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Paper short abstract:

The study explores how religious webmasters balance their professional identity as hi-tech experts and advocates of the faith. Employing fieldwork with Jewish and Catholic webmasters, the study unveils profiles that converge a devotional and techno-scientific logic to legitimize digital platforms.

Paper long abstract:

The past decade has witnessed a surge in religious webmasters who design digital environments to propel religious movements, proselytize ideals and redefine devotional practice. While past scholarship focused on the veneration of holy sites and religious materiality (e.g., books, icons, talismans), the religious landscape has witnessed a growth of smart technologies-of-the-self which integrate sacred activities into the webosphere. This includes cultivating various platforms such as live-streaming websites for holy places, religious apps (e.g. prayer, community building) and creating video content.

Studies of web developers have underscored their emergence, prestige and occupational burdens, as well as growing tensions between engineers and self-educated workers. However, questions of webmasters’ occupational identity have been less addressed, particularly as they engage in ideologically charged missions. Accordingly, we inquire: How do devotional webmasters work to construct their professional identity as advocates of the faith? Findings are ethnographically informed and are gleaned from 40 in-depth interviews with app developers and semiotic investigations of 40 Jewish and Catholic apps in Israel and the US. Specifically, the study revealed three primary types of relations between religious webmasters’ professional identity and their religious creed: (1) Conservative, (2) Incremental and (3) Radical. Examining these relations the study elucidates a convergence between religious thought and techno-scientific logic, as well as a sanctification of mobile platforms through symbolic religious aesthetics. Findings shed light on the growth of globalized and standardized religious practice, and on its implications with regard to native forms of communal religious identity.