Abstract
This article presents positions on the digitability of religion as they are lived and reasoned about by digital natives who claim to be religious, spiritual, and/or searching and curious in this regard. Data were collected through explorative participant observations and semistructured interviews with digital natives with transmigratory biography elements in Switzerland. Examples of the borders that interlocutors drew between digitable and nondigitable aspects of religion are also presented to provide an overview of the emic assumptions about the possibilities and limits of religious digitability in the field. The analysis revealed that digital natives tended to see almost all aspects of religion but not all aspects of the religious community experience as digitable, and sometimes value the nondigitability of certain nuances of community explicitly.
1 Introduction
The lived experience of religion becomes increasingly enriched, expanded, and transformed by digitality (Neumaier 2016). While the digitability of seemingly exclusively non-digital and haptic religious practices such as pilgrimage has been considered unintuitive for a long time, even these phenomena have become quite digital and/or complemented by digital practices over more than twenty years (MacWilliams 2002). Today, we see a religious reality that is often multisited (Campbell and Bellar 2022) and includes online and offline elements alike. This raises the questions of which aspects of life and religious life are regarded as digitable (that is, can take place in digital contexts), and to what degree they are digitable, just as it is of interest to see which aspects of life can take place rather, or only, in digital contexts. While how religious institutions, marginalized religious groups, and content-creating individuals such as bloggers see and attempt to create religious (non-)digitability has been described (see, for example: Vitullo 2016; Lövheim and Lundmark 2019; Guzek 2023), the perspective of potential recipients and users has received less coverage. This article aims to shed more light on the viewpoint held by digital-native individuals regarding the digitability of religion.
Currently, religion and many other complex phenomena are negotiated on a spectrum between “totally digital” and “not digital at all.” While aspects of the total phenomena can be either digital or nondigital (that is, binary in its wider sense or, as one interlocutor put it, “like a decision tree, you either accept a digital prayer or not”), larger religious phenomena and concrete lived religiosities can have different amounts of digital and nondigital elements or aspects, which are in constant exchange and entanglement (Campbell 2012). By contrast, digitality and nondigitality usually remains basically different from human beings (Boellstorff 2021). For example, relationships between persons can have no digital aspect, as is the case for a mother and a newborn, or can take place completely in digital contexts and be crucially shaped by digitality, as is the case for online spiritual care. Digital aspects can form or define some parts of relationships, such as that between couples who met on the internet and are living far away from each other most of the year.
While people are intuitively capable (Boellstorff 2021) of differentiating between digital (for example, being comrades in an ego-shooter computer game or meeting on Skype) and nondigital relationship aspects (for example, kissing each other physically or praying physically next to another person), most persons usually agree that larger phenomena (for example, relationships in the former two examples) can be more or less digital in general, not just either digital or nondigital (see also Miller 2018). The degree to which phenomena consist of digital elements in the eyes of people who are experiencing them is crucially shaped by assumptions about the digitability of the elements of a particular phenomenon.
2 Digitability and Religion
In this article, “Digitability” refers to the potential and actual extent to which elements of a phenomenon can be digital in the widest sense.1 This can include whether aspects of a given phenomenon can be visually represented digitally (for example, pictures of buildings on Google Maps) or can only exist digitally (for example, non-fungible tokens). Digitability also refers to the extent to which a total phenomenon can be digital, which, as I assume (see above), can usually be described as a continuum (“more” vs. “less”). Digitability depends on how many (possibly) digital aspects a phenomenon has while also allowing hyperdigital and nondigital formations of the same phenomenon (see, for example, MacWilliams 2002) and being describable in a binary statement (totally digitable vs. not digitable).
The tricky thing and aspect of digitability dealt with in this study is the fact that digitabilities can also lie in the eye of the beholder, that is, what seems relatively or totally digitable to one person (for example, receiving a blessing or having sex) can seem completely undigitable to another. To use an analogy from the technological side of digitality research, while there are elements of traditional binary digitality, such as “1 or 0” or “either/or logics,” in each attempt to grasp digitalities and digitabilities, there are also elements of quantum digitality (that is, 1 and 0 can be true at the same time depending on likelihoods and perspectives) in every approximation of an adequate description of the digitabilities of complex phenomena. This complicates the research on the digitability of complex phenomena but helps and even compels researchers to pay attention to the nonnegotiable and negotiable aspects of factual, ascribed, and assumed digitability.
I claim that religion is a phenomenon and an interesting arena for research on digitability negotiations.2 From my point of view, this is true on at least three levels: First, religion per se often has different degrees of factuality and agency depending on the person (for example, one person firmly believes in angels, while another does not). This can be potentiated by adding a digital layer. For example, some people see digitality as “less real” than the physical world in some occasions, just as some people see certain religious aspects as “differently real” from physical structures. Thus, it is interesting to ask, for example, if people who see digitality as “not very real” in general but firmly believe in nonhuman intentional actions by a god, find particular digital religiosities, such as blessings, rather digitable, and if so, under which circumstances and why.3 Second, it is possible that the nonphysical dimensions of religious convictions (for example, believing in an afterlife) resonate well with the often non-physical dimensions of digital contexts (for example, chatrooms or video chats) and thus result in a better tolerance of digital-friendly people toward religious people and vice versa. Third, the often physical performative elements of religiosity (for example, collective pilgrimage or circumcisions) could be difficult to transfer to digital contexts, just as the less physical elements of religiosity (for example, reading holy texts or the effects of praying for absent people) could be easily transferred to digital contexts.
These general assumptions led me to conduct an ethnographic field study on how digital natives see the digitability of religiosities and why they see it that way. While the initial considerations helped in designing the study, they were not the guiding hypotheses. This study was fundamentally explorative and was conducted within the classical anthropological openness of long-term participant observations in the respective fields (Dürr 2017; Fischer 2017; Quack 2017).
