Abstract
Judging by a 2023 Pew Research Center report about online religion, digital media have become thoroughly integrated into American religious experience. Thirty percent of U.S. adults report searching for information about religion online, 21% use scripture apps or websites, 15% listen to religious podcasts, and 14% use prayer apps or websites. Seventeen percent of U.S. adults post or share religious content on social media, and the exact same percentage has “unfollowed, unfriended, blocked, or changed their settings to see less of someone on social media” because of the religious content that person posted or shared. And despite reporting that worshipping in person makes them feel more connected to other worshippers, 27% of U.S. adults watch religious services virtually (Faverio et al., 2023).
To explain how digital media have affected religious experience, Heidi Campbell, professor of communication at Texas A&M University, teamed up with Wendi Bellar, senior user experience researcher at JP Morgan Chase. Campbell has published a dozen books on this subject and Bellar wrote her doctoral dissertation at Texas A&M on Catholic and Muslim prayer apps, so this team is well positioned to write an authoritative and accessible primer on digital media. Their entry in the popular Routledge series, The Basics, discusses the influence of digital media on religious beliefs and practices in terms of six key dynamics: networked community, convergent practice, multisite reality, shifting authority, storied identity, and experiential authenticity.
By networked community, Campbell and Bellar refer to the sea change in belief and behavior of social groups. No longer limited to a specific locality, communities now include amalgams of voluntary face-to-face and online associations. The defining characteristic is commitment rather than geography. To be sure, most churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples draw participants from nearby neighborhoods, but what matters most is the experience of social connection. Networked community was demonstrated when religious meetings moved online at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it continues today as people support their relationships through a braid of online and face-to-face engagements.
Sometimes disparaged as “cafeteria religion,” convergent practice refers to people using both offline and online sources to construct their religious identity. Of course, religious communities and individuals have long borrowed ideas and practices from other religious traditions. But the internet accelerates such appropriation because its diverse, encyclopedic resources are available 24/7. To illustrate convergent practice, Campbell and Bellar highlight BelieveOutLoud.com, an online LGBTQIA ministry of the Cathedral of Hope United Church of Christ in Dallas, Texas, because the website’s hyperlinked directory of more than 100 churches, mosques, and synagogues offers bountiful resources that can help LGBTQIA people build their religious identity.
Complementing the convergent practice of individuals creating religious identities drawn from offline and online resources is multisite reality, by which religious groups foster community by combining in-person and online experiences. Most often associated with evangelical megachurches, multisite reality facilitates large, dispersed congregations by operating a main campus and satellite locations with the support of networked technologies as well as information and services available online. As an example, Campbell and Bellar cite central Florida’s Northland Church, which offers several services a week at its main campus and its five site campuses in addition to five online services every week, for which the church employs three internet pastors.
Shifting authority is the fourth defining characteristic of digital religion that Campbell and Bellar identify. Religious groups may control the content of their digital media, but they have no influence over religious critics and entrepreneurs who use the internet to disseminate alternative points of view. Enterprising religious influencers circulate messages that a growing number of followers finds meaningful. Meanwhile, established religious groups apply considerable resources to creating digital content that affirms their teachings and practices. Shifting authority is thus paradoxical: digital media have become centers of both orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
To discuss storied identity, the presentation of self based on individual patchworks of online and offline resources, Campbell and Bellar highlight so-called mommy bloggers. Religious mommy bloggers are certainly motivated by their perspective and experience, but they also season their advice about faithful parenting with their personality, their quirks, and their enthusiasms. That is, their identities are complex, drawn from online and offline experience and information. In addition to blogs, religious storied identity increasingly involves phone apps such as Shabbat Times, Bible, or Athan: Prayer Times & Al Quran. According to Campbell and Bellar, religious apps signify their users’ values and everyday behavior.
Campbell and Bellar’s final category is experiential authenticity, which they define as the continual assessment of the genuineness of one’s religious beliefs and practices. In many cases, this assessment involves feelings. Users of Bible apps and prayer apps, for example, describe feeling encouraged and close to God. But online assessment is also communal. People share Buddhist memes with others to be playful (e.g., a photo of a Buddhist monk using a computer with the text: “How do Buddhist monks send emails? Without attachments.”), questioning (e.g., a photo of a golden Buddha with the text “Talk about giving up desire. Statues made of pure gold.”), and critical (e.g., a white woman with dreadlocks with the text, “I am a practicing Buddhist. This week.”).
Given its organization, its brevity, and its low price, Digital Religion: The Basics should be the go-to introduction to the field for some time. Readers will appreciate the clear and reliable discussion of six dynamics of digital religion based on decades of research. What they will miss, though, is an overview of the more speculative studies of digital religion. Peter Horsfield’s sweeping history, From Jesus to the Internet (Horsfield, 2015), is one example. Horsfield argues that the spread of electronic media in the last century encouraged the production of messages that attract mass audiences, a motivation that fostered the rise of a populist religion that emphasizes material experience and promises health and wealth to those who put faith into practice. Another important speculative work, A Theology for a Mediated God by Dennis Ford (2016), argues that an era’s dominant medium affects how people think about God. According to Ford, because the digital age renders God tangible and emotional, faith is experienced more through feeling than by understanding, making spirituality fluid and resistant to the authority of institutions and texts. Including such broader studies of history and media ecology will make the second edition of Digital Religion even more valuable than the first.
