Religion,the i-zation of society and COVID-19

Preface

Good morning, hello or good evening to all of you. Many thanks to the organisers for inviting me to give this keynote address on zoom across so many different time zones, and congratulation as well for putting this online conference together during COVID-19. This demonstrates how experts in the study of religion can adapt themselves to a changing environment. This is of circumstance to this paper as I will explore how religion has adapted itself in this new space and what we might expect in the near future. Apart from the conventional ‘introduction’ and ‘conclusion’ to a paper, this presentation will have three main sections, these being ‘The i-zation of society and instrumental rationality’, ‘Digital capitalism’, and ‘COVID-19’. The base of this paper is informed by my recent book ‘The i-zation of Society, Religion, and Neoliberal Post-Secularism’ published by Palgrave McMillan and my recent article ‘Mondialisation, l’i-zation de la Société et COVID19’ in a special issue of Diogène guest edited by Lionel Obadia . But first, let’s start with the introduction.

Introduction

Marc Augé (2011: 30–31) hypothesised 10 years ago that the second half of the twentieth century witnessed more radical scientific and technological changes than did the whole period since the birth of humanity. He then considered the twenty-first century and wonders if we should not be studying even shorter periods of time, of perhaps 10 or 20 years, in order to capture the same breath of rapid social and cultural changes initiated by such innovations. As we are approaching the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Augé did not take into account COVID-19. This article will present this epidemic, and more specifically its mode of technological defence as a powerful accelerator of these technological changes.

These new technologies, especially the digital ones, are an outcome of the growth of science. Science, as it was wrongly believed before the advent of globalisation, has not replaced religion. Indeed, Gilbert Achcar (2015) points out that a few centuries have passed since the scientific revolution and that religion has survived the process of secularisation instigated by the 1789 French Revolution. No matter how advanced our technologies, or how independent from their God people can be, or even how certain atheists are about God’s non-existence, religion continues to operate. One such as Nietzsche can kill God, but no philosopher or politician can get rid of religions; these are here to stay. Recent technological and scientific changes have certainly not dispensed with religions – but they have certainly affected them.

As these social and technological changes are affecting our lives, religions cannot remain ‘pristine’ and apart from mundane matters. They have been standardised (Possamai, 2018) and greatly affected by a new level of instrumental rationality as we will uncover soon. These changes do not happen in a vacuum. They are driven by the extension of capitalism that is now fully settled in the digital world. To understand how these new technologies are affecting religion, we also need to understand how neoliberalism is impacting on these technologies and religion.

Further to this discussion, in today’s globalised world, the nation-state has lost some of its capacity for action. In this global economy, Jurgen Habermas (2001) claims that John Keynes’ economic policies of governments within national borders cannot work anymore. The economy, driven by powerful multinational corporations, escapes the control of regulatory states. This has many consequences, one being the shrinking of the welfare-state, another being the difficulty of controlling global crises.

Despite the various crises that neoliberalism has faced, inequalities are not decreasing. François Dubet (2014) even asks, how can we still speak about crises after more than four decades of these? Since the birth of neoliberalism, we have indeed experienced many emergencies, but despite them, we are still within the confines of this ideology. For Berch Berberoglu (2014), these pressure points are even crucial parts of the expansion of capitalism. François Dubet (2014) further underlines that capitalism cannot grow without having to correct its expansion through a crisis every few years. Thomas Piketty (2013) points out that the impact of a financial ‘crash’ is simply to slow down the increase of inequality, and this for only a short term. COVID-19 is one of these crises that is pushing further acceleration. While these confronting moments are not slowing down neoliberalism, they are also putting into question the notion of globalisation and transnationalism.

When the project of globalisation started in the previous century, this concept was in fashion and had positive connotations. Today, it is highly criticised and is even facing a backlash. Manfred Steger and Paul James (2019) have argued that 9/11 and its subsequent war on terror, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the success of national populism such as Brexit and Trumpism have redefined what globalisation means today. These include critiques against the global elites from the middle classes who are becoming more and more dis-privileged. As an example, Emily Campbell, John Torpey, and Bryan Turner (2015) show that the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 brought to the fore that whereas people from poor and working-class backgrounds have suffered inequality for a long time, inequality is now perceived as personal by the white, educated middle class which sees its access to adequate healthcare, satisfactory education for their children, and provision for retirement and old age threatened or taken away.