3 Methodology
This study relied on online and offline participant observations and interviews, focusing on digitality and religion (collected in 2021–2022) and previous research encounters that did not focus on digitality and religion but turned out to be partially intertwined with questions of digital religiosities (collected from 2013 to 2020). The analyzed total data set mainly included twenty-five younger digital natives (from eighteen to forty years old) with a self-posed interest in religiosity from multiple contexts: Muslims ranging from members of a mosque where women are allowed to lead a prayer to Salafis who try to orient themselves as closely as possible toward the first three Muslim generations; Christians; agnostics; and the “spiritually interested.” They were united by their being enculturated in an environment where digital devices with access to the internet were omnipresent and because they worked in IT environments and/or spent much of their time online. While I acknowledge the problematic associations of the term digital natives when used unreflexively (Thomas 2011), I regard it as useful here because it depicts the important difference in everyday experience between my interlocutors and persons who were enculturated without the permanent availability of fast and easy-to-access internet via mobile devices.
In a field study, I investigated how these thoughts, questions, and hypotheses might be misleading or promising (see also Dürr 2017; Fischer 2017). The study allowed me to explore intuitions on digitabilities of religion and religiosity as they are experienced by younger persons with a transnational biography and at least one permanent residence in Switzerland. The main data corpus was collected from 2021 to 2022 as part of the project “Digital Relationships and Local Religious Communities” at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Zurich (Switzerland), which is associated with the University Research Priority Program (URPP) “Digital Religion(s).” No limitations were set in terms of self-ascribed religiosity so that a panopticon of emic positions can be explored rather than one religious niche already investigated in-depth in case studies. Thus, people who perceived themselves as Muslim, Christian, witches, spiritual, Buddhist, and so on could participate. All interlocutors spent a large amount of daily time with online interactions and digital devices, and felt comfortable using digital technologies on a daily basis. Some were ritual specialists (for example, imams of a community, or self-labeled white witches), but most were laypersons. Some were IT professionals and thus contributed to digital landscapes, while others were just taking part in (“using”) digitality.
The main method applied was long-term participant observation; that is, over one year of research was devoted to establishing and maintaining repetitive research contacts with participants. As a result, deep knowledge could be gained of their actual use and evaluation of digital religiosities. Long-term participant observations (Fischer 2017) with key interlocutors were completed with semistructured interviews and group conversations with other interlocutors in religious settings (digital mosques, nondigital prayer rooms, personal space for rituals at home, etc.) and non-religious settings in the interlocutors’ everyday lives, with the locations being chosen by the respondents themselves (shopping malls, ice cream stalls, parks, etc.). Punctually, ranking methods (Beer 2015; Schnegg and Lang 2018) were applied when appropriate, such as by asking interlocutors which (non-)digital rituals they ranked as effective in a situation where they spontaneously started to compare (non-)digital rituals during a conversation. The flexibility of the methods allowed for a detailed holistic understanding (Fischer 2017) of not only the positions the interlocutors held toward the (non-)digitabilities of religions but also the actual practices and how the interlocutors experienced them. While the COVID-19 pandemic was a perpetuator of digital religiosities, it did not seem to crucially change my interlocutors’ general assumptions about the digitabilities of religion (at least not from an emic perspective), so I will not discuss the meaning of the COVID-19 pandemic for digital religiosities in this article (for insights into the effects of the pandemic on religiosity see, e.g.: Ben-Lulu 2021; Lorea et al. 2022; Muralidharan, La Ferle, and Roth-Cohen 2023).
In the next paragraphs, I will exemplify the most important characteristics revealed in the analysis of the total data set. I will do so by drawing on four case studies selected on the basis of the accuracy with which they represented the trends identified during the analysis of the complete field data. As far as the explorative study presented here is able to show, the four cases that I will introduce help us to understand important developments regarding digital religiosities that have become apparent among digital natives with a transnational biography in Switzerland.4 The case studies offer insights into the different meanings that religiosity has for digital natives, the different degrees of desires for community in terms of religiosity, and the heterogeneity of religiosity in the transnational biographies of young persons in Switzerland.
4 Case Examples
4.1 Nabil
Nabil, in his thirties, was the spiritual head and founder of a liberal Islamic and, as he put it, closely Qurʾan-oriented registered community (Verein) in a larger city in Switzerland, which he cofounded in 2017. However, from 2006 there were already initiatives and even international exchange activities between Nabil and other Islamically interested persons, which preceded the formation of an official registered community.
Being interested in the “true contents” of the religion of Islam with which he grew up in his family, and being challenged by his non-Muslim girlfriend in his early twenties, who asked him a lot about Islam, he started to learn Arabic and studied nearly everything he could access to obtain a multifaceted picture of Islam. Starting with writing his own theological summaries on religious topics and later joining an Islamic study group in Turkey, Nabil spent much time acquiring religious knowledge and presenting it—first digitally and later non-digitally—to others who were also curious about it. Besides participating in study groups, translating Islam-related books, and writing theological articles, he was curious of scholars of “Western” Islamic studies and new insights on psychology, sociology, and religious studies when he wanted to find an answer to a question, be it religious or of everyday interest only.
The Muslim exchange group that he cofounded in 2006 has a special background. It was a digital platform and a community of exchange of persons with a deep interest in Islam before it became more physical (with a period of being an open religious reading group for persons interested in Islam). Today it is an eingetragener Verein with a rented meeting room in the outskirts of Switzerland’s largest city, serving as a space for prayers, discussions, and social get-togethers. Nabil also offers workshops about Islam and accepts invitations to speak about his religion. Besides having regular meetings and activities in the rented physical space, the community members also meet virtually on certain occasions, usually in half-closed formats. The community also has a presence on various social media channels, providing varied content, from meeting information or theological essays (mostly written by Nabil) to podcasts, Q&A formats, and thematic videoclips. Some community members only join digital events and others only join nondigital events or mix the formats. The amount of leisure time they have after work and on the weekends, and the geographic distance between their homes and the meeting space are the reasons why some prefer digital formats over nondigital formats.
