The Politics of Digital Religiosities

Dear Colleagues,

In the past three decades, there has been a commendable body of work on what Campbell (2013) has called Digital Religions. These studies include mutations in the pastoral as well as theological functions of mainline faiths, sectarian departures from them, and a range of neopagan, antinomian formations that make a formidable spectrum: electronic African Diasporic Religions (ADRs) like Yoruba, Akan, or Kumina; various forms of the Wicca, Salafist and other revivalisms; syncretic entities like Falun-Gong of China that draw from Buddhism and Taoism; and new age communities like the Turing Church or the ‘Way of the Future’ birthed in the Silicon Valley, centered around an AI deity.

These studies affirm that the internet is a generative reality in and of itself. It must not be seen as a mere instrument or force multiplier. While religious dispensations shape the social dimensions of technology (what Campbell calls RSST or Religious Social Shaping of Technology), the affordances, new temporalities, and virtual spaces of the digital sphere impact traditional institutions and hierarchies of religious orders. Effort, therefore, has been made to avoid both a sociological determinism as well as a technological one. The dissemination of theological or ethical discourse and ritualistic performance can no longer be top-down and absolutely prescriptive. Networked religiosity is inevitably interactive, marked by vernacular, horizontal dispersals not amenable to priestly mediations or monopolies of interpretation. The electronic pastorate today is composed of acolytes who are also consumers interested in feedback loops. Established churches and ecumenical authorities have to relentlessly find ways to sacralize profane instruments of the media and engage with them. This is especially true at a time when -- as Hepp (2013) has argued -- in some European societies, the media has taken on the traditional pastoral role played by religion in terms of spiritual solace, lifestyle or ethical choices, feel-good nostrums, environmental existentialisms, or therapeutic procedures. Amidst all these mutations and adjustments in a historical field of desires, apocalyptic anxieties, and techno-financial transformations, scholarly attention has been devoted to the study of electronic fundamentalisms as well as the novel marshalling of religious resources towards new political ends, that is, political ends that have never quite been ‘traditional’. In this particular niche, we could place examples like Hindu nationalism’s abandonment of an ascetic agrarian conservatism (called Gandhian socialism) and shift towards neoliberal economics since the mid-nineties, or the squaring of pacifist Buddhism with jingoistic, majoritarian terror in Myanmar.

Set against this backdrop, this volume of studies will attempt a major intervention: considering modern digital religiosities as a phenomenal domain that is wider than religion or religious activity in the traditional sense. ‘Religion’, as Talal Asad (1993) has shown, was constructed as an anthropological category within the parameters of European secular introspection after the mid-millennial religious wars and during the modern expansion of empire. It came with an inbuilt Christological bias and a set of normative epistemological expectations: a singular godhead, a church or scriptural and sacerdotal authority, a central doctrinal tradition, a Book, law, and a prophetic figure. This was the template that was used to codify and catalogue the ‘world religions’ in the modern era. That is, to telescope varieties of Islam into ‘Mohamedanism’ as the Christological other (Said, 1979) or to construct an axiomatic Hinduism through a Brahminical–Sanskritic transcription of a vast range of vernacular pieties (Basu, 2020).

The purpose of these studies will be to study digital ‘religiosities’ (for lack of a better word) and their various political implications without the necessary anchorage of ‘religion’ as a totalizing Geertzean symbolic–cultural system that is supposed to explain the general order of experience and destination. In other words, if we think about religiosity as a passionate ethical or spiritual commitment to something and digital religiosity as a phenomenon that follows a trajectory of datafication, algorithmization, and platformization to a worldly info-cogno convergence (Latzer 2022), then it could be argued that this applies to a wide range of political phenomena that may not have anything to do with ‘religion’ as such. Digital religiosities today mark mainstream secular activities like gaming, fanfiction, sports or movie fandoms; social media ‘influencing’; and eccentric formations like UFO-logy, crypto-currency or Flat Earth movements. They pertain to a wide range of human groups interested in fountain pens or vinyl records, tiny houses, or off-the-grid van or island living. These various domains often come with distinct cosmologies, myths, aesthetic values, eco-consciousnesses, ideologies, purity rituals, and grail items and affect industries, projects of memory and world-building. Unlike in the past, they are irresistibly global rather than local; they birth and carry different temporal imaginations with them. Yet, at the same time, case studies of such phenomena in their specific conjunctures require what Dutta (2007) has called a culture-centered and culture-sensitive approach. We call them digital religiosities simply because they may propose wellness, virtue, being, and belonging in formats not necessarily beholden to truth models of science or, indeed, religion qua religion.

This Special Issue requests case studies, theorizations, genealogies, and postcolonial, ethnographic/anthropological reckonings of the many political valences of Digital Religiosity understood as including, but also in excess of, religion as such.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200-300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of this Special Issue. Please send the manuscript to the Guest Editor or the Assistant Editor Sandee Pan ([email protected]) of Religions. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Anustup Basu
Guest Editor

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• digital religion
• digital politics
• neopaganism
• digital fundamentalisms
• social media studies
• minoritarian politics
• majoritarian politics
• religious nationalism
• media and politics