Berkeley Talks transcript: How technology is transforming religion

Listen to Berkeley Talks episode #127: ‘How technology is transforming religion’:

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions ]

Intro: This is Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can subscribe on Acast, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

[Music fades]

Marion Fourcade: Hello again, everyone. My name is Marion Fourcade and I am the director of Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley, and I am very pleased to welcome you to today’s Matrix On Point panel, “Religion in the age of information.” This is a panel that is jointly organized by Social Science Matrix and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and it is also co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

The panel today, we’ll focus on how digital technologies are transforming both religious doctrines and religious practices. For those of you who are new to Social Science Matrix, we are a cross-disciplinary social science research Institute at UC Berkeley. Today’s event is a part of our Matrix On Point series, an event series that is devoted to panel discussions on important matters of the moment. So let me just mention a few upcoming events, on Nov. 10 we have a virtual panel on the labor of firefighting. On Nov. 16 an author meets critics with Sao Balakrishnan, assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning.

And on Dec. 3, we have another Author Meets Critics event with Neil Fligstein from Berkeley sociology department. And finally, our last Matrix On Point of the semester will be on Dec. 13, on democracy, misogyny and digital media.

Now, before we get started, let me review a few housekeeping items. So please make sure to submit your questions through the Q&A feature, and not via the chat window. We will use a chat window exclusively for troubleshooting technical issues. So if you have a problem, just send us a message with the chat and also note that we will be recording today’s event and the video will be made available on Matrix website. So now, let me introduce the moderator and co-organizer of today’s panel.

I’m delighted to introduce professor Carolyn Chen, she’s associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. She’s the author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience , which was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. And she’s the co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation , published by NYU press in 2012. And I’m very excited about her forthcoming book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley , which is forthcoming next spring from Princeton University Press and we actually will have an Author Meets Critic panel, I believe end of April or early May on this book.

So, Carolyn, without further ado, I turn to you for this wonderful panel. Thank you.

Carolyn Chen: Thank you Marion for that generous introduction. Well, good afternoon. Today, we turn to the topic of religion in the age of information. New technology has changed, even transformed the way that people have practiced religion throughout history, from the role of the printing press in the Protestant reformation, to television and the spread of televangelism, to role of the internet and apps today, such as Pope Francis’ rosary app or religious dating apps such as JDate, Single Muslim, and so many meditation and prayer apps that are available today.

Technology is changing how we practice religion, when we practice religion, and is changing our notions of religious community, religious doctrine and what it means to be religious. And certainly our dependence on technology for communal religious practice, has only been accelerated in the last year and a half due to the pandemic.

Well, today we have a distinguished panel of speakers who are going to share their research and their thoughts on how new technology is changing religion. If you don’t mind, speakers, if you could just show your faces as I introduce you. Our first speaker today is Dr. Heather Mellquist Lehto. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. She is a cultural anthropologist whose work attends to the intersections of technology, religion in kinship in South Korea and the United States. Her book manuscript, Holy Infrastructure, draws on over two years of ethnic demographic research to demonstrate the co-construction of Christianity and media technology in some of the first transnational multi-site churches in the world. Welcome, Dr. Mallquist Lehto.

Our second speaker will be Dr. Steven Barrie-Anthony. He is a researcher, teacher and author in the area of contemporary American religion and public life. He is director and principal investigator of public theologies of technology and presence of program supported by the Henry Luce foundation, that gathers and finds leading scholars of religion and journalists for projects, examining technology’s impact on human relationships.

Dr. Barrie-Anthony was formerly a staff writer with LA Times , where he developed the technology and culture beat. He is a visiting scholar with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and has a psychotherapy practice in the Bay Area. Welcome, Steven.

Dr. Erika Gault is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Arizona. She is a scholar, poet, an ordained elder whose justice-centered work, whose research, blends art and religion to advocate for the rights of young Black people. Dr. Gault’s work focuses on the intersection of religious history, technology and urban Black life in postindustrial America. She’s the co-editor of Beyond Christian Hip-hop towards Christians and Hip-hop , her new book, Networking the Black Church: Digital Black Christians and Hiphop will be published by NYU Press this January. Very excited about that. Welcome Erika.

Finally, Dr. Kelsy Burke is associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she studies the relationship between sexuality and religion and contemporary America. She’s the author of Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet , and author of the forthcoming book The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession . What a great title. Thank you. Welcome Dr. Kelsy Burke. So why don’t we begin first with Dr. Mellquist Lehto and we’ll go in this order with Heather, Steven, Erika followed by Kelsy.

Heather Mellquist Lehto: Thank you Carolyn, for the introduction and for organizing this panel. I’m really honored to be here as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. alum. It’s a real pleasure.

So I, as she said, I am a social cultural anthropologist, and I research religion, media and technology through ethnographic field research in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Today, I’m going to draw on work from my first book project, which focused on technology in transnational multi-site churches. So a multi-site church is essentially a single church that meets at multiple locations, often by recording a worship service at one location, and broadcasting it to so-called satellite campuses. Since about the two thousands, nearly all American mega churches have become multi-site, have adopted this more franchise-like model. And for this reason, American churches have been seen as sort of a pioneer of this new model. However, as I found in my research, the first multi-site churches in the world were actually based in Seoul, South Korea, beginning in the 1980s.

And in fact, I found that many of the so-called pioneering churches in the United States, actually drew deliberately on the models of certain South Korean churches in my studies. And so I mentioned this just to say for people in my audience here who might be a little more familiar with the American multi-site church, which is a fairly new phenomenon, a lot can be learned by looking also at its predecessor in South Korea. So in my comments here, I want a first flag that there is a level of technological determinism that is sort of built into our common sense notion of technology. It’s partly because the word technology often connotes change, while religion often connotes traditionalism, that the ways in which technological objects affect religion can seem most apparent or intuitive, but that influence is of course not just unidirectional in the way that the common narrative implies.

And we might even think about the way that these categories are not as distinct from one another, as we might think sometimes. So today I’m going to offer one story for my research that highlights what I sometimes call the coordination of religious and technological innovation within South Korean multi-site churches. This will serve to highlight more generally how religious ideas and practices, informed technological ideas and practices, and not just vice versa. The case will also offer what I find to be a challenge to contemporary conversations about algorithms and ethics, but in general, hopefully it illustrates why the study of religion should remain a critical element to understanding information technologies within people’s everyday lives.

OK, here’s my story:

“Hallelujah,” shouted the older man on the stage. And with that, the lights turned on, browsing us from our prayer at the first meeting of the information technology mission school at Onnuri Church in central Seoul. The speaker was [Korean name], a professor of computer science, the former president of a small university near [Korean city], and an elder at Onnuri Church. As an introductory talk for the program, his presentation was meant to excite us about doing ministries through information technology.