From Nabil’s point of view, which is a leading and decisive perspective of the community, religion in general, particularly the Qurʾan, is a “mirror”: “Someone who is looking for [strict] rules will find [strict] rules in the Qurʾan, and someone who wants to look for the message behind them [the rules] will focus on that reading, and both will be right” (Nabil). Regarding the atmosphere of communication and religious practice that he and his community want to establish, he said that “care for spiritual integrity and dignity” would be key, that is, not providing strict interpretations of religious sources, but rather enabling community members to find their own relationship with Islam and Islamic practices. He strongly emphasized that neither his nor any other religious community could claim to be “better” or “truer” than another: every person’s religiosity and the message of God to every person would look differently, so one and the same source could evoke endless interpretations and belief styles. There would be honest ways to explain one’s own approach, but there would never be a one-size-fits-all solution for religious practices or religious interpretations. Half-jokingly, Nabil labeled his community’s flair as being “woke, in a way.”
Referring to quantum mechanics, Nabil mentioned that religion and “truths in general” would fan out from moment to moment: “There can be so many approaches that are equally true depending on how you look at what you’re looking at.” However, he claimed that he understood and provided live and digital content for people with a radically different approach to religion than himself: “Some like these classical Q&As [online], they pose a question and want a clear answer.” This was not what he really wanted religious exchange to be like, but he would look for a way to enable the questioner to find his own information, satisfy the demand in a way, and finally, give and explain an interpretation that he finds provable and adequate.5 When asked religious questions online, he experienced his followers not questioning the credibility of his message just because they communicated via online channels. In fact, the Q&A format online sometimes cemented authority hierarchies between the questioner and him, the answer provider, while in live conversations this hierarchy was less formalized through the clear positioning of both speakers. According to Nabil, this depends on the online channel, but usually, providing online content often makes authority ascriptions more permanent than live dialogues, which he does not like but regards as the logics of the respective channels and digital communication conventions: “It’s often this Q&A mechanism [online]. Question in, answer out.” After all, from Nabil’s experience, the credibility of religious content provided digitally and religious authorities making statements are perhaps higher for the younger generation in the online realm than in offline settings. This generation carefully picks whom they trust online and has a broad choice online compared with, for example, elderly imams “with no idea about their lives in a mosque nearby.”
Nabil himself said that there is no categorical difference between digital and nondigital lived religiosity in terms of “better” or “lesser” religiosity; both digital and non-digital practice and information exchange would be “proper” religion: “[There is no difference] in terms of religion as such. However, [digital communication] relies much on intentionality.” People would have to know beforehand what content they were looking for digitally, with whom they would like to speak virtually, and so on because machines could not yet simulate the conversation flow and the spontaneous changing from one conversation to another in a room or during a religious festivity. Thus, something that is entirely undigitable from his point of view would not be religion per se but religious community experiences: “What will never work online will be the interpersonal feeling. When you’re in the same room [physically]. Unless someone finds a way to properly simulate that as a perfect illusion.”
However, Nabil indicated that the effectiveness of prayer would not be challenged by the different feeling. Nabil differentiated very sharply between (a) what characterizes and defines a religious practice as religious practice (not necessarily community) and (b) what people, from his point of view, look for in religious experiences besides the purely religious aspects (necessarily, community). He recognized occasions during the COVID-19 pandemic or when, because of a person’s sociophobia, religious practices could and should only be performed in nonphysical community contexts or even individually. According to Nabil, this does not lessen the religious efficacy or meaning of the practices or beliefs of the individual believer. However, there would also be a steady and perhaps even growing need for (both religious and nonreligious) persons to engage in nondigital get-togethers because these would mean experiences of interpersonal connection and understanding that could not yet be replaced digitally and perhaps would never be entirely digitable. In other words, from Nabil’s perspective, religion, religious knowledge, and religious practice per se are completely digitable, but community is not; and while religion per se does not depend on nondigital community experiences, many people decisively want and need a nondigital community to be a part of their religious experiences.
While some members of Nabil’s community might still visit other mosques with their families on special occasions, Nabil had the impression that those who regularly attended the community meetings usually did not engage themselves deeply in additional religious contexts. Nevertheless, important community members even lead the prayer sometimes and visit other mosques and communities:
You know that Radko also visits Shiʾi mosques in [a larger Swiss town]. Everyone is fine with it here though. And you know that he even sometimes watches videos of [a famous, some would say fanatic, conservative Muslim preacher] … the total opposite of us [the rest of the community]. And he then tries to find pro- and counter-arguments for what he heard. For me, though, my time is too precious to spend it watching the videos of [this preacher].
However, the fact that members such as Radko would freely disclose that they also listen to other religious perspectives is experienced as a positive aspect of the community’s stability in Nabil’s eyes: Radko and anyone in the community would not have to hide anything. The specific atmosphere of his community would play a large part in its members feeling able to show religious ex- or co-associations openly in their digital and nondigital appearances and conversations.
From Nabil, we learned that he and his cobelievers did not see larger problems in transferring religiosity into the digital realm,6 especially as this strategy has helped them to connect with like-minded persons since the early days of the community. Nabil found differences in community experience between in-person and digital meetings; however, these differences pertain only to communality experiences and not to the supposed impact of religious practices (that us, if a prayer or wedding rite is “valid”). In religious knowledge acquisition, Nabil stressed possible biases of online searches for religious content: “You get out what you put in [with your question].” He also mentioned how digital conversations can tend to stabilize religious authority instead of empowering believers to develop dialogical approaches.7 Thus, from his point of view, digital communality is quite different from in-person communality. The same is possible for religious knowledge acquisition. However, the effectiveness and validity of religious practices are not touched by being digitally mediated at all.