Coming back to the notion of globalisation, even if the term is criticised, it has to be understood in the twenty-first century differently from the twentieth century. For Manfred Steger and Paul James (2019), it is today recognised by an intensified contradiction between a persistent global and digital interdependence, and the increase of political and populist frustrations at the national level. These populist fractures, spread around the world, needless to say are paradoxically a global phenomenon which are not slowing down the expansion of capitalism, and especially the digital one as we will explore soon. Aligned with this notion of global interconnection is that of transnationalism. It is also not left untouched by changes. This article follows Nehring and Hu’s (2021) perspective that COVID-19 has highlighted its fragility, to the point that they make reference instead to the notion of ‘fragile transnationalism’. Indeed, the typical transnational groups such as migrant workers, refuges, international students and transnational families have been left in a structural limbo due to the pandemic. With the resurgence of nationalistic ideologies and politics asking for nation-states to withdraw from the transnational space through xenophobic public discourse (e.g. the spike of anti-Asian violence), the authors see this as undermining post-national cosmopolitan ethics. Closer to this article, they observe alongside this withdrawal of nation-states the expansion of digital capitalism which, as I paraphrase (Nehring and Hu, 2021: 5), colonises, monopolises, and gatekeeps people’s transnational access. As such, this article presents a new perspective to understand globalisation and transnationalism by using the new concept of the i-zation of society, a process which I will argue has developed in elective affinity with digital capitalism and has affected religion. While this process was already in place well before the pandemic, COVID-19 is currently accelerating this new phenomenon and even creating a closer elective affinity between them.

The i-zation of society and instrumental rationality

Max Weber (2003) developed his theories of rationalisation in order to explain, among other processes, the development of capitalism during modernity. Various societies in history have, of course, used various types of rationalities and bureaucracies. With the development of industrialisation, capitalism demanded that investors calculate potential results and profits in the most efficient way, regardless of sentiment or tradition. For this new ideology to evolve, it needed a deep shift in the way people were thinking about work and about their relationships. The motivation to take on an employee was no longer mainly associated with the person’s relationship with the employer, but with the professional qualities and level of performance he or she could bring to the employment. Even if today we take formal rationality for granted, it was not the case in pre-industrial societies. Weber called this change the rationalisation of society.

George Ritzer (1993) later adapted this argument to late modernity and claimed that this process of rationalisation spread from these large-scale organisations and filtered into our everyday lives. Ritzer uses the McDonald’s fast-food restaurant chain as a model. If viewing each small restaurant individually (such as one building in a strip mall), this appears as a simple provider which does not offer complex recipes. It is, however, part of a large-scale organisation that uses instrumental rationality in each of its restaurants. Ritzer’s argument, as we are all familiar with, is that today, many of the places we visit outside our home are ingrained within instrumental rationality; these being about optimising efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control.

Allow me to present you with a telling example that is not about this fast-food restaurant. Speaking from Australia where air travel is limited at the moment, I feel nostalgic making reference to one of the most pre-COVID-19 MacDonaldised place in the world: the baggage carousel at an international airport. Who would have thought that I would miss such a place? I am certain that many of you are feeling the same way behind your screen right now, especially during this international conference where we are not flying anywhere. The place where the baggage carousel at an airport is located is well controlled with many CCTV cameras. With the flux of people coming from all corners of the world, people need to pick up their suitcase as fast as possible to get through customs or find their connecting flights. This has to be done quick as other planes are landing. For the process to work, carousels are large and long so that many people can wait around it. As each suitcase is scanned at its originating location, the flow of baggage can be calculated, managed, and controlled. This process is so standardised that we do not feel we have landed in a different country to the point that we might even wonder if we have indeed travelled to a different place. So standardised, indeed, that often I usually do not even remember which suitcase is mine – as most are mass produced global models and designs. To find my suitcase, I have put some colourful strings on my handle, but many people are doing the same thing.

