Surveying theoretical approaches within digital religion studies

The rise of digital religion studies

Digital Religion explores the intersection of new media technologies, religion, and digital culture. It encompasses topics such as how religious communities engage with the Internet to ways religiosity is expressed through digital practices and the extent to which technological engagement can be seen as a spiritual enterprise. Digital Religion studies has been referred to by many names in the last two decades, from the study of “cyber-religion”—a way to describe new expressions of religious practices emerging through the then new computer networks—to “virtual religion,” which emphasized tensions between “real world” religious structures and new “virtual” forms, implying that these virtual expressions might somehow be seen as incomplete (Højsgaard and Warburg, 2005). More recently, the term “digital religion” has been used to describe studies of the technological and cultural space evoked when scholars talk about how online and offline religious spheres become blended or blurred, as offline religious contexts intersect with new online spheres, allowing hybrid spaces of practice to emerge (Campbell, 2013). Hoover (2012) suggests that scholars have moved from simply exploring the “digitalization of religion”—how digital media force religious groups to adapt to changing notions of religious tradition, authority, or authenticity—to consider at a deeper level “the actual contribution ‘the digital’ is making to ‘the religious’” (p. ix). Digital religion is imprinted by both traits of online culture (i.e. traits of interactivity, convergence, audience-generated content, etc.) and offline religion (i.e. patterns of belief and ritual tied to historically grounded communities). Digital Religion studies thus pays attention to the online–offline implications of reformulating existing religious practices and new expressions of spirituality online.

The evolution of Digital Religion research has been described in terms of four waves (Campbell and Lövheim, 2011; Højsgaard and Warburg, 2005) to illustrate how different research questions and methods have arisen, peaked, and then led to new areas of research emphasis. It is notable that these waves can also be seen in the development of Internet studies in terms of dominant research approaches taken over time (Campbell, 2013). In wave 1—the descriptive era—scholars sought to document what was happening to religious practices on the Internet, such as O’Leary’s analysis of how Neopagan and Christian religious ritual online highlighted questions of what constitutes religious authenticity.

In wave 2—the time of categorization—scholars attempted to provide concrete typologies, identifying trends occurring within religious Internet practice, such as Helland’s (2000) often-cited categories of “religion-online,” importing traditional forms of religion online, and “online-religion” adapting religion to create new forms of networked spirituality.

In wave 3—the theoretical turn—scholars focused on identifying methods and theoretical frameworks to help analyze offline religious communities’ strategies related to new media use, as seen in Barzilai-Nahon and Barzila’s (2005) study of how ultra-Orthodox Jewish users rhetorically justify their Internet engagement so that it can be incorporated into the community’s religious boundaries.

Wave 4 highlights current scholarly focus on religious actors’ negotiations between their online and offline lives, and how this informs a broader understanding of the religious in the contemporary society. Cheong et al. (2011), for example, explore how the Internet can both solidify and undermine traditional forms of religious authority online, while forcing religious leaders to evaluate the uneven gains social media offer established authorities.

While Digital Religion studies are still maturing, scholars continue to identify an increasing number of theories that have been used in studies of mass media and religion and consider how those theories might best be applied and adapted to Digital Religion research. Three theoretical approaches often engaged by scholars studying the intersections between media, religion, and culture have also become influential with current Digital Religion work, namely, mediatization, mediation of meaning, and the RSST. Each approach presents a unique understanding of the relationship between religion and media and leads to a different consideration of how religion performs within the digital context.

Mediatization and new media

Mediatization theory has become an important lens used to focus attention on the role media play in social and cultural change. The concept of mediatization is used to capture long-term interrelation processes occurring between media change on one hand, and social and cultural change on the other (Hepp et al., 2010: 223). As a theoretical approach, it has been interpreted and applied in more than one way by using a social-constructivist or cultural studies approach to taking an institutional perspective on mediatization (Lundby, 2014b). Some scholars assert that mediatization is a contemporary phenomenon describing the rise of “media-saturated societies” (i.e. Hjarvard, 2013), while others argue mediatization can be seen from the very beginning of humanity in mankind’s use of media tools for communication (i.e. Krotz, 2014; Lundby, 2014).

Drawing on Krotz’s work, Lundby (2014) describes mediatization as seeing media as a set of foundational tools contemporary humans use to communicate. This perspective allows scholars to consider processes by which media socialize public understandings of religion, the way this socialization shapes religious communities and institutions, and the extent to which they depend on media. Scholars have also used mediatization to emphasize the diminishing or reconfigured role religion plays in the society (i.e. Hepp, 2013; Hepp and Krönert, 2010), which is arguably true especially in certain European contexts where media have notably taken over roles once played by state churches (Lövheim, 2011). Here, mediatization becomes a useful tool to consider how religion “serves as an active agent with media and modernity,” and how these interactions relate to broader societal moves toward secularization (Lövheim, 2011: 161).

