This page considers online demographics in relation to religious faith.

It covers -

• introduction
• religious divides?
• the shape of online faith

     introduction

Normalisation of the online population means that the net is not necessarily secular: it increasingly has the attributes and users of offline media.

US Pew Internet & American Life surveys indicated in 2000 that 21% of surveyed US users had looked for religious or spiritual information online; that rose to over 30% in the 2004 study. Pew's 2001 Cyberfaith report also observed the most popular activities of "religion surfers" online were solitary ones used to supplement offline religious involvement. Believers outside the US are using the net for proselytising, for providing access to religious texts and exegesis, issuing digital fatwas or denunciations, organising offline gatherings, providing 'online temples' or 'devotionals', making donations and buying religious products.

     religious divides

Cautions about some of the more simplistic claims that faith = hostility to technology are provided by works such as Douglas Abrams' Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists & Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens: Uni of Georgia Press 2001), Heather Hendershot's Shaking the World for Jesus: Media & Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2004), Grant Wacker's 'Searching for Eden with a Satellite Dish: Primitivism, Pragmatism, and the Pentecostal Character' in Religion & American Culture (London: Routledge 1995) edited by David Hackett and Diane Umble's Holding the Line: The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1996).

     the shape of online faith

Points of entry into the literature are Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet (New York: Routledge 2004) edited by Douglas Cowan & Lorne Dawson, Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises (New York: Elsevier Science 2000) edited by Jeffrey Hadden & Douglas Cowan and Religion and Cyberspace (London: Routledge 2005) edited by Morten Højsgaard & Margit Warburg.

Works on Christian practice include Brasher's Give me that online religion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2001) and Campbell's Exploring religious community online: We are one in the network (New York: Peter Lang 2005).

For Islam see in particular in Gary Bunt's Islam in the Digital Age: E-jihad, Online Fatwas and Cyber Islamic Environments, (London: Pluto Press 2003) and Virtually Islamic: computer-mediated communication and cyber Islamic environments (Cardiff: Uni of Wales Press 2000) and 'Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Religion and Computer-Mediated Communication' by Charles Ess, Akira Kawabata & Hiroyuki Kurosaki in 12 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.

Primers for practitioners and institutional statements include Andrew Carega's E-vangelism: Sharing the Gospel in Cyberspace (Lafayette: Vital Issues Press 1999), Zukowski & Babin's The Gospel in Cyberspace: Nurturing faith in the Internet Age (Chicago: Loyola Press 2002), the Pontifical Council for Social Communications' 2002 statement The church and the Internet, Lochhead's Shifting realities: Information technology and the church (Geneva: WCC Publications 1997), Cobb's Cybergrace: The search for God in the digital world (New York: Crown 1998)

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