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How Smartphones And Social Media Are Changing Christianity by pcei: 7:56am On Mar 04, 2017 |
How smartphones and social media are
changing Christianity
Many Christians are turning to apps and
memes to express their faith instead of
churches – and it's raising intriguing
questions about the future of the
world's largest religion.
By Chris Stokel-Walker
23 February 2017
When the Reverend Pete Phillips first
arrived in Durham nine years ago, he was
ejected from the city’s cathedral. He had
been reading the Bible on his mobile phone
in the pews. Phones were not allowed in the
holy place, and the individual who accosted
him would not believe that he was using his
phone for worship and asked him to leave.
“I was a bit miffed about that,” says Phillips,
who is director of the Codec Research
Centre for Digital Theology at Durham
University in the UK. “But that was 2008.”
Next year Durham Cathedral will have been
standing for 1,000 years. But its phone
policy is now up to date. “They allow people
to take photos, to use phones for devotional
reasons – whatever they want to do,” says
Phillips. “The attitude has changed because
to restrict people from mobile phone use
now is to ask them to cut their arm off.”
This more relaxed approach to phones is
not the only tech-related update the Church
has undergone in the past few years. The
rise of apps and social media is changing
the way many of the world’s two billion
Christians worship – and even what it
means to be religious.
The Reverend Liam Beadle became
Yorkshire’s youngest vicar when he took up
his role at St Mary’s Anglican Church in
Honley, a village of 6,000 people five miles
south of Huddersfield. He runs his parish’s
Twitter account. A colleague runs the
church community’s Facebook profile. The
Bishop of Leeds, the Right Reverend Nick
Baines – who is the head of Beadle’s diocese
– was one of the first bishops to start a blog
and is known in the church as the “blogging
bishop”.
But Beadle contrasts the Church’s approach
to social media with its reaction to the
printing press. “The difference between
then and now is that with the invention of
the printing press we were proactive,” he
says. “With the advent of social media, I
think we are being reactive, we’re jumping
on the bandwagon.”
The mobile phone Bible is now
replacing the book Bible
The ubiquity of smartphones and social
media makes them hard to avoid, however.
And they are changing the way people
practise their religion. Faiths are adopting
online technologies to make it easier for
people to communicate ideas and worship,
says Phillips. “But that technology has
shaped religious people themselves and
changed their behaviour.”
Many people scrolling through their phones
in Christian churches are probably looking
at a Bible app called YouVersion, which has
been installed more than 260 million times
worldwide since its launch in 2008.
Similarly popular apps exist for the Torah
and Koran.
“One of the first things Christians did with
the computer was to put the Bible into
digital formats,” says Phillips. Those
digitised Bibles then made their way onto
phones. “To some extent, the mobile phone
Bible is now replacing the book Bible.”
According to the company behind
YouVersion, people have spent more than
235 billion minutes using the app and have
highlighted 636 million Bible verses. But
reading the Bible in this way could be
changing people’s overall sense of it. “If you
go to the Bible as a paper book, it’s quite
large and complicated and you’ve got to
thumb through it,” says Phillips.
“But you know that Revelations is the last
book and Genesis is the first and Psalms is
in between. With a digital version you don’t
get any of that, you don’t get the
boundaries. You don’t flick through: you
just go to where you’ve asked it to go to,
and you’ve no sense of what came before or
after.”
Quite how interacting with the Bible in bite-
sized nuggets might affect people’s views of
it is now being explored by researchers like
Phillips. The way religious scriptures are
read can influence how they are
interpreted. For example, studies suggest
that text read on screens is generally taken
more literally than text read in books.
Aesthetic features of a text, such as its
broader themes and emotional content, are
also more likely to be drawn out when it is
read as a book.
In a religious text, that distinction can be
crucial. “When you’re on a screen, you tend
to miss out all the feeling stuff and go
straight for the information,” says Phillips.
“It’s a flat kind of reading, which the Bible
wasn’t written for. You end up reading the
text as though it was Wikipedia, rather than
it being a sacred text in itself.”
When you read the Bible on a screen
you end up reading the text as though it
was Wikipedia
Some think that overly literal
interpretations of religious texts can lead to
fundamentalism. If you take Genesis as an
account of six days of creation, for example,
you will need to believe that science is
wrong, says Phillips.