Ritzer (1993) adapted Max Weber’s work on instrumental rationality and bureaucratisation to describe people’s everyday lives at the meso-level at the beginning of late modernity. This instrumental rationality, I am arguing in this article, has now spread to the individual and to the self. As Ritzer used the McDonald’s restaurant chain to ‘brand’ his theory, I am turning now to Apple and its iPad and iPhone to ‘brand’ this wave of twenty-first century instrumental rationality and to call it the ‘i-zation of society’. This refers to the intensification of the McDonaldisation process and its expansion to the self, as characterised by these new i-technologies. As I am speaking to you, I am wondering how many of you have such a device right now in your pocket or on your side. You are perhaps even using it as you are listening to me? Are you checking your calendar and organising your tasks for the week? Perhaps you are checking your finances and doing some planning? Or perhaps checking your research metrics such as your citations and h-index? That said, if you have your smartphone with you, you are more than welcome to tweet about my presentation right now. If I may be tongue-in-cheek, this might help to increase my own altmetrics performances.

With apps on iPhones and iPads that allow us to calculate our various performances (at work, in sport, or in our diet), we might believe we no longer need to ask a professional for advice. We just have to enter the data and obtain the results. At the touch of an icon, we can receive immediate coaching to improve at tennis or golf, to learn to play the guitar, to quit smoking, to complete cardio exercises, to become healthier, to meditate, to become successful in our life, and so on (Possamai, 2018).

The sociologist Kevin McDonald (2015) researched the Quantified Self movement and discovered that people use data to drive their lives. With the help of self-quantifying technologies such as emotion tracking, or sleep and exercise monitoring, one can improve one’s quality of life. As such, a person can know himself or herself through calculus and thus administrates the self in a calculable and efficient way. Using new technologies, people in this movement record their activities and performances on the digital world and share their data. They benchmark themselves against other people, improve themselves, and, more importantly, improve their efficiency at work and in everyday life. A variety of matters can indeed be tracked such as weight, energy level, mood, time usage, sleep quality, health, cognitive performance, athletics, and learning strategies.

Apps allow people to manage themselves in the same way that they would run a small company. At the touch of a screen, people can follow their personal progress and compare their output and success (or otherwise) with that of other people. To experience the McDonaldisation of society, one no longer has to go out to a fast-food restaurant, a university, or a hospital, because with the i-zation of society, via the pervasiveness of i-devices, the experience is instantaneous and the means to it is actually carried on the self. In i-society, Weber’s instrumental rationality has become omnipresent. We have bureaucratised our own selves.

With regards to religion, I remember, when I was conducting fieldwork on New Age spirituality in the late 1990s in Melbourne (Possamai, 2005), seeing spiritual seekers in Mind, Body, Spirit festivals either pay to use a large machine that would read their aura, or ask someone to read their palms. There are now apps that take a picture of a person, or of his or her palm, and give similar readings. There are apps that perform a reading of tarot cards, promote understandings of the Bible, link a person to religious groups and activities, and help organise witchcraft rituals. One can have an app to calculate Muslim prayer times and to assist in following the Ramadan timetable. The ‘Prayer Silencer’ app silences a user’s phone at prayer times. ‘Find Qibla Pro’ is a prayer aid that shows the direction that should be faced when a Muslim prays during salat. ‘i-Quran’ and ‘Memorize Quran’ help a devotee to study and memorise the Quran. ‘Buddhist Meditation Trainer’ is designed to increase people’s efficiency in meditation. ‘The Jesus Film’ (translated into many languages) can be used by missionaries on their i-devices to introduce people around the world to Jesus. The ‘Hail Mary’ app turns a phone into a virtual rosary, with beads. ‘Uplifting Scriptures’ shares biblical scriptures every day at a set time. ‘Prayer Mate’ helps people to pray and includes an alarm to remind them when it is time to pray. One can make confession in front of one’s iPhone or fight against the devil by finding the scriptures that relate to life’s problems such as anxiety and addiction (Possamai, 2018).

Kathy Richardson and Carol Pardun (2015) studied the 2013 Barna survey, which focused on practicing Christian Millennials. A large majority of them (70%) read scripture on a phone or computer. The survey discovered that mobile devices are often used during sermons to check the veracity of the statements made by the preacher. The YouVersion app, which contains 600 translations of the Bible, reached 100 million downloads at the time of their research. These authors also conducted their own survey and focus groups among Baptists in the United States. They found their respondents used smartphones to access the Bible while at Church and while travelling. They discovered that convenience was the main reason for using these new technologies. As one respondent stated,

I use the iPad every week because I can come straight from work and have my 10 minutes before class to look up pictures of the missionary, the place we’re studying, and I can save them all and scroll through while we’re having our story, and I can play music that goes along with the place. (Richardson and Pardun, 2015: 24)

In another research, Misita Anwar and Graeme Johanson (2014) studied the usage of mobile phones for religious purposes among Indonesian women. The interviewees were Muslim businesspeople who claimed how significant it was for them to use mobile technology to conduct their religious activities and run a business at the same time. They use these technologies as reminders of their prayer times and listen regularly to Islamic lectures to develop their religious knowledge.