I expected a sermon, but what he offered was an academic lecture instead. Drawing on Max Weber’s famous thesis of the elective affinity between Protestantism and rational capitalist development, his lecture argued that South Korean Christians had a unique calling to become IT missionaries. Weber, he said, had demonstrated the close relationship between Protestantism and industrialisation, as each had developed in Europe and North America. With charts and graphs, he traced technological advancement through modern history, beginning in Western Europe, where and when Protestant Christianity had flourished.

To this point, he stressed that France had only a marginal role in the industrial revolution due to their relatively high rate of Catholicism. French society was full of advice because they did not follow the right gospel, he said. At this point he addressed me directly, switching to English, “Are you French?” He asked me kindly, hoping for a negative answer, a few people who spoke English laughed.

And I said, “I’m American.” To which he said, “Ah, American, okay,” with the thumbs up. After the secularization of Western Europe in the 19th century, he continued, the United States became the locus of technological development, as the prominence of Christianity in Europe waned. Given our forum here, I want to just make an aside and mention that his historical account actually cited a couple of UC Berkeley history professors, Carla Hesse and Thomas Laqueur, though I’m not sure if they would agree with his interpretation. And similarly, I’m going to set aside critical analysis of his reading, of Weber as well.

So in recent history, professor [Korean name] noted, South Korea had taken a prominent role in technological advancement through the work of companies like Samsung, LG and Hyundai. In his view, this was the direct results of the rapid Christianization of the Korean people, and God’s blessing upon them. The point that he most stressed was that the future wellbeing of Korea was dependent upon its mutual advancement of both Protestant Christianity and technological innovation. Now that Protestantism had enabled Korea to become a technological power, Christians needed to align their efforts with new technologies so that they could continue to spread the gospel and not suffer the same fate as modern secular Europe. Material and spiritual prosperity were not the same, but they had a unique co-dependence in this narrative. Put simply, the nation is technological, insofar as it remained Christian. Since 2014, I have spent nearly three years with IT missionaries and technology teams in multi-site churches, in Seoul and in Koreatown, Los Angeles, to learn how people understand the technologies that are central to these dispersed congregations.

The students in the IT mission school were neither technology professionals nor professional missionaries. Many of them were teachers, housewives and office workers, who had little or no computer science training. One woman referred to herself as a quote unquote, “computer illiterate person” or [Korean word] to me. But despite her lack of confidence in the effectiveness of her computer use, she continued to work as an IT missionary.

When in doubt, they told me they drew on and cultivated faith. So when I asked one middle aged attendee, if he had heard or believed professor [Korean name] particular historical narrative, his response was, “sure.” I mean, whether or not there’s that kind of story about technology and Christianity, I don’t really know, but that’s fine. Not knowing is not a problem, even though I don’t know, I’m trying to do God’s work. You have to have faith.

He paused and read confusion on my face. “Is it strange that I say, ‘I don’t know,’ like this?” he laughed. It looks like maybe you don’t hear many Korean people say this. He laughed again. In Korean society, it’s rather strange to admit your weaknesses, but is it a problem that I don’t know much about technology? Many tech experts can be wrong and sometimes problems actually arise because they think they know everything, but I’m a Christian. When we use the tools that God gave us, we must put faith in God.

We broke up into small groups, focusing on particular IT mission ministry projects. A woman named [Korean name] decided she would use her Instagram and Pinterest accounts to transform social media into a mission field. [Korean name] lived with her husband on the periphery of Seoul. She had worked as a teacher in her early 20s, but the familial responsibilities, she felt, as a new wife and daughter-in-law, led her to quit her job. With her husband at work for most of the day and night, she spent more time than she might wish on social media as a way of passing time.

The idea of becoming an IT missionary then seemed appealing to her because of its promise for social and spiritual connection, despite geographic isolation in her apartment. She prayed every day over Instagram asking God to lead her to direct certain messages to strangers, particularly ethnic Koreans and Korean speakers abroad who might respond to this kind of ministry.

She didn’t understand the algorithms within these platforms. And so she often doubted that her messages would be read at all, let alone by a receptive audience. Sometimes these limitations created a certain sort of ambivalence. She said, “As they say, the spirit can move through technology, and I really do feel touched sometimes, but it might be silly. I don’t know. Sometimes when I’m sitting alone at home, just posting things and commenting on strangers’ posts I think, ‘I’m a real fool, huh?'” She chuckled. “I mean, it’s weird, right? You can spend hours on Instagram and then realize all that time is gone. And what have I really done?” Nevertheless, she prayed that God might direct her actions on the social media platforms and the activities of geographically distant strangers to align message and receiver.

She says, “At those times, I don’t know whether or not I’m doing anything at all, but I must have faith that God is doing things for us that I don’t know about. If I pray or follow him, I have faith that the Lord will lead the perfect message to the right person.” Faith was a necessary resource upon which [Korean name] drew, but it was also a virtue that was cultivated through this practice. When [Korean name] refers to faith in God here, we should not understand this as a sort of Kierkegaardian belief in the incomprehensible, but more as a capacity to place limits on one’s own agency in deference to a higher power.

What the anthropologist, Hirokazu Miyazaki, described as an abeyance of agency. By working toward her goal to grow the transnational church, despite her recognition that she had no control over how an algorithm might direct her digital actions, [Korean name] realized her faith by submitting her to the mysterious operation of the holy spirit, which she believes operates within and exceeds the social media platforms.

So to sum up here, I just want to mention that for many Christians engaging in these IT ministries, it’s clear that their understanding of information technologies were inextricable from their theologies of the holy spirit, their understanding of virtue, ethics and their view of Christian history. Just like the hidden secret workings of the holy spirit, the operation of media algorithms was also opaque. But however, contrary to contemporary debates about algorithmic ethics that focus on pursuing systems that are more just, and more transparent, the hidden, but determinative sorting functions of algorithms were not seen as a problem to be solved, but just a situation to be negotiated. Rather than seeking total mastery, they see technology use as a way of developing their faith by subordinating themselves to things beyond their control, and working towards uncertain ends. Thank you.

Carolyn Chen: Thank you, Heather. That was so fascinating. Now we turn to Dr. Steven Barrie-Anthony, could you please turn your screen on? Thank you.

Steven Barrie-Anthony: Thanks Carolyn. And thanks to the Matrix for having us, this is wonderful.

My talk today, I’m calling “Spirituality and Psychotherapy in Technological Spaces.” So in this talk, I’ll be exploring what happens to contemporary forms of spirituality and to forms of psychotherapy, as these move into and inhabit technological spaces.

I’m thinking about a broad range of spaces — social media, forms of app-based group communication, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, gaming platforms like Twitch, and also new psychotherapy apps and platforms that have really taken flight during COVID such as Talkspace and Lyra Health. Importantly, what does their moving into technological spaces do to the spiritualities and the psychotherapies, social and civic possibilities and vulnerabilities?