Within media, religion, and culture studies, Hjarvard’s understanding of mediatization has been popular, drawing attention to how contemporary media institutions influence religious ones. His work spotlights the ways in which various social structures have become dependent on the logic of the media (Hjarvard, 2008, 2014). In this case, media are understood as independent institutions within the society, to which religion and religious culture adapt. Hjarvard’s approach places the focus on the way media become key structures for disseminating religion and beliefs about religion throughout the society. Here mediatization transforms religion, as the various media serve as society’s prime information source about religion (Lövheim, 2014). So mediatization occurs when media institutions dominate the social order, taking over the position once held by religious institutions as purveyors and interpreters of cultural meaning (Lövheim and Lynch, 2011). This focuses researcher attention on how media institutions inform and guide societal understandings of a religion.

Mediatization has been employed within studies of Digital Religion to help scholars identify the affordance of digital media that create new patterns of communication within religious groups, often transforming or destabilizing traditional religious communication flows. For example, Lövheim’s study (2012) of female Scandinavian Islamic bloggers argues that social media provide possibilities for enhancing and extending the agency and authority of young women. Here she draws on and extends Clark’s work (2011a, 2011b) considering how mediatization through the affordances of digital media opens possibilities for individual agencies in the field of religion. This highlights how digital media can heighten the visibility of religion in the public sphere, as religious communication emerges in new forms through social networks, changing traditional community information flows. Here mediatization helps emphasize the ways digital media can create unique public spaces where individuals or groups can voice their thoughts in ways often not previously possible within their religious context.

Mediatization has also enabled scholars to explain shifts in traditional forms of religious authority, as digital media destabilize religious institutions and enable potential new forms of religious mediation. Hjarvard (2013) has suggested that the Internet makes use of religious imaginaries to communicate religion in popular media genres, further loosening religious symbols and images from their original context as they are manipulated, reinterpreted, and shared across digital networks. As a result, rather than authority being tied to set institutional structures, authority becomes temporary, personalized, and based on connective actions. Therefore, mediatization offers an interesting lens through which we can study shifts from traditional and institutional authority (as defined by Weber, 1958) to consider what Clark (2011b) identified as “consensus based authority” within new media culture.

Mediation of meaning and new media

Silverstone (2005) defines mediation as the processes of language whereby meaning is transferred through acts of reception and consumption informed by the audience’s understanding of the world and themselves. Within studies of media, religion, and culture, this term has been used to describe how processes of communication transform the social and cultural environment (i.e. Silverstone, 2005). The “mediation of meaning” is a distinct theoretical approach employed readily within Digital Religion studies to unpack the ways communication is seen as a process of creating shared meaning.

This approach is developed in the work of Hoover (2006), who argues that media serve as a reservoir from which people draw meaning to help explain, represent, and even assimilate religious ideals and beliefs within the contemporary society. Seen from this perspective, meaning informs, and is informed by, religious narratives and conceptions of the self. Drawing from extensive audience studies of American families’ television viewing and interpretive practices, Hoover et al. (2004) argue that the “mediation of meaning” approach sees audiences as active consumers and interpreters of media content, seeking to make sense of the media they consume by making connections or contrasts between the messages portrayed and their own beliefs.

Hoover argues that media offer individuals and groups a language they can use to communicate to others and themselves. Thus, the “mediation of meaning” perspective presents media as an important resource helping people negotiate and express religious beliefs and values within culture. While media consumption may be deemed as problematic by some groups, it still serves as an important resource for articulating what religion is and is not in contemporary life.

While specifically developed in relation to studies of American media, this approach has been applied to studies of how media users in a variety of cultural contexts rely on media to help express religious beliefs. Like Hoover, scholars often use ethnography and interviews to create interpretive maps of how and why specific groups of religious Internet users engage with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the meaning they give these practices. This process is seen in Wagner’s work (2012) documenting the fact that gamers interpret their gaming practice as a form of religious experience, or Clark and Dierberg’s study (2013) of how religious groups use digital storytelling to visualize and articulate their religious identities. Studies of Digital Religion—such as Coats’ and Murchison’s work (2015) on New Age spiritual tourism—have also drawn on the mediation of meaning to consider how new media platforms provide religious symbols and texts for negotiating ideas of spirituality in digital culture and cultivating alternative religious narratives.

The mediation of meaning has also informed the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture’s “Third Spaces of Digital Religion” project, which notes that mediation occurs not just in technological innovation, but also through movements within digital spaces where religious cultures are negotiated. From explorations of the work of Anonymous to the Vatican’s Digital Presence and Salafi Muslims new media usage, the Center documents how religious meaning is generated and performed at the “borderlines of a complex ecosystem of media ensembles and hybrid spaces” (Hoover and Echchaibli, 2014). Therefore, mediation of meaning offers an important perspective from which we can study the ways religion and spirituality are reimagined online, while recognizing that these innovations still draw on traditional structures of social power and religious identity.

