Religious Communities in the Virtual Age

General information

Code: H6-8291
Period: 1.11.2022 - 30.9.2025
Range on year: 0.08 FTE | 2024
Project leader at FDV: prof.dr. Aleš Črnič
Co-financiers:

Projekt je v okviru programa CHANSE ERA-NET Co-fund financiral program Evropske unije Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation (na podlagi pogodbe št. 101004509).

Abstract

Recovira (Religious Communities in the Virtual Age) is an international research project that examines how the shape, role, and experience of religious life in Europe has been transformed by contemporary technology and digital culture. The pandemic forced many religious communities into new relationships with technology and the digital world, and Recovira investigates the what the effects of these changes will be going forward. Our research is based in seven countries around Europe (the UK, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Slovenia), and our case studies include religious communities of many different faiths, beliefs, and origins.

While, historically, religious life has been something of a refuge from the digitalisation of European society, the COVID-19 pandemic changed that. The social restrictions imposed by the pandemic rapidly accelerated religious communities’ embrace of digital tools and structures in order to continue their essential social and psychological work during this crisis.

As our research shows, these developments have opened up new and productive possibilities for how European religion is done, and so these developments are likely to persist long after the pandemic has ended.

But exactly what the consequences of this rapid digitalisation of religious life in Europe will be, for majority and minority traditions, requires further research. How will issues such as religious authority, community belonging and membership, the (digital) sense of sacred place, the making of meaningful and affectively potent rituals, and the relationship of religious communities to the wider public sphere change when those communities exist primarily, or even completely, in the digital realm?

This project brings together scholars from seven European countries with backgrounds in the sociology of religion, anthropology, digital religion, performance studies, and allied disciplines to address these questions. The primary method is ethnography, including both traditional and digital methods. We studied religious communities from different traditions and backgrounds, selected to provide both ethnographic depth and international comparability. Throughout 2023, we conducted observations and interviews with members of three types of religious communities: first, in mainstream churches (the Roman Catholic Church, Evangelical Lutheran Churches, the Anglican Church); then in the long-established minority communities (the Jewish community, the Islamic community, the Jehovah’s Witnesses); and finally in the newer, less widespread and established communities (African diaspora churches, the Buddhist community, the Hindu community, the Hare Krishna).

A total of 249 interviews were conducted with 270 ordinary members of the selected religious communities, their leaders or official representatives, and digital content creators across seven countries.

Research Organisation

https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/21792

Researchers

https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/21792

Citations for bibliographic records

https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/21792

Results / Key findings

During the pandemic, digital technologies allowed religious communities at least a partial continuation of religious practices and related activities, especially informing and communicating with their members, thus maintaining at least a minimal sense of connectedness among them. Despite some reservations about the use of digital technologies, reservations that were repeatedly identified in our research, the community leaders, as well as the majority of the members interviewed, made every effort to make use of their potential.

However, the ways in which digital technologies were used and their significance in the lives of the studied religious communities differed across groups. The members’ age, education, and socio-economic status all shape their acceptance of technology, as well as the way and extent to which they use it. The use of digital technologies is also subject to various traditional and doctrinal constraints and restraints on practicing ritual and other religious activities remotely.

When the covid-19 pandemic made physical gatherings impossible, it threatened the traditional ways in which these communities are constituted and sustained. Members of all the communities studied in our research expressed feelings of undermined and strained communities, emphasizing the crucial importance of regular physical contact in maintaining an authentic sense of community. They particularly missed the sensory element, the materiality and the atmosphere. Our findings highlight both the utility of digital technologies and the irreplaceability of personal and collective embodied religious practices.

Our research overwhelmingly supports those contemporary conceptions of religion that do not primarily define it as a set of doctrines and ideas that are subsequently expressed by believers through material tools. Our findings affirm that religious life cannot be understood as a mere interplay of purely cognitive activities of learning, understanding, and thinking that can easily be transferred online. The persuasiveness and efficacy of religion is largely based on (collective) physical participation with bodies and physical senses.

Generally speaking, our research findings suggest that, at least for traditional religiosity, digital technologies do not serve as an adequate substitute for physical activities, but rather are used as supportive and complementary tools. Therefore, at least for traditional religions, fears of their disappearance amid the rise of digital technologies do not seem justified.  At the same time, however, it would be premature to conclude that the growing use of digital technologies cannot profoundly change traditional religious activities primarily conducted in churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other in-person places of worship. In fact, in many places, these activities are already being complemented by the hybrid use of digital technologies, which in some communities has already led to tangible decline of in-person participation in physical religious activities. Thus, the post-epidemic intensification of the use of digital technologies also has longer-term implications for contemporary religious life.