So why spirituality and psychotherapy? This is partly because these are spheres in which I move professionally. I do sociological research on the spiritual, but not religious. And I’m also a psychoanalyst, but also these two spheres, spirituality and psychotherapy, have often been drawn together by sociologists of religion, usually in terms of emphasizing their social and civic lack. So it’s fitting here at Berkeley to turn to the late Berkeley sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, and specifically to his 1985 book, with co-authors, Habits of the Heart . Bellah and his co-authors saw, I’m quoting them here, “in the upwelling of mystical feeling in the 1960s and forward, the particular distortions to which the mystical type is prone. Its extreme weakness and social and political organization, and above all its particular form of compromise with the world, namely its closeness to the therapeutic model in its pursuit of self-centered experiences and its difficulty with social loyalty and commitment.”

Bellah saw the spread of these spiritualties and of therapeutic culture as the spread of a radical individualism, what he called ontological individualism. Divorced from social priority and constraints, this argument echoes to through scholarly and popular narratives that link the ascent of religiously non-affiliated spirituality, the so-called religious nones, that’s N O N E S, in the spiritual, but not religious, with social decline. The so-called low social engagement hypothesis.

To this view, the pervasive social and civic decline indicated for instance, in Robert Putnam’s research, becomes what Bellah called a massive empirical confirmation of his argument in habits. To this view, the spiritual, but not religious and the widespread psycho psychotherapeutic pursuit of deeper self understanding, inner authenticity and emotional expansiveness, deliver us to loneliness, solipsism, narcissism, and the decline of the public square.

Now it probably won’t surprise you that I don’t agree that this is inevitable, but I do think that Bellah identifies something important, but it’s only part of the picture. In my own ethnographic research with a network of young adult nones, my observation has been that social relationships often run deep among the nones, contributing to forming their experience of the sacred and with psychotherapy, patients’ pursuit of inner meaning and authenticity often happen in the context of their deepening experience and embeddedness in human relationships.

Certain clinical approaches are particularly attuned to this. For instance, contemporary psychoanalytic approaches that pay close attention to webs of relationships, complexity, and inner subjective systems. What Bellah and others point to as an intrinsic lack, I see as a vulnerability within spiritualities often also within psychotherapies. There can be a vulnerability to bypass social connection and civic responsibility. But on the other side of the equation with these spiritualities and psychotherapies, there is sociological strength and glue. And also subtly emerging configurations of inner life, social solidarity, and civic action, configurations that often go unseen are misunderstood by sociologists.

The question for this current talk then is what happens when these spiritualities and psychotherapies enter into technological spaces. What happens in terms of the individualistic vulnerability and what happens in terms of the emerging social and civic configurations? In order to think this through, how should we conceptualize the social dimensions of the nones spiritualities?

From a sociological vantage point, it’s easiest to see what the nones reject. They move away from familiar patterns of religious institution, organization, clear cut definition, and practice. But, in beginning to see the nones in their sociological presence, it’s important to connect inner experience with external social forms. For many nones, the inner and the outer inexplicably looking just at the traditional social forms constitutes a very partial view. I’m going to draw here on an impress article in which I theorize this dynamic psychoanalytically. I argue that many nones spiritualities may be seen as the sacralization of inner subjective experience of what the psychoanalyst Darlene Ehrenberg calls The Intimate Edge. The external social forms that come into being among the nones tend to be loosely knit, spiritual networks.

Some are explicitly spiritual, such as among people interested in a particular vein of Indian mysticism. Others are less articulated as spiritual, but adopt practices that evoke a sense of spiritual experience, such as yoga. These networks tend to emerge for a period, begin to take shape, and then as they start to have the flavor of institutionalization, concreteness, organization of religion, their participants tend to pull back into them and the external forms of the networks ebb. Importantly, however, the nones involved even as their external networks ebb, often continue to experience the networks internally. The feelings of interconnection past and present deeply alive, internalized relationships that constitute or contribute to the nones continuing experience of the sacred. Then, the external forms of the networks reemerge, expand and recede.

Darlene Ehrenberg’s theory of The Intimate Edge is useful for understanding this choreography. She is writing about clinical psychoanalysis, but her concept is equally useful in terms of theorizing social relationships among the spiritual, but not religious. Ehrenberg defines The Intimate Edge as the point of maximum contact and intimacy with another person without losing one’s individual identity. Maximum intimacy without merger. The Intimate Edge involves the pursuit of a horizontal rather than a vertical structure of social authority and relationship.

For their part, the nones pursue horizontal relationships with other nones. And in this way they challenge traditional Eccles, traditional religious structures of ecclesiastical authority, vertical hierarchy, and institutional control. So here are a few important elements of The Intimate Edge drawing on Ehrenberg.

First, The Intimate Edge is not a static achievement, but rather it’s, it’s a process. Second, Intimate Edge experience is temporary, ephemeral, and continually changing. Third, a deep longing often accompanies and animates the pursuit of Intimate Edge experience, longing for a realm of experience that cannot be mapped or known before it is co-created and experienced together. And yet this longing nonetheless resounds deeply within and inspires the shared venture into the unknown. And finally, Intimate Edge experience, while temporary and ephemeral, generates something new that did not exist before. What I’m arguing here is that for many nones, what is generated, what persists within, retains the imprint of it’s fundamentally inner subjective creation.

So, the nones’ spiritual networks emerge and recede, they ebb and flow. There is an ephemeral quality to them, which has led to their being interpreted as shallow and insufficient in comparison to the institutional, persisting, clear cut religious structures they replace. But these dynamics take on new meaning in terms, new meaning and substance, in terms of the logic of the sacralization of the Intimate Edge. Nones who fit this pattern are not simply individualistic, nor are their social networks merely weak and faulty aversions of traditional religious institutions. Rather, there’s an entirely different logic in paradigm at work. These networks, these nones in their networks, move toward the Intimate Edge and away from the inevitable up croppings of traditional religion and religious institution. When these religious features emerge, the Intimate Edge dulls and the networks recede, but the internalized relationships derived from Intimate Edge experience continue to effervesce internally, animating and shaping and experience of the divine, an inner experience, which is not really solitary. Deep longing for authentic contact exerts its melancholic force.

The scene is set for other emergences, comings together at the Intimate Edge, do not live long in the air and sunlight of the world, but also do not really die. And so what happens when these dynamics unfold online in apps and other technological spaces? Do these spaces exploit the none’s individualistic vulnerability or do they support their social creativity? To explore this is important. It’s important to consider the technological spaces, and the companies and technologists who produce them in religious terms.

