LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: When the sun comes up in Second Life, which it does every four hours, you are immediately overwhelmed by the vast, brightly colored mish-mash of stores, houses, and malls stretching across multiple continents—all of it, including the mountains and forests, designed and built from scratch by the tens of thousands of people who regularly visit here.

Move your mouse and you tour the Taj Mahal. A few clicks and you are launched on a NASA rocket into low orbit. Click again and you can join a service in an Anglican cathedral. This live, online world called Second Life was launched in 2003 by the San Francisco company Linden Lab and its founder Phillip Rosedale, who says he had no idea what would happen.

PHILIP ROSEDALE (Chairman of the Board, Linden Lab): Well, I always figured in the beginning that if Second Life looked like anything we were able to predict that we would have failed, that if it was predictable we weren’t doing the right stuff.

SEVERSON: Second Life is definitely not predictable. Turn a corner and you might run into a furry animal that talks. It isn’t just the buildings that are designed by residents. They also design themselves, creating virtual bodies called avatars either sculpted in their own likeness or, more often, someone they would like to be. And then they chat with other avatars, even becoming close friends. For some, the virtual world is a way to escape. Others say it enriches their real-world lives.

(to Michael Adcock): You still seem to get this social value out of it.

MICHAEL ADCOCK (Freelance Designer): Yeah, I do.

SEVERSON: Michael Adcock has been into Second Life for about three years. He says, for him, hiding his real identity behind an avatar which, in his case, looks like a warrior painted in silver, has helped him learn more about himself.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I’ve found that I’ve been able to be a lot more up-front and blunt in what is on my mind right away. That happens to say quite a bit about myself, and I choose to look at that as a learning experience.

SEVERSON: Most people in Second Life don’t use real names. The woman you see here might actually be a man, or vice versa.

This avatar actually is a man. He’s Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist.  He has written extensively on the culture of virtual worlds.

PROFESSOR TOM BOELLSTORFF (University of California, Irvine): For some people, the escape factor is one of the best things about a virtual world like Second Life. You can try having a totally different life, and there’s people who get married inside of Second Life to someone that they don’t even know who that person is in the physical world, even if it’s really a man or a woman in the physical world. They have a house and even virtual kids and a job, and they have a whole life inside of Second Life.

SEVERSON: It costs nothing to get into Second Life, but if you choose to be part of it, to build a home, for instance, then you will have to spend real money. It’s like visiting a foreign land. You convert dollars into Second Life currency called Linden dollars.

Professor Tom Boellstorff

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: So here is what my house looks like. This is land that I own. I spent—this cost about $50 US to buy this land and about $15 a month to keep, to be able to continue to own it. That’s how the company makes their money.

SEVERSON: You constructed a cathedral like this once?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, I did.

SEVERSON: How long did it take you?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Eighteen months.

SEVERSON: Eighteen months of your life.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, off and on, you know.

SEVERSON: Where is it?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: It’s deleted now.

SEVERSON: Wait a minute. Eighteen months, and it’s deleted?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I couldn’t afford to maintain the simulation, to keep it running, yeah.

SEVERSON: It would have cost him $350 a month to keep it. But there are other cathedrals he can visit which took other residents months or even years to build.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: There is a cathedral right here.

SEVERSON: You don’t look like a typical Sunday churchgoer.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: That’s true, I don’t. But they’re nice, and they welcomed me and asked me how I’m doing.

SEVERSON: It took a decade for churches to have a strong presence on the Internet, but Professor Boellstorff says it is beginning to attract followers in Second Life.

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: There are already people I know who say that they go to, you know, every Sunday they don’t go to church any more in the physical world. They go every Sunday to church in Second Life, and that is their faith community that they are interacting with.

SEVERSON: We spoke with the leadership team of the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. Mark Brown is the priest-in-charge. In real life he runs a Bible society in Wellington, New Zealand. Cady Enoch chairs the committee. She’s in Columbus, Ohio, and Helene Milena is the worship service leader. She’s in West Yorkshire, England.