Mobile technologies can thus increase the efficiency of people in combining their work, their private sphere, and their religious life. This is part of a culture of neoliberalism in which religion helps the ‘self’ by making one more productive as a worker and wealthier as a consumer. Neoliberalism promotes the image of an ideal citizen as a good consumer and a hard and efficient worker with the correct targeted skills for the market. Work is no longer evaluated in relation to its engagement in production, but according to the buying power it delivers. In this period, in which the state is withdrawing more and more from its duty to provide for the welfare of its citizens, the responsibility of being a ‘good’ citizen has fallen on the individual. New forms of regulation and governmentality have been created to regulate this individual self: people are expected to resolve, themselves, their possible unhappiness and their sense of alienation and disenchantment. Self-improvement has become a social duty rather than just a private goal. In this new world, in which self-help has become so hegemonic, programmes available through many religious outlets offer to ‘selves’ in distress many and varied pathways to an improvement in their situation. Religious entrepreneurs not only offer their products offline but have also designed podcasts, videos, and apps to aid and direct individuals to work on themselves, by themselves (Sanders, 2012). The issue, here, is not necessarily whether the religion is true but whether its teachings work. As one spiritual healer, quoted in the work of François Gauthier (2012), stated, ‘efficiency is the measure of truth’.

I am tempted to revise Marx’s and Engel’s famous understanding of religion as the opium of the people. On the contrary, in neoliberal society, consumer’s senses are no longer dulled; they are heightened. If religion is still to be compared in a metaphoric sense to a drug, it is no longer an opium, it is rather cocaine-like, purchased and consumed to enhance people’s productivity and efficiency. But the goal is not only to increase production but rather to increase workers’ buying power. In neoliberalism, religion helps people to enhance their consuming power by making them more efficient and productive in their work and everyday life. And in return, consumer society needs religion to justify and increase its markets.

Digital capitalism

This space represents a large part of the market and has greatly expanded since Manuel Castells (1996) wrote his magnum opus on the information age at the end of last century. He was making reference to the information technology revolution, and the changes of that are still happening today at even a faster pace. Job markets and access to information continue to still metamorphose, to the point that we know less and less what are the jobs of the future. Web 2.0 and the democratisation of access to the digital world have certainly intensified this process.

Robert McChesney’s (2013) studied how capitalism has shaped the Internet. For him, the digital revolution occurred around the time that the ideology of neoliberalism was strong and there was a search for new markets, especially after the financial crash of 1987 and the recession of the early 1990s. In 1994–1995, the Internet was formally privatised, leading to a strengthening of capitalist and monopolistic tendencies.

As disparity brought by neoliberalism increases between nations and within nations, social inequality will probably also increase; digital technologies (controlled by profit-driven corporations) are likely to progressively marginalise rather than empower most of us. This is the argument of Trebor Scholz (2017: 2–3) who claims that the neoliberal deregulation of digital labour creates inequality, undermines union, and favours low-wage temporary contracts. As the author demonstrates in his book, the distribution of production is now available to a large population, but the economic rewards do not follow. Only a few are benefitting from this new form of capitalism, and these few have benefitted from COVID-19, as we will see very soon.