This isn’t a stretch. There’s a number of projects being done right now that speak to this. I’m especially excited about Carolyn Chen’s upcoming book, Work Pray Code , which I understand explores ways in which technology companies use work to meet the needs that religion once met. And also, the technology spaces themselves also evoke deep questions for users, essentially spiritual questions as I see them, about what it means to be human and to be connected with others.

So it’s not a leap to consider these companies and their products in religious terms. Like Heather, actually, I’m turning to Max Weber here. Weber described the arc of modern life as one of increasing rationalization and disenchantment. To this view, modern life is increasingly impersonal, systematized and institutional. For Weber, charismatic profits can undermine the drumbeat of rationalization and disenchantment, but this is always temporary. Each spiritual movement, if it is to persist, must then accommodate to the wider culture. It must transform charismatic authority into forms of authority, more in line with rationalization. To borrow popular parlance in this process, the spiritual becomes the religious. Weber referred to this process as the routinization of charisma. In Silicon valley, company, culture, marketing and inbuilt into many of the tech social spaces that they produce, there is charismatic religious prophecy. The promise of deeper, more instantaneous, ubiquitous, intimate, more authentic connections with ourselves and with others.

But there is also in these cultures and in the products they produce, radical routinization — the shiny new phone, social network, virtual gaming community, and onward promised direct and experiential connection of an almost metaphysical sort. At the same time, activities on these platforms service distinctly routinizing processes. The users’ pursuit of authentic connections service the company’s powerful impersonal systematized institutional and economic engines. So what does this mean for contemporary spiritualities and psychotherapies? It means, I think, that entrance into these online spaces involves inhabiting a paradox that goes to the core of their social and civic vulnerabilities and possibilities. One way of looking at this lines up with Bellah’s critique.

The idea that contemporary, spiritual yearnings and experiences while espousing authenticity and connection, now through technology, support systems of selfish pursuit and instrumentality. On the therapeutic front, a similar conclusion is possible. The idea that technological platforms lend themselves to short-term, manualized therapies. To clinical work that unfolds as a closed horizon, where symptom leads to an algorithmically determined therapeutic solution. A to B-the technological apotheosis of managed care, rather than a clinical open horizon that tolerates silence and time that allows the patient and therapist to sink into and explore less determinable, less instrumentally motivated, less defined and definable depths of inner life and mutual experience.

Another way of looking at this, however, is that the technological paradox, prophecy and routinization in a click, goes to the core of contemporary spiritual yearnings. It is this very paradox that animates the sociological pattern of building and dismantling spiritual networks while connections remain inwardly alive, the ebb and the flow of contemporary spiritual life.

We could look at the technological predicament as a cullen, as contradiction and disappointment that motivates for the spiritual seeker, the familiar ebb and flow dance of sociological creativity, moving in and out of technological spaces as the spaces themselves, as the spaces themselves evolve and devolve. And for those in therapy, tech spaces may present the opportunity to explore social yearning and disappointment. And also the pathways that feeling this sadness and yearning opens up: a paradox, a cage, a closed horizon, yes. But what is this like and where does this take us? The paths that this opens up may be less defined, less algorithmic. We can explore all of this together. So those are some thoughts about spirituality and psychotherapy and technological spaces. I think there’s still a lot to consider. It’s all very much in process. Thanks.

Carolyn Chen: Thank you, Steven, for those reflections on spiritual experience among nones and psychotherapy. Next we turn to Dr. Erica Gault, who is going to be sharing some of her work on digital Black Christians.

Erica Gault: Good morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you are. It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you to the matrix for the invitation to be in dialogue on religion and in the information age. I want to begin with the disclaimer that this is a story told best through means. And so I’m going to share my screen. If you can’t see that, please let me know.

I want to begin with a story here. I want to tell you about a wooden framed church from when I was growing up. It set far back on what seemed like a grassy hill, but thinking back, it was more just a mound at the end of a dirt road, which was likely paved first by first people’s horses, slaves, then former slaves. And finally, in the late 80s, by the old Lincoln sedan that my father drove us to church in each Sunday morning. I would like to give you some sense of the rhythmic feel of the snare drum, the cow bells and the tambourine that were matched only by our own foot stomping on the wooden floor boards, as the steel guitarist, his hands and knuckles swollen and scarred from picking cotton most of his life, but now gracefully, they moved along those same fingers along his lap guitar, adding melody and meaning to our songs.

When I think of the sound, the spirit and the songs that took me in, as we say in the B lack church, or that got me over as I would arguably say, Mahalia Jackson, best sung first, how I got over. I think of those memories first and foremost. Those are also the memories of the Black church that ultimately led me online. And when I think of that, I often think are these two Black churches? How do we reconcile the two and more importantly, how do we name, define and identify the digital Black church?

Because usually we only talk about THE Black church as this kind of timeless and unchanging entity, but I want to put forward a conversation about naming the digital Black church as something separate for investigative purposes. And so I’m thinking about the digital contours of the Black church today. Let me know if this image is apparent on here and I’ll know whether the rest of the PowerPoint is viewable to everyone, if that’s helpful.

Okay. Thank you. The image that you’re seeing here is kind of my metaphor for thinking through this and how we often think about the Black church as this kind of contained and transparent flat kind of group, the physical Black church. When in fact, perhaps a more apt description is a visualization, something like this as not only free welding while these shapes of light might be in constellation with each other, they remain fluid and in many ways apart and always shifting in terms of their meaning. And so when I think of what forms the digital Black church, that leads to three points of investigation. One, I would argue that it is a manifestation of the earlier of earlier Black technologies. It’s a site for critical engagement with and apart from the physical Black church, and last, it is a hyper performance of the Black church.

What E. Patrick Johnson calls religious performativity and Syed Kabeer calls, racial religious performativity. And I add to that digital racial religious performativity, which my research assistant rightly criticized as too much of a mouthful to have as a term in your research. And so, more simplistically put, web work, but that kind of deep performance that continues and has become enlarged in the digital space.

So when we think about that very first one, the manifestation of earlier technologies, one of the first voices that comes to mind for me and arguably you could raise several other Black religious voices in history, but I go to Nat Turner and thinking about what I term spiritual technologies, the signs, miracles and other forms of divine communication that Black folks traditionally use in building new religious networks for Black liberation among diverse Black and gender bodies operating at the margins of Christian accessibility acceptability. In part because Nat Turner’s legacy has received such diverse reads, the centrality of technology to his story remains under explored.

Technology, the intellectual production of systems or systematic approaches, are often rendered as more legitimate or authoritative than technique, which is still this form of technology, but is more closely associated quite often with the doing of technology. Techniques, however, are, as you may know, usually the less coveted form of production because in this instance of its connection to Black practices, the doing of technology as a Black practice.