HELENE MILENA (Teacher and Counselor): I think there is an intimacy here, in any online set-up, actually, but at the same time there is an anonymity, and the two mean that people can be very, very open. It would be very unusual in real life to meet someone and ten minutes later be knowing about their difficulties with their marriage, or something of that nature.

SEVERSON: In order to accommodate attendees from around the world, the virtual church is now offering 7 services a week.

MARK BROWN (CEO, New Zealand Bible Society): Straightaway it is the opportunity to mingle with people around the world. We have about 20 nations represented in our community. I absolutely love that. I love the richness of that, that regardless of where we are in the world, we can come together and worship.

SEVERSON: Second Lifers tend to become hooked on the experience. Michael Adcock says he was spending 12 or more hours a day for awhile. This can have negative consequences on real-world relationships. There have been at least two highly publicized divorces resulting from what were supposedly virtual affairs in Second Life. Questions are often raised about ethical behavior by people who can hide behind anonymous identities on the Internet.

SIBLEY VERBECK (Founder and CEO, The Electric Sheep Company): If you look out on the Web, as long as there’s been forums where people post comments or chat rooms, people are often quite rude to each other, and a lot of that is that degree of anonymity that’s there.

SEVERSON: Sibley Verbeck founded the Electric Sheep Company, which has created its own virtual worlds. He thinks people tend to be more civil in Second Life

SIBLEY VERBECK: But it is more human, because you see this human figure, and you’re interacting with them in real time.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I don’t see much of a difference between what I’m doing here, or what I’m thinking, or what I’m doing in my real life. It’s all the same thing.

SEVERSON: There’s not much you can’t find or do in Second Life. There are virtual shops that sell everything from virtual artwork to virtual waterfalls. Second Life is a community of creators, and it’s economy is based to a large extent on marketing art and architecture.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: So far as we can tell, there’s like 60,000 people that are cash-flow positive from their operations, but there’s thousands of people that would call this employment of some kind.

SEVERSON: Elisha Allen is director of new media and extended learning at the University of New Mexico. Like many learning institutions, the university is experimenting with Second Life as way to reach students who can’t make it to the campus.

ELISHA ALLEN (Associate Director, New Media and Extended Learning, University of New Mexico): I’ve been to a number of conferences in Second Life where I had the opportunity to meet peers at other universities without actually having to fly there, and it’s interesting because the memories of those conferences are very real, and it did feel like I was there, wherever “there” was.

SEVERSON: But Elisha agrees with those who say that navigating around Second Life can be daunting.

ELISHA ALLEN: Second Life, while it’s maybe the state-of-the-art for virtual worlds right now, I think has a long way to go before it’s something that I would consider to be really, fully immersive.

SEVERSON: For others, like Reverend Mark, it’s a godsend.

MARK BROWN: There’s no artificiality of me, here I am sitting in my study in New Zealand looking at a monitor. I am real flesh-and-blood. The way I am communicating and relating, of course, is different, but the same experience is welling up, and that is really how this is able to be intense and intimate and actually quite a real experience.

SEVERSON: About a million-and-a-half people have visited Second Life in the last couple of months. They are typically in their mid-thirties. But there are millions of kids under 12 who are growing up with virtual reality games and programs designed especially for them. Verbeck and others predict that a decade from now, when these kids are in their 20s, places like Second Life are going to grow dramatically in popularity.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.

LUCKY SEVERSON: The Park Street Church on the Boston Common has witnessed two centuries of American history. John Adams and Paul Revere are buried in the old Granary graveyard next door. In their time, church services were usually limited to the reach of the pastor’s voice.

Pastor DANIEL HARRELL (Park Street Church, reading from the Book of Revelation): She held the golden cup in her hands filled with abominable things.)

