system, and increasing opportunities for travel by steam-powered watercraft, the telegraph engendered a new, vertiginous experience of “life in the fast lane” and the collapsing of distant horizons through the universal and invisible, but very tangible medium of electricity. Long before Google, Second Life, or the Web 2.0, telegraphy was implicated in the creation of phantasmatic, electrically-mediated communities of knowledge-seekers, conversation partners, and like-minded souls dispersed across the entire globe.

The very first message to reach California on that inaugural day of the new transcontinental line came from Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, governor of Utah, and patron of Western settlement, who rejoiced in the telegraphic strengthening of “the bonds of friendship between the people of Utah and the people of California,” but who ended his salutation with an injunction that pointed to the work to come: “Join your wires with the Russian Empire, and we will converse with Europe.” The Pacific Coast was already no longer visualized as the end of the line. At the very moment of completion of the American transcontinental line, the telegraph’s horizon was extended further, pointing toward an imminent, truly global, frontier-less, and harmonized future.

The choice to depict the bearer of telegraphy’s utopian gifts in the form of an angel was not unique to Harper’s magazine, nor is it particularly surprising. As John Durham Peters reminds us, the figure of the angel has been linked at least since St. Augustine to the idea of instantaneous travel, and angelic speech has been described as a transference of pure, interior thoughts from one party to another without any degradation or loss. “Angels,” Peters summarizes, “a term that comes from the Greek, angelos, messenger, are unhindered by distance, are exempt from the supposed limitations of embodiment, and effortlessly couple the psychical and the physical, the signified and the signifier, the divine and the human. They are pure bodies of meaning.”

But as it so happens, angels were not the only spirit entities who presided over the completion of the telegraph line, and not all these transcendent powers worked toward the same end. In his memoir published in The Californian magazine in 1881, James Gamble—the pioneering figure responsible for laying the cable that connected San Francisco to Salt Lake City, as well as much of the rest of the telegraphic infrastructure along the Pacific coast—recounts the many challenges he faced setting up the line. His narrative details the extended effort to manage hostile terrains, difficult weather, pack animals, a less-than-reliable workforce, and, not least, the delicate negotiations needed to win the assent of local Indian populations, specifically the Shoshone people, whose territories at that time extended from Western Utah across Nevada and into Eastern California, precisely along the route of the Overland Pass, which had been chosen for the construction of the transcontinental line. A striking feature of Gamble’s story is the recurring manifestation of magical and spirit forces, control over which seemed decisive for the success of Gamble’s enterprise. At times, Gamble’s journey resembles that of an itinerant magician, an electrical showman trading in mysterious demonstrations designed to both educate and awe his audiences. One such spectacle was performed during the opening of the first telegraph office in San José, California, where a crowd of curious onlookers had gathered to bear witness to new technology at work. Gamble writes:

Observing the anxious and inquiring expression on the faces of those who had managed to get near enough to thrust their heads through the open window, it occurred to me to act in a very mysterious manner in order to see what effect it would have upon my spectators. … [As] I was preparing the message for transmission … instead of handing it to the boy for delivery, I put it, holding it in my hand, under the table, which was provided with sides sufficiently deep to hide the envelope from their view. As I did this I kept my eyes fixed on the wire, while, with my right hand, I took hold of the key and began working it. The moment the crowd heard the first click of the instrument they all rushed from under the veranda out into the street to see the message in the envelope pass along the wire. On seeing them rush out tumbling one over the other to catch a glimpse of the message, we on the inside burst out into one long and continued roar of laughter. … The telegraph was to them the very hardest kind of a conundrum. It was impossible of solution. Their final conclusion was that it was an enchained spirit—but whether a good one or an evil one they could not quite determine—over which I had such control that it was obliged to do my bidding. Under this impression they departed one by one, looking upon both the telegraph and myself as something, as the Scotchman would say, ‘uncanny’.

This “very mysterious manner” of acting and its “uncanny” effects belong to a long history of technological wonder-making in the service of public edification, profit, and boundary-maintenance with respect to scientific literati and their abject others. In this case, Gamble’s mastery of the art of legerdemain provided fellow telegraph operators with the opportunity to revel in the naïveté of their technologically illiterate onlookers. But working wonders also proved useful to the company’s efforts to pacify potentially hostile populations and thereby to secure control over territories marked out for extension of the telegraphic infrastructure. A telling instance was Gamble’s way of dealing with Sho-kup, chief of the Western Shoshone tribe that lived in the Ruby Valley in northeastern Nevada, which lay directly along the Overland Pass. In order to win Sho-kup’s assent to the construction of the telegraph line, Gamble had one of his agents lead him on a tour of a working telegraph station, whereupon Sho-kup

was told that when the telegraph was completed he could talk to [his distantly located wife] as well from there as if by her side; but this was more than his comprehension could seize. Talk to her when nearly three hundred miles away! No; that was not possible. He shook his head, saying he would rather talk to her in the old way. His idea of the telegraph was that it was an animal, and he wished to know on what it fed. They told him it ate lightning; but, as he had never seen any one make a supper of lightning, he was not disposed to believe that.