Turner’s often cast as either a religious zealot or in the words of William Styron in his hotly contested fictionalized account of Nat Turner’s life as a “fanatical Black man.” However, in Thomas Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner , it is with methodic force that Turner relates to honing of spiritual technologies that produce miracle signs and divine communication. The revelation of complex systems of knowledge empowered Turner with skills that rival white slave masters’ own technological weaponry, and expanded Turner’s network of fellow enslaved Blacks.

And while he has been written down in history, even the best kinds of depictions of Nat Turner do not talk about him as a scientific mind. And it might seem even this scholar is kind of exaggerating, or this is a reach, but you have to think of, of the confessions of Nat Turner as revealing these early kind of pyrotechnic skills, as he talks about the chemicals that are necessary for explosive devices and how he also talks about the way in which his divine communication through prophecy enables him this kind of knowledge.

Yet what Gray and the confessions of Nat Turner could not foresee is that the black church tradition has continued to encompass such quote unquote, unfit Christians as Turner. They are not always violent, but like Turner, they upset white and Black church hierarchies and sensibilities that seek to totalize Christian identity and terrorize perceived outliers. Through the use of technology, such unfit Christians continue to problematize the faith and the notion of the Black church in important ways.

And that’s what we see when we look at digital manifestations of the black church. So here’s, as I said, a meme to consider. I am, I should tell you, Black church meme affect affection ado, I love these because they reveal so much about the digital Black church. But I have here spiritual technologies continue, Black mothers as OGs, both in its usual usage, but also the original Google that Black mothers can find you anywhere is a common adage used in several different ways within black communities. But here is an image of Kobe Bryant and it says “how your mom looks when the pastor says something about disobedient children.” And of course, this is supposed to put us in a Black church and really this performance of Black motherhood. However, as means due it, detaches it from its original context, thus making it funny. Okay. Kobe Bryant is not your black mother, nor is he in a Black church. And yet it tells us something about the Black church within the digital context.

There should be an image here of Kobe Bryant, who’s clearly not in a Black church setting, but this is meant to be a revival of Black church activities in this performance of the same. I would also add to that, that when you talk about earlier spiritual technologies in the place of these kinds of all seeing eyes or all seeing knowledge that God empowers one with, the Black mother enters this kind of narrative representative of these other knowing kind of skills, in this sense the ability of omnipresence, or the ability to see her child, and there’s several versions of this kind of story. But in all of these means the Black mother shows up either very well or very powerful having these other worldly kind of abilities. And so even though it’s taken out of its context, its ripped out of the context of the Black church, it continues to imbue that same kind of power of the earlier forms of the Black church and the use of spiritual technologies.

Another instance of that points to my second point, the Black church, digital Black church as a site or critical engagement with and apart from the physical Black church. And I denote these kinds of differences, because when we talk about the Black church it has become this kind of catch all for all Black religion, all ages, may be very diverse, but all Black folks being a part of the Black church. And so my forthcoming book Networking the Black Church looks specifically at that group called black millennials or who I call digital Black Christians, because their expression of the Black church takes place in different ways and is interpreted differently within a digital context. And so I looked over a period of two years at the lives of a number of Black millennials, and one of those was a rapper by the name of Propaganda. And he described himself as an older OS or operating system version of a millennial, not quite a millennial,

If you’ve seen recent news reports, these millennials are now called geriatric millennials, which is an interesting term in itself as an aside, but it is telling us of this group that operates differently within the Black church. Like another rapper, popular rapper, Lecrae, these older digital Black Christians see them as straddling technological time periods and have used this to remediatize forms of Black culture. Older digital Black Christians through their innovative use of digital tools were imposing new visions on the world through their music. And discussing what a millennial is, they are saying something regarding their ability to see the necessity of translating through embodied practices like beat making, one technological process that is analog into another technological process into digital. As the attuned reader might suspect then, I am here referring to Michel Foucault’s notion of the technology of self.

While he defines four major types of technology, production, science, systems, power, and self, he contends that these often function in relation to one another technologies of self flow allow the individual alone or in conjunction with other others to affect their environments by transforming their own bodies, souls, thought, or way of being in order to achieve happiness or wholeness. Like any technological innovation then, digital technology follows a pattern. And critically I think there needs to be a critical reflection on what the digital itself means for the manifestation of the Black church. It makes use of older innovations informing a more rapid layer process for task completion. Meredith Broussard demonstrates this process by cataloging the complex network of codes required to create a simple thing like a space between text, but what underlies that exactly when we hit the space bar?

Beneath that single command, a structure process of information retrieval occurs. Digital Black Christians who appeared in a technology chain at the point of analog were able to go behind the curtain of the black church, so to speak, in order to digitize its practices acting as this kind of bridge between the physically located black church and the digital Black church. We see that manifest in a number of ways, but even when we talk about the steady meditation in the digital black church on something like the death narrative, we’re seeing the manifestation of that earlier black church. I would argue the hashtags that began to appear following the death of Trayvon Martin, like #RIPBabyBoy, other hashtags like #SayHerName or #BlackLivesMatter, is this kind of meditation that is sacred for those who participate in the digital Black church.

In these hashtags, we are looking at the revival of, and some would even argue, the new spirituals, hashtags as the new spirituals, for they do the same kind of work of informing us and transforming us on the notion of black death, both its surety and the possibility of overcoming it for those participants in the Black church. And then there are these other images that tell us within the digital scape, the way earlier forms of technology that one would’ve seen through TV series like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , earlier films like Lion King , or even this conversation in the Cosby Show where Dr. Huxtable is telling his son, “I brought you in this world and I will take you out.” In those that I interviewed and studied over a two-year period, these were images and stories that they constantly returned to both in their artistic work and in their discussion of [inaudible] and things like death. Figures like Tupac also factor in this, and the death of Tupac figuring large.

How they then take those images and re-mediatize them tells us a lot about their reflections on death and how the Black church continues to take that up. But something to keep in mind and kind of pointing to my last point, and I think is perhaps a good place to begin to close also, is that these images are a hyper-performance of the Black church, because the digital move so quickly one does not get the story that is connected to the past, or the rich tradition of the Black church. It is also subject to hypercapitalist, heteropatriarchy white supremacists indications of what Blackness and Black culture are. This kind of image here of Good Times that tells the story of the death of her husband, quite tragically so, is the first instance of a Black death that is filmed on television and that is recorded in this kind of sustained way. It becomes, however, when it is detached from its original content in the second image, this very funny comedic kind of take on death, rather in this case it’s the death of a parent in the hit TV show, mid-’90s, on Martin.

How does this happen? And much the same way that I talked earlier about means, it becomes detached in this way that allows for it to take on a different emotion and a different meaning. The meaning that becomes so important as we’re seeing with Facebook’s most recent problems is that we go for the highly charged emotional kind of content that gives us the algorithmic success of certain companies that we see at present. Both and thinking about next steps and what might be the answer for the further study of the digital Black church then, I would say a few things.

