The first time D. J. Soto strapped on an Oculus Rift and stepped into virtual reality, he felt like the ancient prophets must have felt—arriving in the promised land that would fulfill his destiny. It was a summer Friday in 2016, and the virtual world he was visiting, AltSpaceVR, was just a year old. Billing itself as a free social network in virtual reality, AltSpaceVR allows its users to toggle between 2-D and 3-D, using a virtual-reality headset or a computer monitor to explore the space. When Soto entered, he found a virtual world that was practically empty: just a few avatars attending quiz shows or cheesy comedy performances. Still, the young preacher was electrified.
In the months since he’d quit his job as a pastor at a branch of his local megachurch in Reading, Pennsylvania, Soto had been looking for a way to create a radically inclusive church. After all, he had embarked on a career in ministry to introduce as many people as possible to God’s love. Scripture called for men of the cloth to reach into the most unreceptive corners of the world and find common ground with outsiders: the weirdos, the sinners, the dammed, the indisposed. But Christianity, Soto believed, had stalled in this mission. The ministers he knew were happy preaching only to those who walked through their doors on Sunday. The only way to spread the good news as he envisioned, Soto decided, was to found his own church.
Soto’s head buzzed with ideas. He felt called to become a spiritual entrepreneur—an “apostle” in the lingo of some Christian writers whose thinking had come to influence him. Soto imagined bringing religion directly to the people by offering sermons or bible study in unusual places, like backwater towns, CrossFit gyms, campgrounds, and bars. That November, Soto convinced his wife, Kari, to join him on his mission. They sold their home and most of their belongings and piled their five young children into a 30-foot trailer. Their plan was to head to California, by way of backroads, launching a series of pop-up churches along the way.
But gradually Soto’s plan shifted. AltSpaceVR was exactly what he’d been looking for. Across the country churches were rolling out digital offerings—building livestreaming tools and message boards to engage the young and allow seniors, the sick, or disabled people to worship remotely. Soto had even used some of those tools to launch his own church online five years earlier. But virtual reality felt like a radical next step. It felt tangible, a digital world that could convey the feeling of communing in worship.
Two days after he stepped into AltSpaceVR, Soto delivered his first sermon there. He kept at it, hosting services every few weeks. Sometimes he attracted a dozen people; sometimes the virtual room where he preached was empty. He didn’t mind. In all his years as a pastor, Soto had never had an atheist at his service. Now atheists regularly came to listen to him preach about divine love, and they talked openly about their own faith. This was frontier work, he decided. The people who never felt comfortable walking into a house of worship were happy to join him on AltSpaceVR. Ten months after he first strapped on the headset, Soto founded VR Church, the first house of worship to exist entirely in virtual reality.
Religious groups have long attempted to stake claim to digital worlds. As soon as Second Life, one of the earliest two-dimensional virtual worlds, began offering free accounts in 2006, churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques built virtual outposts to host prayer groups, build meditation gardens, and engage in missionary work. But building an institution in a virtual world requires a loyal set of users. As Second Life’s membership declined, so did church membership. The congregations that have lasted have had to migrate often, as users grow tired with the faddish platforms.
But Soto, along with a small but vocal group of reformers, believe that the time is right for a spiritual movement to gain momentum in VR. For one thing, social VR is thriving, with a throng of new worlds coming online. As VR has shifted from 2-D to 3-D, the experience has grown closer to the kind of “embodiment” that’s ideal for fully experiencing the sacraments. As the price of headsets drops and VR technology becomes more accessible, Soto sees virtual churches as a way to bolster flagging church attendance, particularly among the young and others who feel alienated by real world churches. Sure, virtual reality has provided a free zone for cybersex, porn, and trolling. But that same freedom, Soto believes, can also fuel something deeply spiritual—it can provide a place where sinners and the saved can come together for an open and profound conversation about faith.
Like all pioneers, Soto faces hurdles. For his VR Church to survive, he has to plant branches beyond AltSpaceVR, on newer platforms, such as Sansar and High Fidelity. That requires real world funding. Which means that Soto needs the one thing that may be impossible to get: for mainstream Christianity to accept that the future of religion is virtual.
