Search

Religious activities are no longer confined to local religious communities, but are increasingly taking place online. In that regard, social media is of particular importance for young believers that connect with their peers via platforms such as Instagram. There are conflicting views on the functioning of social media platforms: they are either conceptualized as superdiverse spaces, in which social boundaries can be overcome, or as resulting in separate bubbles that foster exclusive exchanges between like-minded people sharing certain characteristics, including religious affiliation. This article assesses online religious activities based on qualitative research involving 41 young, urban, religious Instagram users of different faiths. We demonstrate how young believers' interactions on social media produce thematically bound content bubbles that are considerably homogeneous when it comes to religion, but superdiverse in other areas. Religious activities online often have an affirmative effect on religious belonging. This is especially true for young people that perceive themselves in a minority position and search for like-minded people online. We have found that religious content bubbles are clustered around religious traditions. Interreligious exchange (e.g., between Christians and Sikhs) is largely absent, whereas intrareligious boundaries (e.g., between Lutherans, Catholics, and Pentecostals) become blurred. This suggests that differences within religious traditions are losing significance in a digitalized world, while interreligious boundaries remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on religious belonging has overwhelmingly labelled believers' religion in very broad and superficial terms, presuming that individual practices and beliefs are congruent with religious doctrines and official discourses. By splitting up religious socialisation into two crucial phases, the adoption and the adaption of religion, this article offers a more procedural understanding to investigating how young believers develop their own sense of religious belonging. Based on biographical narrative interviews with Viennese believers (aged 16–25) from 7 religious groups, we observe that the adoption of a certain religion is primarily bound to family ties. The adaption phase serves to develop personal approaches towards religion based on two major rationales: adapting one's own religiosity by engaging with religious doctrine and community itself, and negotiating religion within society. We argue that adaption is closely tied to social relations within and across religions and to (secular) society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]