One, when I talk about the Black church that I come from, the kind of autoethnography that I engage in, is a continuous testifying, as well it is a attempt to arrest the algorithms, if you will, and telling stories that are diverse, that are multiplicitous, about the engagement of Black folks with the Black church, and lodges a critique on the way that the black church has been misconstrued historically and presently as this single kind of fish bowl. However, it is complex and fluid. I think in further study, one of the best directions is the critical study of race, and there have been some wonderful works coming out now around critical race theory, critical digital Black studies. And for the study of contemporary religion and religious practices, I think those are some of the most important and lively sites for such a conversation on religion in the age of information. Thank you.

Carolyn Chen: Thank you, Erika, for that really fascinating discussion on the digital Black church. Now we turn to Dr. Kelsy Burke, who will be sharing her research on sexuality and religion in the internet. Kelsy?

Kelsy Burke: Hi everyone, it’s so nice to be with you today. Thanks, Carolyn. And to the other panelists, you are all hard acts to follow and I’ve enjoyed so much learning about these diverse topics. So my specific expertise when it comes to religion in the age of information comes from my research on Christian sex advice, and how it as a genre and an industry has been transformed by the internet.

This might seem like a niche topic, but I hope that my brief remarks today can help us better understand the relationship between digital media and theologically conservative religious traditions broadly, and specifically, the relationship between conservative white evangelicals and American culture. So, I’d like to introduce you to my research by telling you the story of one of my interview participants, Samantha, who ran a website, which was an online store that she called Samantha’s, that specialized in sex toys for women.

So for unsuspecting visitors to the site, Samantha’s funny and confident writing style may have conjured up images of Sex and the City ‘s Samantha, the TV character who loved to talk about sex almost as much as she loved to have it, but disrupting this Hollywood image is the story of how her website began. When Samantha asked for prayers from an online community of fellow conservative Christians about whether or not God wanted her to start her adult store business. And God’s answer, the website users unanimously agreed, was, “Yes.” So I followed Samantha online for about a year before I interviewed her. This was part of my dissertation research at the time that eventually became my first book, where I studied dozens of Christian sexuality websites. I collected all of this data about a decade ago. And so, technologies have changed quite a bit since then, but I think the lessons that I have learned continue to live on.

So, I was among thousands of others who encountered Samantha’s virtual presence. No one online, including me, knew what Samantha really looked like, who she quote, unquote, “really was.” Samantha was not her real name, it was a username that she created for her online activity. But Samantha’s story, I would come to learn, was a common one for evangelical women I encountered who used Christian sex advice websites.

Just a few years before she started her business, Samantha had never used a sex toy herself or had even experienced an orgasm. She grew up in an evangelical church that spoke very little about sexuality, and for years after she got married, she told me that she enjoyed the closeness she felt to her husband during sex, but she never really felt deep pleasure or desire. And when she finally shared some of these troubles with a close friend of hers, the friend told Samantha about a website that Samantha described to me as, “Where people talk about sex in a really frank, but respectful way, and from a Christian worldview.”

So Samantha followed her friend’s advice. She got on her computer and she typed the URL for a website that I call betweenthesheets.com. And it was there that she discovered a virtual world of over 30,000 registered members who were engaged and married Christians who talked in frank and really explicit ways about sexuality through a series of message board threads. So she would later describe in an interview to me, “I was just so floored, I mean, in a happy way, that people were talking about really specific things like try this technique or lean forward or lean backwards, like really practical stuff. I could tell that people had a heart for God and for their spouse, and for wanting to help people. So I started posting and getting a lot of encouragement. I just needed to learn so many things.” So, Samantha found this online community of people who, just like her, had what she describes a heart for God, but they were not focusing on the sins of sexuality like Samantha was used to in her evangelical church growing up. Instead they were insisting that God wants married heterosexual couples to have active and satisfying sex lives.

Thanking God for great sex was not a flippant vulgarity, but was for these website users, a sincere form of praise. American evangelicals have a very rich history when it comes to promoting sexual pleasure within marriage. They’ve drawn upon multiple mediums, books, workshops, radio shows all since the 1970s. And today, evangelicals encourage sexual expression in all of these ways as well as a wide range of digital media, which became the focus of my study. So this includes online stores like Samantha’s that sell intimacy products, online message boards, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Bible studies, all that discuss a wide range of topics related to marital sex. And these digital media reflect the ideas that are presented in print literature that are often written by well established and respected evangelical authorities, but I came to learn that they also do much more.

Unlike a book that is already written, the internet is kind of like a book that is constantly being rewritten by a collective of laypeople, each with their own unique experiences and perspectives. And these spaces also allow for non-evangelical religious who buy into the parameters set forth by a conservative evangelicalism, namely that sex is intended only within heterosexual monogamous matrimony. So, over the years that I spent researching Christian sex advice websites, I found that creators and users were able to draw from existing religious doctrine while also talking about God in really personal and sometimes unorthodox and surprising ways. Ethnographers of religious communities have long offered many examples of how, in particular, evangelical believers understand a God that is intensely involved in their everyday lives, not removed from it. So God meddles in the mundane, what Robert Orsi calls everyday miracles, wherein all of life’s events from joyful ones like overcoming an illness, to unhappy endings like losing financial savings, can all be opportunities to connect a divine force to ordinary life, kind of like the Holy Spirit influencing IT algorithms.

Contemporary Christian beliefs generate both the sense that God is real and he has powers that are distinctly non-human. I really like, in her ethnography of a non-denominational binary church, anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann observes that evangelical belief are as she writes, in effect a third kind of epistemological commitment, not materially real, like tables and chairs, but not fictional, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . So religion offers believers a method to grasp their realities and make sense of life circumstances, but at the same time, it leaves room for awe and for wonder, and for things that are not completely understood. And religion as this in between real, tangible and supernatural divine, mirrors the ways in which scholars have often described to the cultural effects of digital media and cyberspace, what Michael Ross has described as space between fantasy and action.

The internet shares this resemblance to Luhrmann’s description of the God evangelicals believe in, that it lacks a physical presence, but still feels almost ubiquitous in our lives. It’s not reducible to our computers or smart smartphones, but it’s awfully deeply tied to these tangible components. So virtual reality is not quite material, but nor is it imaginary. It’s out there somewhere, difficult to definitively describe, impossible to capture in scope. And I think it’s these parallels that are what make really online so enthralling to its users. One way that I think about Christian sexuality websites, and more broadly religion in the age of information, is to think about what urban designers called desire paths or desire lines. So, we’ve likely all seen them in city parks or on college campuses, where there are trails that are determined by where people walk rather than paved sidewalks or pre-marked paths.