Soto was always going to be a preacher—until, suddenly, he wasn’t. He grew up a peripatetic military brat, and after each of his family’s moves religion provided a ready-made community. During the school year, he attended Christian schools; in the summer, he went to church camp. The youth pastors in his church were kind and he admired their dedication to kids who were struggling. As a teenager, he decided he would become a pastor too. For college, Soto chose Pensecola Christian College, a Baptist school in Florida. But he found the culture stifling. He was turned off by the clubbiness, the message of exclusivity, and the extremely conservative politics. “What I saw in the scripture was a very open invitation to all types of people,” he says. Ministry training, he found, did not line up with that vision.
He graduated with a degree in bible studies and didn’t set foot in a church for years. Instead, he became a producer and worked for small TV stations. Fifteen years into that career, Soto was working as a producer for a station in Pennsylvania when he was assigned to do a story about a youth group at GT Church, a Pentecostal megachurch.
When he went to film the segment, he was struck by the energy of the kids and the pastor. “Their spirit was different, their attitude was different, their vernacular was different. It was just very refreshing,” he says. Soon, Soto was volunteering for the church—drawing on the technology skills he’d picked up as a kid, tinkering on his dad’s computer—and developing online worship tools to post sermons and build apps. The lead pastor was so impressed that he created a special residency program that would allow Soto to become a pastor. Eventually, he was tasked with launching a new branch of the church on a $500,000 budget. Soto spent two years setting it up and three years pastoring, but quickly he was itching to do something more.
Across the country, unbeknownst to Soto, a man named Brian Leupold had also fixated on VR as a place for a religious revival. A former heroin addict who turned to religion in rehab, Leupold delivered virtual reality headsets to hospital-bound children in Portland, Oregon. He was moved in particular by one child, a paraplegic boy named Henry. Shut up in a hospital room, Henry, more than anything, missed church. Leupold designed a basic VR film of his hometown congregation, a tiny building with a white steeple called Amity Christian Church. Leupold created an app with the 3-D video, which he loaded onto Google Play. Henry loved it.
Alistair Clarkson was building a virtual reality bible app when he stumbled across Leupold’s and Soto’s projects in the summer of 2016. He reached out to the pair with a proposition: Why not join forces behind Soto’s project? In January 2016, the three of them signed a formal agreement. They began to meet regularly on Google chat or in AltSpaceVR to discuss their plans. With the duo behind him, Soto was drawing a regular congregation. People were having frank conversations about faith and emotional traumas. Soto signed up some volunteer moderators. A community had begun to form.
Christianity has a long history of turning to new media to spread its message. The printing press was first used to distribute religious materials. In the 20th century, fundamentalist and evangelical Christians flocked to the radio and television to attract believers. Today, most churches have websites, and many stream services. Pope Francis has 16.4 million followers on Twitter and a Pope chatbot, which encourages those who reach out to pray. According to a 2017 Baylor survey, some 45 percent of Americans use the internet to access religious and spiritual content.
“Christians have by and large adapted themselves to every technology that came along, in particular ones that had the promise of communicating information,” says Robert Geraci, a religious studies scholar and author of Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life. But despite historical affinities, Christianity and technology are, in some ways, naturally at odds. New technologies have also disrupted church hierarchies. The printing press, for example, allowed reformist teachings to spread, challenging the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
While VR’s flexibility is a boon to those who want to reach non-church-goers, it’s also alarming to denominations that are devoted to conservative ideas. “The virtual world is a place where identity is fluid,” says Neal Locke, a Presbyterian minister who writes about religion and virtual reality. People who spend time in virtual worlds are, by definition, explorers, he explains, so they’re likely to seek out people and places that differ from their experience. And VR’s invitation to experiment with different avatars strikes some as a pathway to temptation. In August 2016, an article in the Intersect Project, a website that addresses Christianity and culture, warned that virtual reality might increase the allure of sexual sin, increase discontentment, and draw people away from family and community.