4.2 Lisa
Lisa was in her twenties, had a transnational family history connected to the Balkan region, and labeled herself as “spiritually receptive” (spirituell offe … empfänglech) but “not religious like people who go to churches or join institutions” (nöd, wie, chile-religiös). While she was not a permanent member of any nondigital religious community, she regularly followed particular astrology accounts and self-described witches on Instagram. Lisa stressed that she does not “blindly” adopt the views and advice she finds there, as “you always have to see that these people also want to make money with this business [of online spirituality].” However, she always found inspiration and truth in the content of her favorite accounts. Lisa’s way of being “spiritually receptive” showed itself in particular ideas about the world, such as in her conviction that the inclusion of dead beloved ones in everyday life is healthy and good, or that doing good deeds would resonate favorably in one’s own life: “You should not only be good because that is morally good. But you also get something for it. When you are a good person, you are somehow rewarded. By life, or the universe, or whatever you call it, maybe God” (Lisa).
However, what mattered to her most were not fixed beliefs or convictions that she could spell out but practices. Lisa created and conducted private rituals at home, usually with herself being the only physical human presence. The inspiration for how to perform these rituals stemmed mainly from digital sources, most importantly from Instagram accounts, but the exact way of conducting the rituals varied depending on her “inner intuition on how to do that.” According to Lisa, being the only person present during rituals was what made her most connected not only to benevolent dead persons but also to “the universe at large.” While performing rituals, she would feel very much in harmony with herself, connected to her body and the world around her, and deeply calm and mindful of everything around her. Having other people present would only distract her and automatically put her into social dynamics that would block her from feeling well and spiritually receptive:
You see, as soon as there are others, you start to lose energy. You do not want to, but you think, “How does my hair look?” You put makeup on instead of connecting to your beloved [dead] ones or whatever you intended to do. … I am not an opponent of documenting rituals for Insta; I myself once had a friend over to take photos. But then, I kind of staged everything; I dressed up as a proper Insta witch [laughs]. That is not a proper ritual. Even when your friends who know you without fake lashes and everything come over, as soon as they are in the room, you become too attached to banal things automatically.
She thought that streaming a ritual for others while performing it alone might be a little less distracting because the person performing the ritual would not feel the many people watching as a physical presence in her room. At the same time, Lisa doubted that any community experience would be imaginable, which would not diminish the “spirituality of the whole thing [Lisa’s ritual, which is] why I actually do such things.” When asked if she could think of any occasions when a (nondigital or digital) community would not be disturbing during rituals, she took a longer time to think about it and then hesitantly responded that maybe rites of passage would be an exception here. Lisa imagined that when people marry, when a person dies, or when a child is born, it might be better to have persons around who are physically present to welcome, accompany, or say farewell to the liminal person:
Then you are maybe better off with someone who guides everything and maybe others who are also there. But I was never in a situation of being near to death or so, so I cannot really say something about that. … Right now, I do my rituals for myself and whatever I decide to connect to.
Regarding the assumed facticities and validities of ritual performances online, Lisa did not doubt for a second that there is an equal effectivity and assumed authenticity that can be attributed to nondigital and digital rituals:
If you want to have a ritual done for you [by somebody else] or when you want someone to read your future, that all happens in spheres that don’t care for “live” or “Zoom” or so. In person, Zoom, it is the same. If somebody sends you powerful good energy, they can do so when they touch your hands or when you see them on Skype or when they just think of you. … It is very funny to think that things wouldn’t work when you’re not present. I mean, when you connect to your [dead] ancestors, you don’t really see them, and yet you totally know they’re there. Or when you pray, it does not only work for people when they see the Gods they pray to, right? So why should you have to be present in person … For making a chair, you have to be present, but not to send a blessing!
She also tells us that basically, all practices that she outsourced to other witches were done without her presence. As her tarot card reader is in Great Britain, she would only consult them digitally. If she was sick and asked somebody in the online community to help her by holding a smaller ritual for her or if she did the same for somebody, this would not even be streamed but just done remotely without any digital transmission. The effectivity of a ritual for somebody else does not depend on physical presence or even digital presence, as she stated: “I think everyone who believes in something sees it that way. I mean, my [Catholic] grandma used to think her prayers worked. Did she need others to hear her prayers, or would they only work if a priest or whoever would sit right next to her?”
As for the reliability of the knowledge that Lisa attributed to different sources of ritual and spiritual knowledge, she trusted online sources no less than others. Lisa said that she is very aware of the fact that the knowledge about rituals that she found online was often connected to the economic promotion of certain ritualistic tools (for example, distinctive feathers or stones) advertised on the Instagram feed of the recommending person and that the recommending person would often receive commissions for advertising the tools. However, that did not disturb her much, and she said that doctors and psychologists would also take money for what they do and what they prescribe and that this fact would not lessen their skills. Thus, when she turns to Instagram for inspiration, she feels that she gets information and inspiration “just as valuable as in books or so, sure.” In the end, she would only let her intuition guide her. If an Instagram account, a book, or a person would recommend certain steps to greet the summer, she would not necessarily follow these steps and buy the objects recommended for it but rather “take some parts out of it and replace others, just as my gut tells me.”
