Digital religion is not simply the study of religious people using the internet. Scholars in the field, following Heidi Campbell's own framing, distinguish several stages that matter because each raises a different question. "Religion online," roughly the 1990s, describes institutions broadcasting existing sermons, texts and doctrine outward through websites, a one-way extension of print and broadcast that changed distribution without changing much about religious authority or community itself. "Online religion," from the early 2000s, describes something genuinely new: people forming real religious community, ritual and even ordination natively inside digital spaces, with no equivalent offline original the digital version was merely representing.
"Digital religion" proper, the field's current name for itself, covers the period from roughly 2010 onward, once smartphones and algorithmically curated social platforms became religion's primary daily point of contact for enormous numbers of people. This atlas's own case studies sit across that range. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Kopimism are religions that could only have reached their scale through internet-speed transmission; the YouVersion Bible App turned scripture reading into a habit mediated by notifications and gamified plans; and older traditions such as Wicca and witchcraft have found new transmission through short-video platforms, covered on those traditions' own pages.
What unites the field is a refusal to treat any of this as religion merely "moving online" unchanged. The medium itself, its algorithms and its incentives are treated as actively shaping what religious belief and practice become, not as a neutral pipe carrying an unchanged cargo.