ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 is a response to the earlier chapters on Taoist spirituality and technology and reconsiders the manifestation of Christianity that is enframed in new media technology. The reverberations of Witaya’s case lead me to rethink the Christian experience in Singapore and the implications of being a Christian in today’s technologically advanced world. By focusing on the phenomenon of Christmas shows in Singapore, this chapter studies a different religious context but show how the earlier arguments on media and performance could be made for another popular religious practice. A Christmas show is an ideal case study because it attempts to reach out to non-believers who are familiar with supposedly non-sacred elements and technology. At the same time, it must reflect a church’s doctrinal and denominational standpoints and speak to its existing congregation. Christmas shows in Singapore heavily rely on the latest multimedia technology for its marketing and production – video trailers, concert performance, live bands, publicity posters and well-equipped auditoriums with built-in sound systems and sophisticated lighting rigs. This chapter argues that a religious interface is always an assemblage of mediums and media, both technological and spiritual. It includes digital mediation because worked into a popular religion is the capacity to fuse forms and showcase faces – because God has no face, so his messengers’ faces come to the fore. By all means possible, their faces are projected and multiplied on all types of screens and surfaces. A strong belief in bodily experiences of the Holy Spirit, such as the ability to speak in tongues, draws my attention to the similarities in Uncle Cheong’s accounts of the Taoist spirit medium who speaks in an archaic Hokkien dialect when he is possessed or Witaya’s ability to speak an unfamiliar dialect during his possessed state. More importantly, by comparing all the case studies and analysing how they proliferate and constitute themselves, it becomes clear that religious interfaces created and proliferated via digital media blur the boundaries of technology and spirituality.