Overall, Lisa considered the non-digital and digital community aspects of her way of believing as rarely necessary and possibly also disturbing connections to “spiritual spheres” beyond the physical and social. She had no doubts that digital rituals and rituals without any other persons present would be completely effective and adequate. Rituals and spiritual knowledge acquisition from online spheres were her default way of looking for inspiration for her rituals. Meanwhile, she did not see this information as lesser or better than the information available in physical (books) or social (other witches) sources. While saying that she “somehow likes the digital community [of witches] for exchange and chatting,” Lisa was completely convinced that her own intuition and ability to connect to “spiritual spheres” were the only tools she really needs for being a spiritually receptive person and competent ritual performer.
4.3 Said
Said was nineteen years old and came from a small satellite town in Zurich. He said, “[I’m] from Morocco, so [sic!] I’m Muslim”; in fact, he was born in Switzerland, but his parents were from near Fez and much of his extended family still lives there. His maternal grandmother, with whom he has a particularly close relationship, did not want to leave Morocco, move to Switzerland, or join her other children in Fez. She preferred to stay in her home in the foothills. Said’s grandmother was an important adviser to him on many life issues. Another inspiration for life that he often mentioned, second to his grandmother, was his love for the Godfather movies “because of the loyalty” it depicts. Said had a portrait of his mother on his cell phone screen. He reported that even if they often disagreed—for example, as to whether being a martial artist or car tuner was the suitable profession for him—he would respect her above all else and want to make her proud.
Said reported that “family is like religion,” which is why he would not let just anyone address him as “brother,” not even his fellow Muslims or close friends. He reserved this term for people with whom he felt had a kinship or quasi-kinship relationship with him that can hardly be broken: “Even in the mosque, not everyone is simply brother here, brother there. I don’t particularly like some people in the mosque [in his Swiss hometown]. I go there to pray and for my parents, but that doesn’t mean people there are my brothers.”
In his spare time he enjoyed watching a footage showing the recently retired MMA fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov praising Allah after a victory: “Khabib, he gave up this awesome career because he promised his mother. That’s a man of honor. That means your family is your religion.” To Said, it is generally important to be a “person of honor,” which means being a decent and loyal person. It would not matter if someone was Christian, Muslim, or Jew, or man or woman as long as they live their lives for their family and God.
[Living a good life] depends on what kind of person you are. Not if you are rich or if you pray five times a day. Look at me, I have a Christian girlfriend, I drink alcohol, but I am a much better Muslim than many of the people I meet at the mosque, trust me. Because I have honor, and I respect the, like for me, important people.
Said thought that the most religious trait in his everyday life was how he honored his family. He would not listen to “any preacher who comes along, like others around here [in the mosque nearby]” but rather visit the mosque only for prayers during festivities and generally “stick to what people tell me whom I trust [and who are not necessarily religious authorities],” including his girlfriend, mother, and maternal grandmother: “What they would say would come out of love for me. And they know me, so they know better how I can live a good life than any bearded import preacher.” It is clear to him that he wants to marry his girlfriend soon and have children, even though she is not Muslim:
She has an education and earns money already, from that you see what kind of person she is. She may be Christian, but she is educated and me, I still have to figure out what job to take … she’s like my queen. I’m impressed by her. But of course I can’t let her go to work forever, because work stresses people out. In our country, they say Allah takes revenge on the men who treat their wives badly.
For Said, it is a status symbol to “spoil my wife” instead of letting her work hard. The greatest gift would be to keep people that you cherish from having to earn money: “Look at my mother. She used to work so hard, early shifts. She destroyed her back. But at some point, she was able to stay at home with us kids. She was so happy not to have to work in the laundry service anymore.”
In terms of digital religiosity and nondigital religiosity, Said’s judgment depended on the personalization level of religious advice, not so much on how it is transferred. He said, “What is addressed to everyone on the internet or in a Friday’s sermon is almost like horoscopes.” He thinks that everyone could read into them whatever they want: “I understand this, you understand that. But there is like [actually] nothing [no specific advice], and in the end you are alone anyway with your family and the real friends, but they are few.” A preacher’s video could be an inspiration sometimes but never individual advice for a specific situation: he could not base life decisions on nonindividualized religious opinions.
There wouldn’t always be arguments between religions or preachers if it were really clear what religions mean, what God wants everyone, always, to do … so listening to YouTube or to Friday sermons doesn’t help me directly when I have problems. [They’re] more like training motivation, like videos for inspiration.
When Said once had to make a tough decision between quitting and continuing his apprenticeship, he consequently followed the advice of his grandmother and did not consult any religiously educated authority or source. He was unable to visit his grandmother in Morocco during his “crisis” because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so he Skyped with her instead: “Where she lives, someone helped her [with a tablet] and set that up. We talked for a long time; we also prayed. She comforted me and said something like everything’s going to be fine, everything’s in God’s hands.” Said highly valued the fact that she did not judge him for having picked the wrong apprenticeship in the first place and that she loved him anyway. He associated his grandmother’s way of talking things through with him with feeling right and honorable and even being a good person in a religious sense: “Being right in the eyes of Allah is almost the same thing to me like hearing ‘everything will be fine’ or so from a person I really trust and honor.” He insisted, “What is faith if not that everything will turn out well in the end?” When his grandmother asked him to do so, he even prayed more often during his phase of crisis, and he reported feeling better afterward. If he would pray, that would also be “a contact with my family, not just with God.” Nevertheless, he would have preferred to be physically close to his grandma in his times of crisis and during prayers and blessings because he could “concentrate better when I’m praying next to her or when I’m not praying in front of a PC with windows popping up.” However, if this was geographically not possible, he would definitely prefer a joint prayer with or a blessing of his grandma on Skype rather than in a physical mosque without his grandma present.
To Said, being close to his grandmother meant feeling closer to God, but this was not rooted to the fact that his relatives in Morocco might be more religious than his Swiss family: “Prayers are just part of everyday life [in Morocco], nothing special.” No one explicitly looked to see where he was when it was prayer time to get him when he was in Morocco. However, he prayed more often in Morocco because he knew that his grandmother would be happy and he thought that praying was good for clearing his head. In his family, people tended not to talk about religious issues but mentioned them all the time: “That’s just the way it is, you know, mashallah here and subhanallah there. That’s more like part of the language. My grandma, for example, can’t really congratulate or wish happiness without Allah here, Allah there (laughs).”