If we think of prescriptive religion or formalized religious institutions as the carefully planned and professionally designed routes, the internet creates these desire lines that may at times travel alongside established religious traditions, but at other times they can cut corners, they can extend further, or even go in an entirely different direction. So, what I found is that with some deft discursive maneuvering, website users are able to challenge many of the stereotypes we have about conservative Christians, namely that they’re anti-sex. So I observed how website users are able to make men who are interested in kinky sex seem more, not less, connected to God, how they portray women’s masturbation as an act of submissions to God and their husbands, rather than an act of independence, and they make Christian marriages seem steamy and sexy, while at the same time, wholesome and respectable.

I observed this dance between the openings that website users create for sexual expression within Christian marriages, and also the closures that they reinforce by perpetuating the regulatory of gender heterosexuality in Protestant and Christianity. So, collectively, online conversations can help evangelicals do what they seem to do best, which is to use culturally salient spaces to embed contemporary dialogue with religious meaning. So, this sort of keeps them as a religious group in this, in between space, not entirely separate from, but also not fully participating in broader culture. So Christian sexuality website users can remain attached to religious beliefs that hold them as exclusive bearers of Godly values, while also participating in some of the pleasures of modern and seemingly secular life. I think of Christian sexuality websites as more trajectories than fixed places. And I think this is true of religion in the age of information more broadly.

In one moment, we may see them perfectly parallel religious dogma, but in another we might find differences that may be obvious or subtle from preexisting religious beliefs. So websites go where ordinary believers take them, where their desires and pleasures propel them, but their sense of choice is not unlimited. So it’s bounded by a sense of where they can go. So, things like heterosexuality, monogamy, and the gender binary are kind of like these massive oak trees that website users don’t attempt to cut down or climb over. But still, I think we can look to these sites and their users to show how really fragile the Christian landscape may be. So, like desire paths that may irrevocably alter the natural ecosystem, Christian sexuality websites too can transform what religion and sexuality might be in the 21st century. I’ll end there and look forward to our conversation.

Carolyn Chen: Thank you so much, Kelsy. That was really fascinating, the discussion that you had. And so many ways I think connected to so many of the other comments and presentations prior. If you don’t all mind, if you could just show your faces so that we can engage in a discussion for the remaining moments of the panel. And just also a reminder to our audience, that if you have questions to please post them in the Q&A place.

I want to just start with a question that I found this tension really, or just an interesting tension among all of your presentations since the internet and technology was a place for religious innovation. And this really came through, especially Kelsy, as you talked about desire lines, and how that contrasts with this sort of brick and mortar institutional church, right? That people can sort of follow these desire lines and that you don’t know where it’s going. And I think that also came through very strongly, Steven, in your presentation also, just about the… I forget exactly the image that you used, but sort of the opening and closing of new collectivities, spiritual collectivities, and how the internet and technology could aid in doing that.

That’s on this one side that I think a theme that you all talked about, in each of your presentations, is that the possibility of technology for producing religious innovation. But on the other hand, there’s also the tension of algorithms. And I think that this is something that came through in Erika and Heather’s talk is about these algorithms, which are predictive and also are conforming. I mean, what’s interesting in many of your presentations is that, you’re all talking about, in a way, minority religious groups. Groups that are not finding a place in mainstream religion in certain ways. And that’s especially, Steven in your presentation of these folks who don’t necessarily… They’re religious nuts, right, that their identity is based on their absence of religion.

And then for Kelsy, you’re talking about these evangelicals who can’t necessarily speak about these things in the church. And then also with you Erika, you’re talking about these digital Black millennial Christians that might not have found a place in the Black church otherwise. So anyway, let me just back up.

My question really is about that tension between technology providing, being a mechanism or an impetus for religious innovation versus also the tension with algorithms as creating conformity and perhaps… Well, conformity. Let me just leave it at that. So let me just open it to all of you and just jump in.

Steven Barrie-Anthony: I’ll jump in, Carolyn. I mean, I think that’s a really interesting observation and I too saw that thread running throughout everyone’s presentations in different ways. I think for the folks that I study, the nones, that kind of tension that you’re describing between algorithmic foreclosure or closed horizon and this open horizon, enthusiastic, experiential opening the technology provides for connection in a deep fashion, that paradox very much mirrors what I think produces their religious creativity to begin with, this opening into collective spiritual experience that then get concretized, inevitably becomes more religious and then, they pull back from it. And it’s this ebb and flow, this wave pattern moving in and out.

And so, I see technology spiritual… Moving into technological spaces for these people is very much reflective of that architecture. And so it’s both a familiar disappointment when they move into algorithmic foreclosure, but then also motivates that same process. So moving out of certain technological spaces into others and when those get concretized and feel too foreclosed, they move out and in, it’s this same process. So that’s what comes to mind for me.

Erika Gault: Okay. What I was thinking of enjoying so much of the presentations. I was thinking of how for my group, it is often out of survival that their creativity flows, that their practices are in many ways at risk and without exaggeration under a tremendous amount of terrorism in the communities that they come out of. And so this duplicitous situation that they’re in. And that’s where the tension really arises because in other ways and I’m thinking of Heather, your presentation and talking about these as multi-site churches that begin with South Asian communities, even though when we think of what is a megachurch, that’s usually not the site that we go through. These are first people, they’re the first to arrive at these technologies out of necessity. And having those always in conflict and always subject to center or being taken away by the broader community keeps that tension there but also the necessity of finding, creating, and maintaining these kinds of spaces.

Kelsy Burke: Yeah. And what I was just going to add is an observation that I think across the different topics that we study is what a sociologist Nancy Amman writes about as religious practice. Like the stuff that we do, that is never entirely original. It is always coming from somewhere and bound in some structures. But that it’s also by its very nature of being continually reproduced, which I think is so often apparent in digital media that that’s where the room for creativity and agency can come from. And it’s also interesting to think about algorithms as predictive and conforming, but that it’s sometimes they’re trying to in fact mask that intent to try to make it seem as if the website structure is limitless or is in trying to endorse creativity or individualism. That that’s just something that I think we see across different technological platforms that is also interesting to be a part of this conversation.

Heather Mellquist Lehto: That’s absolutely right. Just to piggyback on that point, which I think is really important is that the creators and the owners of the algorithm. It serves their best interest to market these platforms or these particular spaces as new innovative creating a rupture open, full of freedom. And so it can be useful to remember that certain words carry connotations, that then can influence how we think about those, like analyzing religion in those spaces. The digital lends itself a little differently than thinking about the analog or something. And so for this reason, I wonder if it might be helpful to reframe this as just another iteration of a new media practice.

Going back to your introductory remarks about the printing press. Different media have different affordances and capacities. But they’re not without their limitations as well. And that’s as true of the internet as it is from as it was with the printing press. And so maybe sometimes flipping into a different register thinking about media can be helpful here and thinking about this tension, which I think does run through all sorts of technological changes.

