“The Computer as a Sophisticated Disguise of the Devil”

Christian churches are sometimes perceived as being hostile towards technology due to the supposed incompatibility of the cold, rational world of technology and the warm, humane organization of the church. Even when electronic data processing (EDP) was introduced in German-speaking Protestant churches in Western Europe, a lack of acceptance of technology was repeatedly problematized by church digitization pioneers as a central hurdle in church digitization processes. According to them, the "synchronization" (David Gugerli) of church and computer was therefore to prove particularly prone to conflict. This paper analyzes the discursive function of the recourse to the "technophobic church" (technikfeindliche Kirche) in digitization debates in the Swiss and West German Protestant churches from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. It argues that the portrayal of the church's pronounced hostility to technology went beyond an empirically verifiable technophobia and served discursive purposes. The "technophobic church" and technophobia in the church were widely and publicly lamented in order to evoke widespread clichés that church digitization pioneers could use to mobilize support from the broader public, both inside and outside the church, for their position in inner-church disputes about power and hierarchy, as well as to conjure scenarios of computer use. These findings therefore suggest that the influence of cultural and technological pessimism in church circles is often overestimated.