SEVERSON: That would have made it more difficult for Pastor Daniel Harrell, one of the ministers here, to carry out his experiment. He wanted his congregation to explore the Old Testament Book of Leviticus by actually living according to its archaic laws for one month and then to log their experiences on the Internet.

Pastor HARRELL: I think there was probably some fear. Sort of given the reputation of the burdensomeness of the law, how in the world would we follow this? But I managed to do a little coercion and put on some, a little bit of pastoral guilt and, you know, had some folks sign up, and it ended up being a great group, very diverse.

Pastor Daniel Harrell

SEVERSON: It ended up being another illustration of the power of online religion. Browse the Internet, and there are examples everywhere: a Web site called GodTube, for instance, which was founded in 2007 and now attracts more than a million-and-a-half visitors a month. One of the site’s most popular videos is a little girl reciting the 23rd Psalm.

UNIDENTIFIED YOUNG GIRL (from GodTube video): Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .

SEVERSON: Hundreds of religious organizations are reaching and connecting believers of most every kind around the globe. For Jews, there’s a Web site called JewTube; for Muslims, one called Muxlim.com. There are Hindu and Buddhist sites, and for those not quite as mainstream, Web sites as diverse as The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, which is actually a site that reflects about man’s relation to God. Nowadays, with the latest technology, virtual churches provide a 3-D space where the user can walk in, sit down, and listen to a sermon. The very first virtual church, the First Church of Cyberspace, was founded at this real church in Montclair, New Jersey back in the Internet Dark Ages — 1994 — by then pastor Charles Henderson.

Pastor CHARLES HENDERSON (Founder, First Church of Cyberspace and Editor, CrossCurrents Quarterly): It was really overwhelming. I mean, here I was, the minister of a local congregation in New Jersey, and somehow I came up with this idea of the First Church of Cyberspace and within about three months I was in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, on television and radio. I mean, it was just explosive, and here I was doing something that now would be regarded as incredibly simple and primitive.

SEVERSON: What helped make Pastor Harrell’s Leviticus project a success was actually the secular Web site Facebook, which allows people to interact with friends and strangers almost instantly.

Pastor HARRELL: I thought, why don’t we do it in a way that allows people in our congregation to engage a conversation with folks who are actually trying to abide by it, much like the ancient Israelites would have, as well as followers of the Old Testament throughout history? But to do that in public fashion, you know, could have been difficult if not for a vehicle like Facebook.

SEVERSON: Heidi Campbell is a professor at Texas A&M University and author of the book “Exploring Religious Community Online.” She says there are very tangible reasons why the religious experience through chat rooms and social networking sites has increased in popularity — online prayers, for example.

Dr. HEIDI CAMPBELL (Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Texas A&M University and Author, “Exploring Religious Community Online”): In fact, some of the people in my early research said that they felt more cared for and that people, when they said they were praying for them online, that they really meant it because there was some tangible artifact that they could see to really show that they were praying for them.

Dr. Heidi Campbell

SEVERSON: She says the Internet extends the “global body of Christ” because someone or some prayer is always there, and she says for those too shy or introverted to speak up in church, the Internet offers anonymity.

Dr. CAMPBELL: That anonymous nature allows them to ask the questions, to get the feedback, to say things that they would never be able to say in a face-to-face environment.

SEVERSON: This is Cathleen Falsani’s Webs site. She is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of two books, “The God Factor” and, most recently, “Sin Boldly.” She signed up for Facebook fishing for contacts. But before long she was connecting regularly with old friends and new friends.

CATHLEEN FALSANI (Columnist, Chicago Sun-Times and Author, “The God Factor”): I happened to have the laptop open in bed, and I saw one friend of mine’s status update pop up and change, and it said, “I’m really sad that Mark died today.” I said, “Please tell me you’re kidding.” I didn’t hear anything back. So I emailed another friend, and shortly after that he said, “No, Mark was killed this morning.”

SEVERSON: Their friend Mark was killed while in the lead Humvee of a convoy outside Sadr City, Iraq.