Said’s position regarding the digitability of religious advice and religious gestures is disconnected from the transmission mode (digital or in person) but more closely associated with the individual attachment level he had with the person that mediated or even meant religiosity to him. Receiving a Skype blessing from his maternal grandmother meant so much more to Said than an in-person blessing from anybody else (although he preferred an in-person blessing from his grandmother). At the same time, generalized rules and recommendations by preachers or sources who do not know him well were suspicious to him, especially when they come from YouTube preachers whom he never met. Said felt better when he could join persons whom he associated with religiosity and trustworthiness, especially his grandma, for prayers and blessings in person because physical closeness in joint religious activities, the ambiance, and the absence of distractions such as pop-up windows in a PC helped him connect to a religious situation.
4.4 Theo
“Belief is just like a decision tree. You go this way or that way, nothing in between,” Theo said during one of our digital meetings. He was an IT programmer in his late twenties who lived in the easternmost part of Switzerland and was from a Georgian family, with whom he had increasingly lesser contact since he started watching more preacher videos from US evangelical preachers, where he finally “found what I was looking for. They show you how you don’t have to guess this, guess that, but that the Bible is the word of God, and it’s all clearly written out.” As the churches where his favorite preachers preached in person were too far away and because the regulations to control the spread of COVID-19 in the United States made it difficult for the nonvaccinated like Theo to enter the States, he preferred to live his belief by concentrating on digital resources. While it was important for him to watch his favorite preachers via live streaming, gladly accepting the lack of sleep due to the time difference between Switzerland and the United States, he did not think that listening live to the preachers’ words, blessings, or advice has greater influence on him: “Essentially, it doesn’t matter if you watch them now or later. The good that they send will meet you, anyway. I like to get the freshest material just in time, you know (laughs).”
Theo was convinced that in-person communality would not do any good to his relationship with God: “You have to see that everything you need, it’s in the Holy Bible already. It helps to listen to good men who bring you closer to the scripture, but … you have to connect with the message yourself.” Theo feared that when he becomes part of a community, he would not remain on the path he is currently on:
People distract you. I’ve never met a person who would not have any problems. People with problems mean that when I spent too much time with them, the problems would transfer to me. So, I let nobody talk into my relation between God and me because people tend to bring you problems.
This opinion is connected to Theo’s past. He had a history of marijuana and MDMA abuse, spent much of his youth at Goa music (trance) parties, and was “basically a junkie when it came to meeting girls.” He felt that his life started to turn around when he disconnected himself from other people as much as possible: his father and brothers, with whom he tended to drink too much; his friends with whom he tended to consume too many illegal drugs; and girls, with whom he seemed unable to establish stable and “drama-free” relationships.
Everything turned around when I started to really get the message [of God]. I was binge-watching clips, unfortunately not only YouTube but also, hmm, girls clips, like explicit. But also YouTube. And I came across a kind of advertising for porn blockers, you know, info about how porn draws away your energy and brings you away from what God wants for you. It was somehow intense that [blocker] ad.
Theo started investigating and watching more like the porn blocker video, joined online forums, and, one day, decided to go “cold turkey”: “Porn blocker, all numbers from my friends deleted, staying at home with no shit [drugs] around, blocking my phone, reading, praying. Two weeks, man.” Since then, he had isolated himself as much as possible and had never taken any stimulants, be it drugs, porn, or just cheerful company. Theo believed that the YouTube blocker ad that he opened on that day was sent from God.
Today, Theo does not like to join offline communities of any kind.8 He said that for other people, offline communities might be good, but for him, they are just incarnations of temptations. He could not concentrate properly on his prayer if, for example, there were many cute women present; thus, it was his duty to spare women and himself from improper situations in joining a church community. His current job choice as a programmer, which oftentimes required working remotely, also contributed to Theo’s dislike of the company: “I can make my online environment safe. I can block bad stuff. But I can’t make the world safe. So, I am smart and try to stay away. Maybe someday, I am strong enough to enter the world without falling for its temptations, but not yet now.” Theo once half-laughingly referred to himself as an eremite, living a near-forgotten life of reflection. He supposed that eremites of earlier times also might have felt it safer for them to stay away from the world to get closer to God.
For religious advice and knowledge, Theo relied on sources such as YouTube, forums, Q&A sessions with preachers, and a physical Bible. During the Q&A sessions, authority hierarchies are absolutely unquestionable, which Theo liked:
I do not want to discuss and discuss, and finally everything somehow sounds as if it’s an okay way to go. Finally, everything sounds as if it could be excused. I know these excuse circles; that’s what you do when you take too much stuff [drugs], you find excuses. This is not what I am looking for; this is not for people like me. I once lived without real limits. But I need limits and rules. I know that by now.
He does not think that the digitality of most of his sources made them any less reliable; instead, they would be even more reliable, as he said, “After all, I am the one who picks them, and who feels if they are what I need. If I went to church, I had to accept whatever the one preacher present says. Web content is more precise.”
Theo’s religiosity is digitality based. This had to do with the facts that he had biographical reasons to believe that community is often not the influence he wished for in his life and that he felt people could disturb him from connecting with God and prevent him from listening to sermons and content he himself chose to listen to or read. While he liked the clearness and strictness of hierarchical communication structures found online when seeking advice in terms of religious knowledge, he also preferred to carefully identify whose clear and strict answers and advice he likes to accept. Religiosity without being exposed to the in-person world and its relationalities is what Theo experienced and exactly needed to be close to God and to lead a life without getting into trouble because of substance abuse or dopamine rushes of any kind.