The religious professions have been (and will continue to be) challenged by these changes. People are today reflexive individuals who create their own religious identities and fashion their own cosmologies. In a devolved and ‘glocalised’ world of instant and continuous communication, who may speak authoritatively for these diverse religious groups and reflexive religious individuals? As the presence of the media has intensified, authority, in the digital world, has devolved, dispersed, and dissipated (Turner, 2007). The more traditional religious elites are now being challenged in a global spiritual marketplace, especially in the digital world, and forms of religious authority are being redefined. Looking at Max Weber’s typology of authority, Bryan Turner (2009) proposes that global commercialism has inverted the traditional relationship between the virtuosi and the masses. In this sense, we see religions being expressed and lived at the grassroots level rather than being imposed from above by certain forms of religious authority. The sacred is no longer ineffable; it is now easier to understand and is even accessible through YouTube where we can indeed find religious tutorials such as ‘how to take the perfect ritual bath’ or ‘how to pray’, alongside Hijab tutorials on how to look fashionable and still be modest. These technologies can also be used as a form of control as discovered in a research by Heidi Campbell and Altenhofen, (2016) in which some Jewish groups have created filters to protect their users from accessing content regarded as immoral. There is also a version of YouTube for Christians, GodTube, and a Facebook for Muslims, Millatfacebook.com, that provide a religious safe environment.

Digital capitalism is redrawing the boundaries of what it means to be a religious leader. For example, a study of US congregational websites by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research (Campbell, 2004) uncovered such a change in power structure. Previously marginalised ‘techies’ have today gained more authority by being the religious groups’ webmasters. Suddenly, a person, with or without authority in the offline world, is put in a position of power in the digital world. This person can control the discussion, for example, by banning participants or structuring a webpage in such a way that a hierarchy is created (see Campbell, 2012). Deep knowledge is not entirely forfeited in this arena: in a previous study by myself and Bryan Turner (Possamai and Turner, 2012), we noted that the more cultural and/or religious capital (such as knowledge of the Qur’an, pagan rituals, or even Star Wars culture) that a believer has in the context of his or her religion, the more authority he or she might have in online religious forums.

COVID-19

On 11 March 2020, COVID-19 is declared by the World Health Organisation to be a pandemic. At that time, only 300,000 cases were known. Last week, we were above 180 million. The recommendations from this organisation were aimed at all nations to implement nonpharmacological measures to stop its transmission. This led to a response quite different from previous pandemic as the increase of the use of smartphones dramatically increased, from 172 million in 2009 to 1.56 billion in 2020 (Nageshwaran et al., 2021). These new technologies have now changed the way we deal with global viruses and have led to the creation of various phone apps to control the spread. On the 10 April 2020, Apple and Google announced a partnership to develop these digital tools (Sacco et al., 2020). Thanks to these apps, we can now compare and contrast the success and failures of various countries in their effort to stop the spread.

Living in Australia, I have access to a few that inform me of the local situation, and those apps provide me with advice on what to do and on how to cope with mental health issues. I am also regularly informed of the latest regulations with regards to the amount of people admitted in a restaurant and when and where masks are mandatory. I use my phone when I scan a QR code to pass on the information to the local government as to the place I visit. I also receive frequent automatic news on my phone as to what is happening with this virus around the world, and especially from my home country in Belgium, with which I remain in close contact with my iPhone. I am indeed in regular contact over a long distance with friends and family thanks to WhatsApp, Messenger, and Zoom.

Far from comparing or contrasting the pandemic experience in Australia with other countries, it is however worth noting that these types of apps were already in place to inform and protect the Australian population during the 2019–2020 bush fire, the worst and the most extended in this country since we have data on this phenomenon. These apps developed rapidly to inform people of the places where fires were, of the places that needed to be evacuated, and of all the precautious measure needed. Apps such as those are now normalised and this explains why in December 2020, at least 74 countries had their own apps to attempt to stop the transmission of COVID. These new social practices and attitudes towards pandemics, to echo Zinn (2020), are shifting the state of exception towards a ‘new normal’ which might prevent a way back to the ‘old normal’. Some countries have pushed their population to use them not only for health reasons, but also to fight this decease the fastest way possible so it would not affect as much the non-digital economy. We will come back to COVID and digital capitalism very soon.

In the app store, one can find more than 200 apps when typing ‘COVID-19’. The large majority of them have been created to fight the transmission of the virus. Many are available to help assess the symptoms of a potential infection, to help maintain a good mental health and stop reducing well-being, to build network among people who have lost a loved one to this virus, to teach while entertaining kids to understand what the virus is, and even a COVID coach to help reducing stress.

The effect of this pandemic will be studied for many years, but what I would like to focus for this article is on the fact that this phenomenon is accelerating the i-zation of society. The use of these new digital technologies have become so normalised to fight this virus using our iPhone almost as if these smartphones were a second skin. Even if many countries have created their own app to inform people and track the spread of the virus, the product is standardised and provides information about locations visited by people. This has been interpreted by some as a new way to control populations and as a potential threat to human rights. Indeed, this new form of governmentality normalises so much surveillance that Mirca Madianou (2020) sees in this a dramatic extension of state power and a great opportunity for tech companies to extend their market far wider than the sphere of public health.

