Digital Religion as the Networked Spiritual Infrastructure of Our Religious Futures
摘要
This chapter introduces the concept of digital religion, which asserts that to understand religion in contemporary culture, we must recognize that people engage in communal spiritual practices in both online-mediated spaces as well as through traditional offline communities and experiences. I argue that our online and offline experiences of religion are deeply interconnected and force us to re-examine the nature of human spirituality in the twenty-first century. In this chapter, I discuss and define three key traits of digital religion: networked community, convergent practice, and multisite reality. Each of these traits suggests that the ways people participate in religious communities, rituals, and spiritual spaces have been altered by our engagement in a culture that is increasingly shaped by digital technologies. These three characteristics of digital religion became especially evident for religious groups during the global COVID-19 pandemic. They forced many congregations to move their religious services and practice online due to the social limits created by this health crisis. I assert that these new understandings about how individuals gather, practice their faith, and form spiritual relationships represent a unique and important shift in how religion should be conceived in Western culture.