5 Results
While analyzing the data included in the explorative study, I found dimensions that coshaped the assumed digitabilities of religion and seemed to emerge in many different cases and contexts, and that they appear to be important factors in rating or evaluating religious digitabilities for the interlocutors. These dimensions are effectivity/assumed facticity and (lack of) community and how this (lack of) community is evaluated individually.
5.1 Main Findings
Digital natives appear to have no general suspicion of the facticity, effectiveness, or reliability of digitally performed or acquired religious practices and knowledge. On the contrary, some think that the browsing mode of religious knowledge acquisition online (that is, being able to choose among many different sources) allows for a more suitable search outcome than relying on persons or groups that are faced in person (but do not offer a similar variety as browsing digitally). Nobody essentially doubts that religious practices performed online are equally effective as in-person practices. A blessing is a blessing, and an assumed need for community is usually not connected to an idea of heightened effectivity or facticity of a religious act but rather to personal preferences.
Basically, four abstracted main positions were obtained from the digital natives in this study toward the digitability of religiosity in the total data. Not all positions are mutually exclusive, and they do not stand for all possible positions toward religious digitabilities and the digitability of religious communality, but they describe the types of digitability views that come up more often than other perspectives during the explorative data analysis. These positions are as follows:
Position 1 |
Religion is almost completely digitable, but communality is not. There is a strong hierarchy perception of the nondigital community being more appreciated than the digital community, which has nothing to do with religious efficacy or validity. |
Position 2 |
Religion is completely digitable, and no communality or digital communality is more pleasant in the religious context than in nondigital communality. In religious matters, the following strong hierarchy perception exists: no community > digital community > nondigital community. |
Position 3 |
The geographic proximity or distance to a preferred religious context (be it a person, a place, or something else) determines the preferred access path to religiosity, whether it is online or offline digitalities. A weak hierarchy perception considers a nondigital community to be a better choice than a digital community when it comes to religious matters. |
Position 4 |
Religion is fully digitable, but a nondigital communality is suspected. Online environments and private practices according to online sources “protect” against “distorted” communitarian religiosity. A strong hierarchy perception in religious matters is described as follows: no community > digital community > nondigital community. |
As a result, I propose the following formula: religious activity and knowledge are digitable for transmigratory digital natives in Switzerland, but religious communality is not always digitable, and the reduced digitability of religious communality can be found particularly attractive or particularly unattractive.
5.2 Secondary Findings and Limitations
The analysis of the total data, whose scope was beyond the presented case studies, revealed that basic digital logics slowly but notably reflect back on how complex phenomena that are (partially) digitable are perceived, lived, and understood. People describe religious self-ascriptions in terms that originally stem from programming logics, quantum physics logics, or binary logics. For example, they describe their choice of religious self-localization as a “decision tree.” Sometimes, they do so intentionally and even ironically, more often without intending a pun but rather looking for the metaphoric source context that seems most appropriate to them (which, apparently, sometimes turns out to be the IT realm). Besides the advantage of picking up emic descriptions to understand the field from their perspective, it is also conceptually handy to describe the lived experience of the digitability of phenomena such as religion in terms of either binary or quantum computing logics, that is, as being characterized by either an “either a or b” logic or an “a and b” logic. Future research must clarify if this possible trend toward formulations stemming from programming logics to describe religion is persistently relevant or if it is just a striking curiosity in this particular study.
The four positions and two factors (effectivity/assumed facticity and [lack of] community) are far from being the exclusive influencing factors that determine and coshape ideas of religious digitability. On the basis of the findings from the case studies and analysis of the total data, the accessibility and proximity of religious knowledge, practice, and communities; the digital cementation or softening of religious authority; and the management of parallel belongings, among others, are also important factors that influence the tolerance for digitabilities of religion. However, issues of digital effectiveness and reliability in comparison with the (non-)digitability of communality formed the most important part of how the interlocutors in this study estimated the digitabilities of different religious dimensions in their everyday lives and thus received the most attention in this study.
In each individual evaluation of certain digitable or nondigitable elements of religiosity, additional influencing factors were identified. These factors can have biographical, socioeconomic, gender-related, religioauthoritarian, cultural, digital-literacy-related, and other reasons. However, the factors that became especially apparent to the interlocutors in this study were the two factors previously mentioned, which also codetermine which concretization of digitability (“only” pictures of holy scriptures or “even” holding wedding or death rituals online) is possible and desirable for particular dimensions of religiosity.
5.3 Revisiting the Initial Assumptions
Regarding the three assumptions that initially inspired my research interest during this project (see section 2), I can now add the following insights gained from this open and explorative field research.
First, the truism that religion per se often has different degrees of factuality and agency depending on the person is not decisively potentiated by adding a digital layer. Pointedly speaking, religion does not become more speculative when it takes place digitally than when it takes place in person, at least not for the interlocutors I worked with. Digital natives who describe themselves as religious, spiritual, or “searching” do not experience digital religiosity as any less factual, reliable, or effective than non-digital religiosity. Instead, for some, important questions regarding the appreciation of nondigitability in terms of religion arose from community experiences (not religious facticity or efficacy). However, the experience of digital communities sometimes found less binding or “less communal” than nondigital communities could also be a plus, not a minus. This corresponds with earlier findings that highlight the importance of digital means of inculcating the feeling of belonging to a certain religion (Moberg et al. 2019; Broo et al. 2019). Also, authors such as Guzek (2023) and Evolvi (2022) stress that in particular, persons who perceive themselves as marginalized or not belonging to a certain group often find digital religious spaces especially attractive.