Religious–social shaping of digital technology

Most recently, I developed an approach called the RSST as a tool for studying religious communities’ negotiation with new media. I draw on the British social shaping of technology tradition (i.e. Williams and Edge, 1996), to emphasize how individuals and groups within particular cultural contexts see their technological choices constrained by broader structural and social elements of their worldview and belief systems. The RSST begins with an assumption similar to the one that states user communities’ negotiations with technology are constrained by distinct beliefs and patterns of social–technical engagement grounded in their communal histories and traditions. It also echoes the claims of Silverstone et al. (1992), who assert that the adoption of a given technology, by a specific group of users, is based on their ability to shape and frame that technology and so it is seen to be in line with the “moral economy” or core values of the community.

RSST offers a concrete framework, that is, four stages of reflection for studying how religious communities and individuals negotiate their choices related to new forms of media (Campbell, 2010). This begins with (a) a careful study of the history and tradition of the community, especially in relation to group understandings of community, authority, and textual engagement, and is followed by (b) identifying what core values may influence their beliefs about media. These reflections subsequently inform (c) the study of the community’s negotiation processes with new technology, relative to which aspects they accept, reject, or need to innovate in light of their values. Finally, attention is given to (d) communal framing and discourses created to define and justify their technology use as a representative of the community’s identity performance in a wider society.

This theoretical framework has been employed in a variety of recent works seeking to document how established religious communities negotiate their Internet use. For example, both Noomen et al.’s (2011) study of Catholic and Protestant web designers and Shahar’s and Lev-On’s (2011) study of Jewish female ultra-Orthodox web users found that offline religious heritage and boundaries matter greatly when religious communities seek to adapt their community practices to online environments, processes that can highlight long-standing struggles over religious authority and identity within groups. More broadly, scholars of Digital Religion have also used the theoretical arguments of RSST to explain narratives offered by religious users who actively engage digital technologies in ways that solidify their cultural boundaries and justify their moral beliefs, as demonstrated in a recent work on Evangelical Mommy Bloggers (Whitehead, 2013) and Romanian and Hungarian Neopagan web users (Bakó and Hubbes, 2011).

Future of digital religion studies

The mediatization, mediation of meaning, and RSST approaches have provided important opportunities for theoretical reflection on the relationship between new media technologies and religion, and offer scholars useful frames for reflecting on the ways religious individuals and institutions negotiate their online and offline religious lives and media practices. Mediatization highlights how the Internet serves as a media institution informing popular conceptions of religion, thus shaping the religious discourse in the public sphere. This approach proves useful for studying religious institutions’ negotiations with new media, and how those media may inform perceptions of religious authority. Mediation of meaning provides a way to study how people live and talk about religion through engaging new media narratives, symbols, and cultures. This helps scholars identify how new media can inform religious identities and spotlight where and how religion is constituted and circulated within digital culture. RSST presents a framework for studying the motivations of religious communities’ decision-making regarding new media appropriation or resistance. It calls attention to how new media usage patterns are historically, socially, and religiously grounded and may help scholars predict future choices or responses to new technologies, based on previous trajectories. These approaches demonstrate the theoretical trend within Digital Religion studies, movement toward the fourth wave of analysis of online–offline connections and interdependence.

Each approach asserts that media themselves do not determine the role of religion; rather, media institutions, discourses, and environments can shape people’s response to and understandings of religion. These perspectives place emphasis on processes by which media influence religious culture, either by serving as a social shaping force or conduits for meaning. However, these approaches do have their limits. Mediatization is most easily applied to broad social structures and institutional investigations of how digital media and religious groups may compete for power and influence. RSST is most applicable to studies of distinct, bounded religious communities, while mediation of meaning focuses attention on how religious individuals create personal meanings through new media engagement. While each approach is helpful for studying particular contexts, Digital Religion studies encompass more than these contexts and so must expand the theoretical resources on which they rely.

Hoover and Echchaibli (2014) have stated that Digital Religion may lead to a new awareness of religion rooted in unique understandings and experiences of mediation of meaning formed via digital technology. This awareness calls scholars of the Digital Religion to cultivate fluency, not just in the nature and reality of the relationship between religion and the digital, but in the wider patterns of emerging outside these contexts in the global social network. Future theoretical work must devote deeper consideration to how new, imported, and enhanced patterns of being within digital third spaces point to new forms of religious hybridity emerging online, while also speaking to changes in religious thinking and processes emerging within offline culture. More longitudinal and comparative work is called for to unpack the interdependence between online–offline contexts and address understudied questions of agency and power in digital religious practice, as well as focusing on the intersection between religious identity performance and authority construction online. This means Digital Religion studies would do well, not only to engage more with established theoretical resources from media, religion, and culture studies, but also to consider developing other approaches birthed out of Internet studies.