Yet at the same time, a separate strand of
Christian practice is booming, buoyed by
the spread of social media and the
decentralisation of religious activity. For
many, it’s no longer necessary to set foot in
a church. In the US, one in five people who
identify as Catholics and one in four
Protestants seldom or never attend
organised services, according to a survey
conducted by the Pew Research Centre.
Apps and social media accounts tweeting
out Bible verses allow a private expression
of faith that takes place between a person
and their phone screen. And the ability to
pick and choose means they can avoid
doctrine that does not appeal. A lot of
people who consider themselves to be
active Christians may not strictly even
believe in God or Jesus or the acts described
in the Bible.
“A new kind of mutated Christianity for a
digital age is appearing,” says Phillips. “One
that follows many of the ethics of the
secular world.” Known as moralistic
therapeutic deism, this form of belief is
focused more on the charitable and moral
side of the Bible – the underlying tenets of
religion, rather than the notion that the
Universe was created by an all-seeing, all-
powerful leader.
This new form of religion was first described
by sociologists in 2005, but it has been
supercharged by the internet and social
media. “People are looking for a more
personalised religious experience,” says
Heidi Campbell at Texas A&M University,
who studies religion and digital culture.
People are looking for a more
personalised religious experience
“Millennials prefer this generalised picture
of God rather than an interventionist God,
and they prefer God to Jesus, because he’s
non-specific,” says Phillips. “He stands
behind them and allows them to get on
with their own lives rather than Jesus, who
comes in and interferes with everything.”
Sharing Bible verses on social media lets
worshippers find their own readings rather
than sitting through ones chosen by a priest
every Sunday. Bible verses are also subject
to popularity contests, where their
acceptability to a wide audience can dictate
their spread.
The most popular Bible verses bookmarked,
highlighted and shared on social media via
YouVersion’s app are frequently those
which reflect the secular and inclusive
ideals of moralistic therapeutic deism. Many
concern things like personal struggles or
dealing with anxiety, for example – rather
than promoting the glory of God.
Pick-and-mix religious beliefs are not new.
But it is easier than ever to fashion an
individualised faith. “The internet and social
media help people to do it in more concrete
ways,” says Campbell. “We have more access
to more information, more viewpoints, and
we can create a spiritual rhythm and path
that’s more personalised.”
And that includes bringing sacred figures
into memes. Story Time Jesus – where
classical religious iconography is overlaid
with bold text that describes religious verses
in colloquial language – became a viral
meme in 2012 and has remained popular
since. Others include Bunny Christ and
Republican Jesus.
Many of these memes may have started as
jokes, but they are being used to spread
religious ideas too. “People are using
memes as a way to provoke debate about
religion and affirm beliefs,” says Campbell.
“You can’t meme a theological truth in
depth but you can summarise the essence
to draw people’s attention, using them as
teasers.” That applies to tweeting too. There
are churches around the world that
encourage their congregations to live-tweet
sermons.
It’s a source of friction, however. A few
years ago a UK cathedral started live-
tweeting its services. “There were questions
about how appropriate it was,” says Beadle.
“I think the jury’s still out on that one. There
probably is a case to be made that if you’re
on Twitter you’re not engaging as fully as
when you’re not on Twitter.”
The jury is still out on live-tweeting
services
On top of that, there are concerns that a
series of short tweets is not an appropriate
way to represent complex and subtle
concepts. “When you’re talking in 140
characters or a seven-second video, you’ve
got to condense things,” says Campbell.
“The tendency is to stereotype or simplify
messages. It’s not just about using the tools
but treating the tools with the respect they
need.”
Which is perhaps why Durham Cathedral
was so circumspect about Phillips and his
phone back in 2008. Even so, religion of all
hues – not just Christianity – is becoming
less about the preacher in the pulpit, she
says. “Digital is all about two-way
communication. People come with a certain
expectation of what a community looks like
and what freedom they’ll have, and
religious institutions need to either adapt to
that or be an exception.”
If nothing else, organised faith is good at
adapting – Christianity has been reinventing
itself for nearly 2,000 years. Smartphones
and social media are just the latest
developments to force a change. |
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