Second, the nonphysicality of individual religious experiences or knowledge acquisition resonated quite well with nonphysical dimensions of digital contexts (for example, chatrooms or video chats). It resonated especially well when community experiences were not viewed as a crucial part of, or even as harmful to, one’s own religiosity. However, people did not always find any positive specificum of digitality or handy feature of digitality especially well resonating (as, for example, the option to compare many sources to find one that oneself likes best or the instant accessibility of digitalized sources). Sometimes, it was the negative quality of the absence of the physical copresence of others that made them prefer digital religiosities. This could be interpreted as strengthening the thesis of religious individualization as a culturally, historically, and biographically located social process (Fuchs 2015), while also hinting at the fact that the use and creation of digital religious content is also a matter of identity construction, expression, and possibly transformation (Lövheim and Lundmark 2021). In some cases, it is doubtful if, or even possible that, interlocutors had found nondigital access to multiple religious sources any more satisfying.
Third, the often physical performative elements of religiosity did not appear to be extraordinarily difficult to transfer to digital contexts. For example, rituals were adapted to digital circumstances or just practiced alone at home when necessary, and the effectiveness of digital blessings was not doubted. It is likely that highly physical performative rituals that require the presence of others are usually considered difficult to digitalize.9 However, there was no general hesitation against digitalizing these kinds of rituals per se among the digital natives interviewed in this research.
6 Conclusion
Some aspects that codecide how digitable certain elements of religion are were identified and exemplified by drawing data from long-term fieldwork, especially on four extended case descriptions. The two most important aspects that influenced the digitability of religion as perceived by the interlocutors in this study were effectiveness/assumed facticity of (non-)digital religious knowledge and practice and (lack of) community as a positive and/or negative factor.
In terms of tolerance for digital religiosities, the availability and proximity of (non-)digital channels, questions of authority hierarchy preferences in (non-)digital religious knowledge acquisition, and the management of parallel belongings (which also requires of the digital natives a certain degree of reflexivity in terms of stressing or not stressing cultural differences and similarities, and reflexivity regarding different authority styles and authorities that may be parallelly at play; see Cheong 2022) could also play a role. The latter connects to extant findings in the broader field of digitality studies, digital religion studies, and studies on the formation of religious belongingness (Thomas 2011; Kołodziejska and Neumaier 2017; Broo et al. 2019). However, while earlier contributions sometimes emphasized that the appeal of religious content and online interactions could be linked to an existing offline connection to specific religious groups or contexts (Miller and Slater 2000), this finding could not be replicated with the digital-native interlocutors observed and interviewed for this study. This aligns with more recent studies emphasizing the growing importance of religious online-only contexts and content, not just as consumption but also as active coproduction (Cheong, Halavais, and Kwon 2008).
In the context of studies that conceptualize the digital activities of religious institutions and their professionalized digital strategies as “media settling” (Kołodziejska et al. 2023), the case examples mentioned above raise the question whether potential recipients of professionalized religious online presences can be interpreted as “media travelers”—in other words, travelers between or to the “settler camps” of religious organizations. The interlocutors I encountered and presented earlier, however, appeared to be less exploratory travelers between religious settlements, hopping from one to another. Instead, they seemed to have a relatively straightforward idea of the direction in which they wanted to travel. So, while religious institutions have clear goals in their digital strategies, as Kołodziejska et al. (2023) point out, recipients (or coproducers of content) from the digital-native generations also appear to have similarly clear intentions regarding how they want to experience the digitizable aspects of religion.
The exact interactions, intertwinednesses, and relationships between the highly diverse factors that influence perceived religious digitabilities in general and individually remain a field that demands further research.
Acknowledgments
I express my gratitude, first of all, to my interlocutors. Without their willingness to share their thoughts and everyday lives with me, this work would not have been possible. I also thank the project team of P5 of the URPP “Digital Religion(s),” namely Virginie Fazel, Dorothea Lüddeckens, and Rafael Walthert, and my department colleague Jill Marxer, for providing constant constructive exchanges and continuous support.
I adopted Miller and Horst’s 2012 definition of digital, which states that everything that can be reduced to the outcome of binary coding can be categorized as digital.
I use the term “religion/religiosity” in the widest possible sense, without the intention of re-essentializing it in the context of digitality in the way that Becker 2021 rightfully cautioned against.
However, it is surely the case that even physical structures have no meaning without interpretation, just like digital and religious phenomena.
I chose to present four cases in depth instead of selecting a range of quotes from all unintroduced interview partners because it is necessary to understand the entire context that explains why individuals hold the perspective on the digitability of religion that they do. Quotes from many unintroduced interlocutors would miss providing this level of depth in terms of context.
For insights into Christian online (re-)constructions of authority and general considerations of online and offline authority in religious contexts that are contrary to Nabil’s experience and rather perpetuating reflexive questioning approaches toward one’s own religiosity, see, for example, Kołodziejska and Neumaier 2017. Despite the different findings that they reported in other religious and digital contexts, the simultaneity of maintaining and disrupting potentials that online exchange about religion can have seems to be an omnipresent characteristic of digital religion generally.
This corresponds to the thesis that Muslims in Europe, being minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, quite often choose or have to gather (also) in online communities; see, e.g., Echchaibi 2018; Evolvi and Giorda 2021.
This is surely also connected but not exclusively explainable through the current centrality of Qurʾanic exegesis in Muslim religious practices in Europe; see Pink 2021.
All interviews with Theo took place digitally, and he did not accept in-person meetings with the female researcher. He only accepted to be interviewed because his sister (with whom he still has sporadic phone contacts and whom he likes best among his family) arranged the contact.
Although intuition may be misleading here if we consider that phenomena such as pilgrimage were already becoming digitable in the early 2000s; see MacWilliams 2002. The digitability of highly physical performative rituals seems to depend enormously on individual voluntary acceptance, as stressed by Hjarvard 2016.
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