For Gamble and his men, it seems, the telegraph was a magical tool for transcending not only distance but also the privations of “the primitive mind.” Sho-kup, however, was hardly the primitive that Gamble makes him out to be. While it seems that Sho-kup was indeed mystified by the telegraph’s secret modus operandi, his reaction was not based on a total lack of familiarity with the media technologies that were ushering in a new modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. For, as we learn later on in Gamble’s memoir, Sho-kup was already an eager participant in the emerging economy of photographic portraiture, availing himself of the powers of self-representation that were being dramatically reworked thanks to the spreading technology of the photographic camera. Gamble recalls how, at the closing of his encounter with Sho-kup, he:

presented me with a daguerreotype of himself in full dress, taken in Salt Lake several years before, begging me to receive it as a mark of his appreciation of the kindness I had manifested toward him. This was accompanied by the request that on my return home I would send him a portrait of myself. I promised to do so, and on arriving in San Francisco had myself photographed … [and then] placed [the picture] in a gold double locket, with a chain, so that it could be worn around the neck, and forwarded it to him through the Indian Agent, who afterward presented it to Sho-kup with great ceremony.

In this exchange, which of the actors is “the primitive” and which is “the modern?” Perhaps an answer can be found by taking stock of the remarkable collection of material, technological, and phantasmatic entities populating Gamble’s narrative: telegraph operating instruments; invisible flows of electricity; sleights of hand; superstitious minds; enchained spirits; monstrous, metallic animals that live on a diet of lightning; and photographs destined to serve as talismans, yoking their wearers into bonds of distant friendship and strategic alliances. It is hardly insignificant that most of these magical forces were mobilized not by Gamble’s putatively gullible audiences or by the primitives he encountered along his journey, but by Gamble himself. By projecting the presence of spirits, assigning magical explanations, and offering supernatural gifts, Gamble had joined the ranks of what was emerging–not only in the USA—as an advancing army of proselyte-engineers, whose mission was to expand and secure general acceptance for the telegraph through the promulgation of magic. Like the Biblical Aaron beating the Pharaoh’s magicians at their own game, the protagonists of telegraphic modernity forged consensus for their project through the creation of “better,” “more impressive” magic.

By the time of Gamble’s epic journey, an appreciation of telegraphy’s transcendent, magical nature had already been well established in American popular culture. Not least in the case of Spiritualism, a movement whose development precisely overlapped with the rise of the telegraph. One particularly prescient observer of the telegraph’s apparent promise to render distance obsolete was the Universalist minister and trance speaker, John Murray Spear (1804-1887). In 1854, Spear was the recipient of detailed plans, provided to him in a trance state by the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, for the construction of a “soul-blending telegraph.” The soul-bending telegraph was an intercontinental telepathic transmission system to be powered by a corps of sensitized mediums installed in male/female pairs in high towers. This network of harmonized spirit mediums promised stiff competition with existing telegraph services, which were still beset by operational difficulties, and which had yet to announce success in the ongoing effort to connect distant continents. Spear thus imagined an imminent future of communicative harmony on a global scale, a utopian dream to which the crude workings of the electromagnetic telegraph only imperfectly pointed. As it turns out, Spear’s plan was never implemented. But its mere example provided Spear with a vantage point from which to denounce the undemocratic character of telegraphic globalization as it was actually coming to fruition in his day. Commenting on the (at the time, yet-to-be realized) project of the American industrialist, Cyrus Field, to lay a submarine telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean, Spear writes:

The purpose is a laudable one, and should be encouraged; but it is seen that such a means of communication would be exceedingly expensive, and, of necessity, would rarely accommodate the poorer classes, while it would enrich others. It is a hazardous scheme—the most so of any proposed. In that submarine wire lies the snake of a most dangerous monopoly.

Who living in our contemporary moment, marked on the one hand by fantasies of hyper-connectivity and techno-transcendence, and on the other by the specter of sinister corporate intentions and digital divides, cannot hear the echo of Spear’s cry?

Despite his well known status as a staunch—if friendly—atheist, the radio producer and iconic black-framed-glasses wearer Ira Glass has used his program This American Life to delve into people’s spiritual lives with a sensitivity unique in media coverage of religion. As specific and eclectic as its stories are, the show’s frequent treatment of religious subjects seems to bring out in Glass a desire for transcending particular beliefs that approaches an orthodoxy all its own.

Beginning with the premiere episode of the program that would become This American Life, broadcast on November 17, 1995, Glass framed his new enterprise in explicitly nostalgic terms. Even the show’s name—at the time it was called Your Radio Playhouse—self-consciously tweaked the anachronism that storytelling on the radio already evokes. Complete with tinny jazz music that sounded as though it were playing on vinyl, Your Radio Playhouse was every bit as backward-looking in its appeal as Charles Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour had been sixty years before. And Glass, likewise, used this first episode of his fledgling program to deliver a sermon of sorts.