Carolyn Chen: Yeah. Thank you. So fascinating. We have a question here from our audience. They write: Neil Postman, way back in Amusing Ourselves made the useful distinction between entertainment values/standards and other kinds of values and decried the reduction of politics and religion to entertainment. How does the modern church here in the USA and Korea answer the problem of turning congregations into audiences and pastors into MCs? And I think this might be a question that Erika might address too in her research as well. But I think this is for you, Heather.

Heather Mellquist Lehto: Okay. I’ll start us off. But I think everybody has something really interesting to say about new modes of participation and community that are engendered through these use of new technologies. This is a really interesting question that I don’t necessarily want to generalize and say, all churches are like this or like that. But in response, I will give a couple of notable examples. One is, one of my field sites was Full Gospel Church, which is the largest, often attributed to be the largest church in the world. Its main sanctuary itself claims about 800,000 congregants and it has hundreds of campuses around the world. So it’s quite a place. And in that church in particular, I have written about the way that the use of media technologies and creating the multi-site church was deliberately designed to create a centralized and hierarchical structure to the church.

The founding pastor, Choyongi was very, very famous for his faith healing and his preaching. And that was a real draw for people. So when I did research in churches, in Koreatown, in Los Angeles, churches within that same church system, every Sunday, they had one service that was devoted to watching Choyongi’s service from Seoul, South Korea. And so, there are some ways in which that’s actually not something that wants to be avoided, but in other cases I have heard from many congregants of smaller satellite campuses that they actually feel a greater sense of ownership and participation within the church than they did at like a singular megachurch. Because at megachurch, there might be limited opportunities to serve on, say the praise team or the prayer ministry or the welcome team. Whereas, if you have a lot of little congregations suddenly there are endless possibilities for service and volunteering. And so… Anyway, there are different ways that different churches deal with that. And it’s not necessarily always going to lend itself to one model or another.

Erika Gault: Yeah. I definitely think there’s great diversity in how modern churches approach that question for many of the folks that I studied in my ethnography, they rebrand, I would say the Christian faith and the notion of the Black church so much. So that when I use terms like Black church, digital Black church, those are terms for us within the scholarly community to identify and investigate, but they might think of themselves as social media influencers or social media personalities, or just a guy who likes t-shirts and makes them Christian-themed. And out of that becomes a ministry.

I’ll tell a very quick story of who we would call maybe a micro-celebrity by the name of Joseph Solomon, who I track in my book. And Joseph Solomon is most interesting because he no longer identifies as a Christian. He became known as basically an ordained minister, huge following in the millions on YouTube. And it caused a tremendous amount of chaos in his small YouTube empire to say, I’m no longer Christian. And then he said, and I’ve never been a pastor, I never really called myself that. But he really didn’t need to. They understood that they were his audience and they were his Patreon followers. And so you’re seeing a lot of that of rebranding the traditional operation of the Black church.

Carolyn Chen: That’s really interesting. It’s interesting, too, sort of the market language that you use, the commercial language you use of rebranding. Because everything that’s over the internet can, is feels very commercial, I would say. Here’s one question, how do we think about the proliferation of cult, such as group or groups such as like QAnon that the internet and technology has really made those groups possible. And so in your view, does their relation to technology differ from the relationship of the groups that you’ve studied? Which are, except for Steven, recognizes its legitimate religious groups. Wondering if anyone has any comments on that?

Kelsy Burke: Well, I can jump in with some thoughts. Because I study maybe the group that’s closest to groups like QAnon conservative white evangelicals, who I think both their religious beliefs and their politics come from a place of affect. Like these deeply felt beliefs of which there isn’t reason that can challenge them. And I think this can serve a collective effervescence in terms of a religious community, but it also means that messages that line up to their feelings about truth or the way the world should be can find resonance.

And so I think that, in the communities that I’ve studied that seem close to fringe groups like QAnon, they certainly don’t see themselves as fringe. And they certainly don’t see themselves as being anti-knowledge or anti-science, but that their sources come from come from a different place. So I do… I mean, I think that it’s a mistake to say that fringe groups like QAnon are over there and other online communities are somewhere else because there are similarities that would be fruitful. I’m looking forward to the research that comes from studying those communities as spaces that may overlap with those that I study or that we’ve talked about today.

Carolyn Chen: Thanks Kelsy. Here’s finally just our last question comment. This is from the perspective of a local pastor: Technology has also been an integral tool of growing the church and this person gives examples and says, currently we use Zoom and Facebook live. My experience has been that the tools when used appropriately have helped congregations grow closer, deeper in their faith thinking, and more diverse. My question is, what studies are happening during this most recent pandemic regarding church growth? And this question is from Pastor Chuck Kelsy. So any comments on that? What is the research showing about how technology and the use of Zoom and Facebook live is affecting congregational life?

Erika Gault: Well, there’s been one recent study that sound pretty interesting that said, many churches, Black churches were now engaging in hybridized forms of worship, a little online and a little in-person. And I think of that as really gelling with traditional modes of survival in black church communities and having to become innovative. I also, as I said before, think about its connections to wider church by practices and why looking at traditions within the black church becomes so important. Because those become traditions more broadly as Black church culture continues to affect American Christianity and other religious traditions. So I would say, that’s one of the important ones, but I actually think there needs to be much more research. Particularly, on black religion and technology use than what’s been done. Even some of the really great studies coming out of serious research does not engage fully the use of technology in Black religious expression. So I think that’s some outstanding work and my next project.

Heather Mellquist Lehto: I’ll just mention, from some of my own observations, both in South Korea and the United States during the pandemic is that, I think if we’re talking about the effect of technology during this period, we also need to talk about the economic effects of the pandemic and the K-shaped recovery, so called. I think that, that says a lot about what I have observed happening with churches. There has been largely churches that were already accustomed to these forms of mediated religious services have done really well and have actually grown in terms of giving and in terms of the size of their congregation. But often that comes at the expense of smaller churches that are less equipped to make that leap into the digital, or that might have had an aging population that’s just less comfortable doing online worship. And so while some churches have grown, we have to look at how they have maybe absorbed congregants from other places and so on and so forth. I don’t know specifically how many new converts or new attendees of churches have emerged during the pandemic, but that would be interesting to study for sure.

Carolyn Chen: Thank you. This so helpful. Both of you, Pastor Kelsy, you might want to check out the Hartford seminary is doing an ongoing study of how churches have changed during the COVID pandemic. So you might want to check out their website or you could just email me and I could lead you towards that, some of that data. But I want to just thank all of our panelists today for such a wonderful and thought-provoking conversation about the role of new technology in religion. Thank you for joining us, everyone in the audience as well and hope to see you at the next matrix event.

[Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions ]

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