As digital capitalism is in elective affinity with the i-zation of society, many business companies have profited from the fact that people had to open themselves more to the sphere of digital capitalism to work, to go to university and school, and to shop. In this crisis caused by this pandemic, and as observed by Christian Fuchs (2021), those who were able to work from home have are the privileged within the crisis. These have a lesser risk of being unemployed, of being sick, and of dying. Many other workers who have not had that advantage, such as those working in tourism and the hotel and catering trade have lost their work. The workers central to the pandemic, who are those who could not work remotely from a place of work central to the crisis such as a hospital or a supermarket have taken a far greater risk of getting infected and of dying from COVID.

This pandemic has also provided an even wider platform to digital capitalism. For example, shopping on Amazon has increased by 26.5% during that time. It’s worth at the stock market has also increased from US$1900 at the start of 2020 to US$3200 in July 2020. This company has become the 22nd largest transnational corporation and its founder and CEO was in 2020 the wealthiest person in the world. It is also during that time that the fortune of the top 600 US billionaires has increased between March and July 2020 by US$700 billion. This happened at the same time that 50 million people have lost their job, and that poverty, hunger, and homeliness has increased (Fuchs, 2021: 34). COVID-19 has allowed these corporations to accumulate more wealth and to consolidate their control of the world economy. As Matthewman and Huppatz (2020) have alluded, this pandemic provides opportunities for ‘disaster capitalists’ to profit. As digital capitalism is based on a transnational division of labour, where people work under various conditions across the world, the transnational capital of these digital companies has increased even more and has thus made the world even more global, despite the increase of populist movements within nations and its impact on ‘fragile transnationalism’ (Nehring and Hu, 2021).

But what of religions? Many of us, experts in the field of religion, had to adapt ourselves to conducting research in this COVID world. We have become apt at interviewing on zoom, using qualtrics for survey, moving to different forms of data analysis to respond to the proliferation of livestreaming and You tube videos (e.g. Vokes and Atukunda, 2021). New research is starting to come out on how religions have adapted themselves to this new world. As an example, Cristina Rocha et al. (2021) have detailed in Sapiens, the Anthropology Magazine, how they transformed their field of research during a full lockdown in Australia. In their study of Christian churches in African Australian communities, they have observed church services starting to be streamed online. This increased use of online worship has allowed many churches to attract a higher number of people to their services and even diversify their congregations outside of Australia within the African diaspora. Many churches have adapted themselves to Zoom, Facebook Live, and YouTube and through this online transition have reached a broader audience of people worshiping through a laptop or an i-pad. In their research, Rocha et al. (2021) have also uncovered that these digital church goers struggle on how best to worship and on how to feel connected to their faith in this virtual space.

Baker et al (2020) have underlined how social distancing has affected church attendance and face-to-face religious rituals and how the Durkheimian collective effervescence has been altered. Many of these groups had to adapt themselves, not only for their regular rituals but especially with regards to the management of death and mourning, a demand increased due to COVID-19. It is clear for these authors that the religious groups and organisations that already used these technologies before the pandemic are a few steps ahead in their adaptation to social distancing. Indeed, as uncovered by Campbell and Osteen (2021), among those who experienced an unexpected tech learning curve, many were left burned out and overwhelmed. However, as a consequence of this move to these new technologies, small town churches can now become wide-reaching churches and not be limited by their locality. In another research, Frahm-Arp (2021) discovered that at a South African Pentecostal church, a new element developed during the pandemic, online confessions. To reflect on what their sins were, members of the congregations were invited to e-mail their confessions, which were read out during the online services. Since COVID-19, this church has become international.

Moving to religious believers, the Pew Research Center (2021) found in a preliminary research that those who were more religious before the pandemic were more likely to state that COVID-19 has made their faith stronger than those with a lesser religious commitment. This begs the question if this could create a stronger social and cultural distance between the religious haves and the religious have-nots?