Ms. FALSANI: We ended up mourning online because we’re all over the place, and it was just a way to sort of talk about Mark, and there was a little memorial that sort of started there, and then it moved to its own Web site, but we kept talking.

Cathleen Falsani

SEVERSON: Falsani says online conversations often turned to issues of theology and spirituality.

(to Ms. Falsani): You speak of it almost in a spiritual way.

Ms. FALSANI: Yeah. We started — a number of us started calling it kind of flippantly a while ago “church.” It feels like church. But it really has, for some of us, become church.

SEVERSON: Falsani was surprised that a secular Web site like Facebook could become, for her, an online church.  Pastor Harrell was equally surprised at the response on Facebook to his Leviticus challenge. He says people with no connection to his congregation posted their comments about the experiences members recorded while attempting to live and dress and eat according to the word of God in Leviticus.

THOMAS KEOWN (speaking in Facebook video): The man should put his hand on the head of the animal.

SEVERSON: Those members who attempted the experiment called themselves Levites, and some, like Thomas Keown, made their own videos to share on Facebook. His was a humorous look at a visit to his family farm in Ireland where he tried to touch the head of a cow as Leviticus instructs. The cow apparently didn’t see the humor.

Mr. KEOWN: I think it’s completely free of defects, but free of any interest in allowing me to put my hand on their head.

So Facebook was the primary means by which this experiment was public. It was the way that people outside the church and inside the church were able to play their part in it, were able to be part of what we, as a small group, were doing.

SEVERSON: Kristi Vrooman made her Facebook video about the search for meat that complies with Leviticus standards.

KRISTI VROOMAN (speaking in video): And these animals were not, were not injected with hormones?

UNIDENTIFIED GROCERY STORE CLERK: They were all free-range.

Ms. VROOMAN: It surprised all of us, really, that people outside of our own church, outside of our religious tradition were commenting — people from Sweden, people from Israel.

Pastor HARREL: It certainly has added a layer of connection that would have been difficult to otherwise create. I guess the question, or the jury, is still out as to whether that will supplant, you know, the kind of connection that we actually like to have in real time.

SEVERSON: Skeptics of online religion say it’ll never match the church experience — the social experience where the faithful know one other, share coffee and conversation, look each other in the eye. They say Internet religion is religion-lite. Its defenders disagree.

Ms. FALSANI: It was completely counterintuitive to me, and I could not have imagined this kind of blessing, this kind of communion and community — and we use the word “community” tongue-in-cheek but also seriously, coming about from a piece of technology. I just — I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to us. But it did.

SEVERSON: Critics of online religion say it might work for an individual, but it doesn’t foster family togetherness. Pastor Harrell says he is aware of the criticism, but now he is also more aware of the Internet’s possibilities.

Pastor HARRELL: You know, it is in the end a tool, you know, that can be employed for good or evil, I guess, and we’d like to think we’re using it for good.

SEVERSON: Charles Henderson, who is now the editor of CrossCurrents Quarterly, says the Internet should not replace the real thing.

Mr. HENDERSON: I think that the experience online has to be considered as a supplement to real friendships and real community life in local congregations. It’s not a replacement for that kind of real community, although some people do use it as a substitute for religious community. I don’t think that is the ideal.

Pastor Charles Henderson

SEVERSON: But for Cathleen Falsani and others like her, the old-time church is being replaced, for now, by religion on the Internet.

Ms. FALSANI: You know, I was finding that I was getting more hurt by congregational life than I was being fed and that I could find that elsewhere and still be safe spiritually. And so this is a beautiful thing for someone like me to have, and I’m not the only one who’s experienced that in the group.

SEVERSON: Although most churchgoers still prefer religion the old-fashioned way, an increasing number, especially those under 30, are exploring religion online. A study in 2001 by the Pew Research Center found that one-in-four adults use the Internet for religious and spiritual purposes. That was seven years ago. Today, the number is probably considerably higher.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson reporting.