ABSTRACT
Digital religion indicates electronically mediated media practices that differentiate themselves by aligning within a series of relationships linked to perceived sources of ultimate power. To unpack this definition, the chapter proceeds through four investigations. First, it describes the digital as those electronic communications that transmit and store information as programmable bits of data. Second, it investigates digital media practices through the concepts of affordances, mediascapes, and cultural context. Third, it defines the category of religion as a two-step process by which media practices set themselves apart from other practices. Fourth, it describes how religious media practices work because they are situational, strategic, embedded in misrecognition, and able to reproduce a redemptive hegemony. The chapter follows up these investigations by summarizing the last 25 years of research on digital religion as three waves of scholarship. The first wave started in the mid-1990s, when both scholars and journalists looked on in horror or stood in reverence at the transformative possibilities of digital religion. A second wave of scholarship began in the early 2000s and reflected the routinization of digital media. By 2020, the third wave has crested, and the field now has complex, well-examined, significant research into digital religion.
