Religious Communities in the Virtual Age

尽管从历史上看，宗教生活在某种程度上是逃避社会数字化的避难所，但新冠肺炎的流行改变了这一点。大流行病施加的社会限制迅速加速了宗教团体接受数字工具和结构，以便在这场危机期间继续其基本的社会和心理工作。正如我们的初步研究显示的那样，这些发展为欧洲宗教的运作方式开辟了新的、富有成效的可能性，因此，这些发展可能会在大流行结束后很长一段时间内持续下去。但对于欧洲宗教生活的快速数字化将对多数人和少数人传统产生什么影响，还需要进一步研究。当宗教社区主要甚至完全存在于数字领域时，宗教权威、社区归属和成员身份、(数字)圣地的感觉、有意义和有情感的仪式的制作，以及宗教社区与更广泛的公共领域的关系等问题将如何改变？这个项目汇集了来自七个欧洲国家的学者，他们具有宗教社会学、人类学、数字宗教、行为研究和相关学科的背景，以解决这些问题。主要的方法是人种学，包括传统方法和数字方法。我们将以有利于民族志深度和国际可比性的方式，对我们国家的主流、历史悠久的少数群体和新兴或新建的宗教社区进行民族志研究。为了补充这一点，我们将(A)审查和分析欧洲对宗教和数字媒体的经验和参与的大规模社会调查，(B)对因应这一流行病而改变对宗教的报道的社交媒体和广播媒体进行分析，以及(C)利用表演研究工具对在线和混合仪式进行美学分析。

While, historically, religious life has been something of a refuge from the digitalisation of society, the COVID-19 pandemic changed that. The social restrictions imposed by the pandemic rapidly accelerated religious communities' embrace of digital tools and structures in order to continue their essential social and psychological work during this crisis. As our preliminary research has shown, these developments have opened up new and productive possibilities for how European religion is done, and so these developments are likely to persist long after the pandemic has ended.But exactly what the consequences of this rapid digitalisation of religious life in Europe will be, for majority and minority traditions, requires further research. How will issues such as religious authority, community belonging and membership, the (digital) sense of sacred place, the making of meaningful and affectively potent rituals, and the relationship of religious communities to the wider public sphere change when those communities exist primarily, or even completely, in the digital realm?This project brings together scholars from seven European countries with backgrounds in the sociology of religion, anthropology, digital religion, performance studies, and allied disciplines to address these questions. The primary method will be ethnography, including both traditional and digital methods. We will conduct ethnographic research on mainstream, long-established minority, and emergent or newly-built religious communities in our countries in a way that facilitates both ethnographic depth and international comparability. To supplement this, we will (a) review and analyse large-scale social surveys of European experience of and engagement with religion and the digital, (b) conduct a social and broadcast media analysis of changing coverage of religion in response to the pandemic, and (c) conduct an aesthetic analysis of online and hybrid rituals with the tools of performance studies.