For the Catholic Church, virtual reality poses more fundamental problems. The church recognizes seven sacraments, religious ceremonies that including baptism and the eucharist, where followers consume bread and wine that have been “transubstantiated” into Jesus’ body and blood. The eucharist is central to Catholic mass. But in 2002, the Vatican officially declared that there could be no online or virtual sacraments. “Virtual reality cannot substitute for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” the document reads. “Sacraments on the internet do not exist.”
These rules make digital religion tricky even beyond the Catholic Church. In 2016, the Church of Scotland, a protestant denomination, announced that it was considering performing online baptisms, amid plummeting membership. But the church quickly withdrew the idea amid a sharp backlash among the press. Soto believes that he’s in the clear within the Protestant Church, where the sacraments are considered largely symbolic. In his view, the ponds and streams in AltSpaceVR provide a perfect place to immerse an avatar in baptismal water. Still, the idea makes many of his fellow ministers uncomfortable. “A lot of pastor friends would not support that—really great friends and great thinkers,” he says.
J. R. Woodward is one of the naysayers. He’s national director of church planting at V3, a kind of seed fund for new church branches. He believes community can only be established face to face. Woodward is no luddite. He’s active on social media; he uses virtual technology to help train future pastors. He could get excited by a virtual church, he says, if it were primarily a way to get people into real flesh-and-blood Christian communities. “I think media used carefully and thoughtfully is really, really helpful,” Woodward says. “But I think what’s most needed today is for Christians to be an embodiment of Christ in particular places and contexts. There’s nothing really more transformative than that.”
One overcast Sunday afternoon in October, I met Soto and his family near the beach in San Diego, at an RV park called Campland. Dressed casually in a sky-blue surf shirt, gray basketball shorts, and designer glasses, Soto projected a relaxed vibe. His wife, Kari, blond and petite, was friendly and warm. Inside their trailer, four kids crowded on a couch, tapping away at games on their mobile phones. They didn’t look up. His eldest daughter sat in the back room, quietly strumming a ukulele.
Their journey had already taken them south to Orlando, north to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then down to Houston and all the way west to the beaches of Southern California. As they traversed the country, Soto visited with church leaders to drum up interest and financial assistance from pastors to expand VR Church into a larger network.
But the trip had begun to feel like a test of faith. Financially, they were strung out. And after nearly a year on the road, sharing 30 feet of space among seven people was getting claustrophobic. The kids missed their friends; Soto’s eldest daughter missed her marching band. Some of Soto and Kari’s own friends had drifted away. And because they were constantly on the road, they had no real community outside of VR Church.
Worst of all, generating interest from church leaders had been hard. They had sent scores of emails to pastors and to church planting groups. They’d attended dozens of Sunday services, approaching pastors afterward. But the invitations to give congregations tours of VR Church had not been forthcoming. Soto had hoped the visits would generate excitement from religious leaders, and perhaps some money from the church planters. But when they presented their elevator pitch in person, they were met mostly with awkward silence.
“It has been abysmal, to be honest, just trying to connect,” Soto says. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks, “Was this the biggest mistake of my life?” But his optimism and commitment is buoyed by the sense of fellowship he feels at Sunday services.
That afternoon, I watched as Soto lead a service from the RV park. Soto’s profusion of hardware seemed out of place in the low-fi surroundings. He set up on a green picnic table; behind him, rows of trailers flanked a long stretch of beach. As he delivered his welcome remarks and his sermon in his Oculus Rift goggles and hand grips, some passing campers casually rubbernecked. A bit of ambient noise interfered with Soto’s service: airplanes overhead, excited shouting from his own kids. Soto had to interrupt the service once to ask them to quiet them down.
Often the networks can be unreliable. One Sunday the internet crashed during a climactic moment in his sermon. When he logged back in, his avatar dropped into the grass outside the church. No one really seemed to mind.
This time the service went off almost flawlessly.
