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Digital Religion
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Origin from 1990
An established academic field, founded principally by Heidi Campbell, studying how religious belief, authority, community and practice form, spread, adapt and are contested on networked digital media, and, increasingly, how that same belief is targeted, amplified and exploited by the platforms carrying it. The field is generally periodized in stages: an early "religion online" stage, roughly the 1990s, when institutions mainly used the internet to broadcast existing content outward; an "online religion" stage from the early 2000s, when people began forming genuine religious community and practice natively within digital spaces rather than merely reading about them there; and a "digital religion" stage proper from around 2010 onward, in which smartphones, algorithmic social platforms and networked culture reshape religious authority, ritual and identity formation in ways that have no exact offline precedent. The field covers ground far wider than any single tradition: invented religions that could only have spread at internet scale, such as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster; state-registered religions built around a specifically digital practice, such as Kopimism; older traditions such as Wicca and witchcraft finding new transmission and community through platforms such as TikTok; churches whose primary form of contact with their members is now a mobile application; and the platforms' own algorithmic incentives, which can amplify, distort or commercially exploit religious sentiment as readily as they can support it, as seen in phenomena ranging from targeted misinformation about religious minorities to the direct organizing of digital protest movements against religious institutions themselves. The atlas covers new and old religion equally, and digital religion is, in Campbell's own framing, simply where a great deal of religion now actually lives.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe field's own periodization begins with an early religion online stage, roughly the 1990s, when religious institutions primarily used the internet to broadcast existing content outward. The field's formal academic naming and study as digital religion followed later, publicly consolidated by Heidi Campbell's 2012 edited volume. Place of Origin Terminology
Term Coined"Digital religion" as a field name is most closely associated with Heidi Campbell's 2012 edited volume Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, which built on an earlier scholarly vocabulary distinguishing "religion online" (institutions broadcasting content) from "online religion" (community and practice formed natively online). 1 Status
Status TodayIn active religious use 1 Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 1 Learn More
What Digital Religion Actually Studies
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.
When the Platform Becomes the Problem
Digital religion scholarship covers exploitation and conflict as seriously as it covers belief and community, because the same platform dynamics that let a religion spread at internet speed can just as easily be turned against one, or turn a sincere practice into a commercial performance. Three documented patterns illustrate the range.
The clearest case of digital activism organized against a religious institution is Project Chanology, the January 2008 campaign the loose hacker collective Anonymous launched against the Church of Scientology after the church tried to have a leaked internal interview with Tom Cruise removed from the internet. Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, embedded with Anonymous from that campaign onward, documents viral video, denial-of-service attacks on Scientology's servers and coordinated street protests worldwide, a shape of conflict, purely online in its origin, with no real precedent before networked platforms existed.
A subtler pattern is amplification reshaping a practice from outside with no coordinated attack at all. Scholarship on #WitchTok documents how TikTok's recommendation algorithm rewards whichever witchcraft content performs best for engagement, not necessarily the content most representative of how practitioners actually practice, while the platform simultaneously commercializes the aesthetic through witchcraft-branded merchandise sold beside the instructional videos.
Neither pattern makes platforms straightforwardly good or bad for religion. Both show what the field treats as basic: a platform's incentives, not merely its reach, shape what belief and practice become once they move through it, for better and worse, depending on whose interests the platform rewards that day.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Church of Scientology: the target of Project Chanology, Anonymous's January 2008 campaign, the clearest documented case of purely online-organized digital activism against a religious institution.
An invented religion that could only have reached its actual scale and its contested legal record through internet-speed transmission from a single 2005 blog post.
Human Design: an esoteric system whose modern practice and teaching is substantially transmitted through apps, charting websites and online communities rather than any print-first tradition.
A state-registered religion whose sacrament, copying information, is itself a specifically digital-era practice.
The organization behind the YouVersion Bible App, the most downloaded scripture-reading application in history and a primary case study in how a mobile app reshapes a daily devotional habit.
Wicca: documented rise in public self-identification driven by the same WitchTok phenomenon.
Witchcraft: WitchTok, since roughly 2020, has become a major contemporary transmission channel for the practice, entangled with platform algorithms and consumer merchandising.
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