“One great thing about starting a new show,” he says in his distinctive rapid-fire nasal delivery, “is that it’s an unchartered little world…”

No one hearing my words is saying, “Remember that show back when it used to be good?” Actually, that force, that human desire to say that, to say “I was there when the show was good,” is so strong, is so basic to who we are as people, that I know that, two minutes into the new show, there are one or two people out there who are saying, “Sure, I used to listen to that show in the first thirty seconds, back when it was good.”

It is a cheeky, knowing sort of monologue, full of stammers and reversals that at the time—before Glass’s awkward delivery became the lingua franca of public broadcasting—would have made most radio professionals cringe. But it establishes immediately a mode of storytelling perfectly suited to the kinds of spiritual narratives This American Life would tell.

For the first act of this first episode, Glass offers something of an upended conversion tale, the story of a young man lost and found. “Kevin Kelly spent most of his twenties wandering around Asia,” Glass explains. “He was a freelance photographer. And he found himself photographing a lot of religious ceremonies. He found himself drawn to religious ceremonies. He was confused about what he believed.” Kelly’s voice then comes in:

I would get twisted and caught up, and these things were sort of in the background, consuming me. And actually I found that I could think about little else, for many many months. That behind all that I was doing there was always this unresolved question: Was God real? If he was real, then how could we ignore him? And if we were trying to not ignore him, what would we do?

While pondering these questions, Kelly finds himself in Jerusalem, where he falls asleep inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on the night before Easter. When he wakes up, he is convinced of two things: first, that Jesus Christ died and rose again, and, second, that he has just six months to live. From that moment on, he explains, he acts as if his days are numbered. When Kelly’s story reaches its climax, it is six months later. After living daily with the feeling that his death was near, he returns to his parents’ home to spend what he thinks will be his last night on earth.

I went to bed that night—which was a very difficult thing to do, because I was fully prepared at that point never to wake up again. I had been praying, I’d gotten everything arranged. At that point I’d fully gone through in my own mind, my own soul, all the things I might have regretted, and I had righted as many of those as I thought I could, through letters, and I was prepared, as much as anybody could be prepared to die.

The next twenty seconds of airtime seem as orchestrated for spiritual uplift as any of Charles Fuller’s old hymns could be. As Kelly speaks, long breaks follow each word, letting the emotion he feels come through.

And, the next morning I woke up… And… The next morning I woke up and it was as if… The next morning I woke up and it was as if I had the entire, my entire life again… I had…The next morning I woke up and I had my entire life again… I had my future again.

Like Glass’s framing of the episode, it is a poignantly awkward narrative, suspended often by silence, second-guessing, and repetition, all of which serve to heighten the drama of the telling.

“There was nothing special about the day. It was another ordinary day,” Kelly concludes. “I was reborn into ordinariness. But…” Here Kelly’s voice breaks audibly, as if he is fighting tears until finally he lets out the story’s closing words with a small sob: “What more could one ask for?”

After a beat, Glass provides a coda about what became of Kelly. “Nearly two decades after that happened,” Glass says, “Kevin Kelly is now the executive editor of a magazine about the future, Wired Magazine.” Like a puzzle piece dropped into place, identifying Kelly this way highlights the apparent contradiction of the editor of a forward-looking technology publication choosing to tell this story on a self-consciously nostalgic radio show. Only then does the listener realize that the conversion narrative just experienced through Kelly was not what was expected. As framed by Glass, Kelly’s story is not of a conversion into belief, but out of it, a rebirth “into ordinariness.” Kelly begins with confusion, finds faith, and then moves beyond it. The narrative arc of religion on This American Life may run through particular beliefs, but it ends with the non-sectarian sanctification of the everyday.

In this and in other religion stories featured on This American Life, it is clear that Glass is not after Come-to-Jesus moments. The point of Kelly’s story was not to tell how a young man found God. Rather, Glass creates radio experiences that, in current NPR lingo, have become known as a “Driveway Moments”: suspenseful epiphanies that forge such a bond through the airwaves that the listener cannot pull away. As explained on NPR.org: “What is a Driveway Moment? You’re driving home, listening to a story on NPR. Suddenly, you find yourself in your driveway. Rather than turn the radio off, you stay in your car to hear the piece to the end.” A Driveway Moment occurs when one wants nothing more than to be alone with the radio.

As ordered as any liturgy, This American Life leads inevitably to this kind of communion. As Glass once explained:

This is the structure of the stories on our show: There’s an anecdote, a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that’s powerful… is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can’t see anything… that you just want to know what happens next. It’s irresistible…

Then, there’s the part of the story where I make some really big statement like, “There’s something about the kindness of strangers.” Because you can’t just have an anecdote. It’s got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they’re trying to draw from it, it’s not a real sermon.

A Driveway Moment is a perfect cocktail of anecdote and meaning. Considering that the creation of such moments has also become a measure of a radio program’s success, it may be that while broadcast technology promises to relieve one type of isolation, it simultaneously increases another. “The mission of public broadcasting,” Glass once said, is “to tell us stories that help us empathize and help us feel less crazy and less separate.” It may be that stories of other people’s lives can be told so well that we never need to leave the car to hear them.