An atheist myself, I stopped going to church at the age of 13. But as someone who remains curious about religion, I am, in some ways, Soto’s target audience. When I attended a recent service in virtual reality, I was struck by how welcoming and informal it felt. To me, church meant the hushed tones, muted colors, and high tight collars of Sunday best in my youth. Here, the avatars of parishioners—sleek chiseled robots and blocky cartoon humans—came and went throughout the service. Many huddled into the pews, laid out in orderly rows. Others spilled out onto a red carpet that stretched to a small stage in front. The music was thumping.
Soto’s avatar, a silver robot with red trim, thanked his congregation for coming. “Everyone is invited here to VR Church, no matter where you are from in the world, even if you don’t believe in God,” he said to the congregation. Then he read a short prayer and played a soaring rock tune about Jesus. The lyrics, animated by graphics, scrolled behind him on a jumbotron. When the song was over, the avatars in attendance sent little emojis of hearts and clapping hands and smiley faces skyward. After Soto was finished, small groups broke off to hang out and chat. Some were believers; many were atheists.
Soto purposely avoids hot button political issues, such as abortion, at his services, but he encourages discussions of faith and scientific arguments for or against religion. Having a digital avatar, he believes, makes it safer to speak freely. He’s encouraged by the fact that some atheists have offered to help with coding or building various features of the church environment. “In some of them I think there is this seed of faith that is popping up,” he says. “But I don’t prod and poke at them, ‘Are you Christian now?’”
I wanted to understand what would entice an atheist to seek out church. So at the end of service I approached a small group that had formed at the end of the pew. JTravelin, whose avatar was a cartoon human with red hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, was hanging out with a couple of friends. He told me he was an atheist. I asked him what brought him to VR Church.
“I went to Catholic school and all that,” he told me. “It was very difficult. I had nuns for teachers and they were pretty hardcore, and they would beat the stories into you. I felt like everyone around me was brainwashed. I was shunned for asking thoughtful questions.” JTravelin still didn’t believe in god, but Soto’s congregation felt comfortable. “I enjoy listening to the sermons, you know. I think they’re quite enlightening,” he said.
To find an atheist in a church is not so strange. Plenty of people visit with their families to keep the peace. But to find an atheist who seeks out religious services, one who talks about his atheism in church, and intends to return for more—that is unusual. In Soto’s world, church is a place where people with radically different views commune together. In the current polarizing moment, religion and politics seem closely aligned: Christianity on the right and atheism on the left. In this world, an atheist at Sunday service is revolutionary.
In January, Soto and his partners—Leupold and Clarkson—decided to try a new fund-raising approach. “We haven't stopped trying to connect with churches, but we are wondering if that type of support is further down the road,” Soto wrote in an email. “Maybe we need to do a radical tactical shift to support from outside the church and church planting organizations.” The group is going to accelerate plans to create a 501(3)(c), and start a crowdfunding campaign.
While AltSpaceVR remains their primary focus for now—it’s the most widely accessible—they’re thinking about where to launch their next place of worship. They’ve got their eye on one VR app called RecRoom, which is hosted by PlayStation and is billed as “a virtual reality social club.” They like it because it just started allowing users to create their own environments and it has a young, established audience.
At a recent Google Hangouts meeting between Soto, Leupold, and Clarkson, they celebrated some good news: Headset prices are coming down and Clarkson’s VR bible app had reached 25,000 downloads. It was December and they were planning how to dress up the church for Christmas, and ramp up the pageantry. They were also drawing up ambitious plans to create a kind of mini “church universe” inside AltSpaceVR—with interactive elements that will deepen instruction from the bible, maybe illustrate the stories of David and Goliath or Moses parting the Red Sea.
Then somebody suggested glow sticks. “Glow sticks could completely change worship! There are so many possibilities,” Soto said. They end the meeting with a short prayer. "Lord thank you for this time to be together,” says Leupold. "We just thank you for VR Church, and we thank you for the opportunity to be able to help people and spread your word.”
Together they say "Amen," and wait for their words to ripple into every uncharted corner of the virtual world.
Correction at 2:30 p.m. on 2/2/2018: An earlier version of this story said that Brian Leupold filmed a young boy's hometown church. The film was of his own congregation.
