Online and offline religious practices

Last week in class I presented a short critique of Heidi Campbell's "Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society." My assignment this week was to answer one of the questions posed by my classmates.

Q: Can you elaborate more on how online religion practice can help with the religion practice as a whole?

Q: Do you think people generally act differently on different platforms, especially in the way they express their religions?

A: One of the traits of "networked religion" that Campbell observed, "convergent practice," speaks in particular to the first question. I hope a brief discussion of this trait "in action" can also serve as an illustration that offers an answer to the first question.

By convergent practice, Campbell means that traditional rituals and interactions get "adapted" to online culture, and often "blended" with each other to form a sort of remix that is influenced by the original context(s) of the practice, the new online context, and the particular focus of the person(s) doing the adapting.

An example of this phenomenon might be the Prayers of the People project. This project was inspired by a (very) old ritual, the offering of a variety of types of prayer "for the church and for the world" during a particular moment in the church service. A group of monks in Cambridge, MA is trying to help their network of friends, supporters, and spiritual explorers bring that prayerful mentality into their everyday lives via a shared social media prayer practice.

Participants in this project can sign up to receive a daily email prompting them to pray according to the "type" of prayer they have designed for the day (thanksgiving, praise, penitence, etc.). The Brothers always give an example, as well as a "call to action" that invites participants to share their prayer on social media using the #prayersof hashtag.

That hashtag, of course, allows the Brothers to "curate" these prayers and share especially powerful ones with their community—people who are participating in this project and people who aren't.

God of forgiveness, we're sorry for those times our church hasn't been a model of your love. #prayersof #penitence https://t.co/oQFbogr4qi

— Anglican Diocese TO (@anglicandioTO) October 25, 2016

Against that backdrop, I think we can see an outline of an answer to this question.

On the one hand, clearly the affordances of a particular platform help to shape the prayers people offer, and probably also how they interact with the prayers of others.

For instance, if a prayer I'm sharing can be captured in some sense visually, I'm more likely to share it on Instagram:

Others seem to fit in better on Twitter:

God of compassion look upon those whose ❤️ are 💔 in the hopeless corners of the 🌍🌏🌎. Be our love, our vision. #gc78 #prayersof #intercession

— VILE 🐺HOWL-iver (@kmoliver) June 29, 2015

Being able to add video greatly expands the conception of what it might mean to pray as an online practice. For instance, here it helps to incorporate the (again ancient) idea that embodiment is important to prayer—that prayer is more than just words.



On the other hand, there is "nothing new under the sun," and I think we see in these practices something utterly ordinary and perfectly consistent with the ways people have practiced religion for millennia.

People of faith want to bring their beliefs into conversation with their everyday lives—their hopes and dreams, their regrets, the challenges they face, the people and places that bring them joy. They want to gives some kind of "voice" to that intersection. And they often want to share it with their faith community and with the world.

In this (phenomenological?) sense, I don't think people are acting differently at all. But they are (to get back to that second question) using digital social practices to deepen their experience of faith and of both virtual and physical community.

In praise of the narrative and active modes in theories of non-essentialist identity-making

The article by Orsatti and Riemer strongly resonated with my experiences in a field of education that is very concerned with identity formation. Indeed, religious educators have largely shifted in their language to embrace the word formation (a word the authors use repeatedly) rather than education, in response to some of the same concerns Orsatti and Riemer name.

I was particularly taken by two aspects of the non-essentialist framework they develop, and I believe they both will resonate with my colleagues as we continue to study religious expression and formation in online spaces.

First, I am grateful for the emphasis on a narrative modality of identity-making (and elsewhere "active[] co-creat[ion]" [9] of identities). Two of the philosophers Orsatti and Riemer cite, Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur, are very important to contemporary religious thought. Their non-essentialist process in which individuals narrate their lives "against the canvass of the social world and ... shared stories" (6)—and along the way "selectively appropriate" the themes of shared stories for personal meaning—this is at the core of what so many of my colleagues do each week.

We convene spaces for telling the stories of the faith community (in the neighborhood as much as in history) not just to preserve those stories but to encourage members of the community to claim them as their own, to incorporate them as one among many identities shaping their daily lives.

Speaking of daily lives, I also appreciated the authors' deployment of a "practical theoretical lens" (8) to conceive an active modality of identity-making. I agree that our identities are being made not just in our conscious decisions of how we present ourselves* but by the unconscious ways we go about the practicalities of our daily lives. What we do each day—and not just when we confront some big life-changing crisis—really matters.

In religious education as in so many other fields, I believe the literature on social communication will improve when we get over the dualistic model of real selves authentically expressed or inauthentically disguised (see Table 2 in the article) and realize that identity is a much more fluid, experimental, and experiential thing. We do our thing and realize later on what it means, how it's making us who we are. I believe Orsatti and Riemer are correct in their assessment that identity is formed, and an increasingly coherent self is experienced, "in the trenches" of the active mode.

There's an old Latin expression that is important to many members of my faith tradition: lex orandi, lex credendi. Literally it means "the rule of prayer is the rule of belief," but what it's getting at is that what a person prays will shape what they come to believe. Many of us have extended this notion to the world of action. We believe that what we do—day in and day out—shapes who we become.

That more general insight seems quite consistent with how Orsatti and Riemer conceive identity. I look forward to spending more time with their multimodal framework.

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* Incidentally, the focus on self-presentation as the primary example of reflective identity-making, while understandable in light of what the literature tends to fixate on, was a little frustrating to me. Surely we have other good models. In professional development, for example, it's common to engage in "forward-looking ... goal setting" (9) as a result of reflection upon a particular blind spot or felt need. We often see identity being made online in this way, and the "strategic" nature is about much more than people wanting to be seen in a certain way.

Think of all those #whole30 posts. Do those folks want to be seen as healthy, attractive go-getters shaping their own fitness destiny? Sure. But they're also posting as a means of holding themselves accountable. In fact, I think that's primarily what they're doing, and those of us who haven't eaten a vegetable in days tend to project onto them our suspicions of their inauthenticity ("they're only showing the good parts of their lives," etc.).

As helpful as this article was to me, I definitely plan to follow Orsatti and Riemer as they follow through more broadly on their promise to investigate these phenomena in IS social media research. I think we desperately need other examples of the reflective mode at work—and especially more generous ways of interpreting this identity-making process.