I am myself currently doing research on digital exorcism. This is a follow-up on the research that I recently did with Giuseppe Giordan (Giordan and Possamai, 2018). Some exorcism can indeed be performed online, video recorded, and then uploaded on YouTube or Facebook. Recently, the Archbishop of San Francisco performed an exorcism in the city of San Rafael after the statue of the famous Catholic missionary, Father Junipero Serra, was destroyed. He wanted to drive out evil and restore the image of Father Serra (Associated Press, 2021). A video was uploaded on YouTube and shows priests and spectators wearing a face mask during COVID-19. A traditionalist catholic priest, Fr John Zuhlsdorf from the Madison Diocese in Wisconsin, has performed live-streamed exorcism over the years. He claimed to have received the approval of his Bishop and stated that this rite was ‘for the intension of alleviation from the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic’ and bot for ‘partisan political activity’ (White, 2021). He however moved at the centre of attention when he performed an exorcism in which he falsely alleged widespread election fraud during the last US Presidential election. Exploring his blog, the journalist Christopher White (2021) discovers that the priest has been a vocal critic of Pope Francis, has supported the agenda of former President Trump, and has expressed negative views against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) Catholics. I am currently exploring how the i-zation of society is giving a new and wide platform to exorcists to spread widely their political concerns through their rituals and thus influence believers. These are part of a broader spiritual warfare against demons who afflict our lives not only at home but at the political level as well. But who are the demons? As S. Jonathon O’Donnell (2021) has recently uncovered in the United States, spiritual warfare against Satan is not only about claiming the sovereign right of God, but can also be of the humans aligned with him. Demonologists and exorcists do more than simply describe supernatural creatures, as they can also carry their moral code to those convinced of their strength and express forms of symbolic violence to humans when confronting the demonic.

Away from these political exorcisms, individuals are also using new technologies to perform exorcism from a distance. Already before COVID-19, the famous Evangelical Christian Reverend Bob Larson went on Anderson Cooper television show in 2014 to discuss how he uses Skype to perform exorcism remotely (Levy, 2014). He streams exorcism live on Facebook and uploads them, professionally edited as clips, on his YouTube channel (Gritt, 2017).

It is too early to understand the impact of COVID-19 on religion at the local and transnational level. Suffice it to say that the further elective affinity of digital capitalism and the i-zation of society have pushed religion further, not to churches, but to the self through the use of a smartphone and other devices. Some religious groups were prepared to move in this new space, and many others are new to the scene. Some of them will work on helping people to survive the pandemic and overcome its challenges. This has indeed been pointed out by Baker et al. (2020) who underline the important resources provided by these groups during this difficult period. Despite social distancing, many groups help with food and supplementary financial support to assist those in need. They even wonder whether an unintended consequence of having the churches closed would provide an opportunity for civic engagement and community services to expand beyond their offline locality. Other religious groups will take advantage of the COVID generated anxieties for certain gains. I fear to imagine a future ultra-conservative religious leader with the same tweet power as Donald Trump. What is happening now with regards to religion and COVID-19, and what will happen subsequently, will certainly keep us, sociologists of religion, busy for the years to come. Indeed, what would the future bring in a post-pandemic world, will there be a return to a fully offline mode of delivery, would a permanent presence online remain, or would we observe some hybrid developments?

Conclusion

This is the first global pandemic in which the digital world has allowed the privileged classes to withdraw from the offline world while still being connected to their work, studies, religion, family, and friends. This crisis has cost the life of so many individuals and has had profound social and financial impact for many. But has it affected our capitalist lifestyle? On the contrary, it has simply taken a different path even closer towards the i-zation of society. Religion has not been left out and is fully engaged in this new field.

This pandemic is affecting everyone but differently. If the large majority of people have taken a step further towards the i-zation of society, a minority has greatly benefitted from an increase in digital capitalism. This will certainly increase the intensity of the process of globalisation with regards to the interdependence of world economics and digital capitalism. We can thus expect more political fractures due to further increase of populism at the national level, especially in countries that are among the worst hit by the virus. Globalisation is no longer what it used to be, but it is far from slowing down to interconnect people across the world and this constantly, thanks to an i-phone in one’s bag or pocket, and thus thanks to the i-zation of society. As to the future of religion following this pandemic, I am looking forward to reading all the research that you, viewers on zoom from around the world of this conference paper, will produce in the year to come. To all of you, go forth and prosper with your research and make sure to tweet about it. Thank you.