Paper short abstract:

The Alpha course is an evangelistic course introducing the basics of Christianity. During the pandemic, Alpha went online causing its attendance to triple. This ethnographic study explains how this growth was caused by the “belief-curious” being able to participate with the sacred in private.

Paper long abstract:

COVID-19 dramatically changed how religious communities could congregate and practice their faith together. This paper will show how religion moving online facilitated increased engagement by the “belief-curious”, a term I use (following the language of identity politics) to describe those who are not “out” as religious but are exploring their faith identity. It does so by taking Alpha as its ethnographic focus. Alpha is a successful evangelistic course and has been undertaken by over 24 million people in over 160 countries. Alpha reluctantly went online in 2019 and its attendance tripled. During the 2021 lockdown, I undertook fieldwork to understand this pandemic growth. Speaking to interlocutors across Britain, it became clear that Alpha’s ‘move online’ facilitated religious engagement for those who for practical and social reasons had been unable to engage before. Instead of pandemic suffering pushing people towards or away from faith, the technologies which the pandemic forced upon religion brought the “belief-curious” out of the woodwork. Those unable to go to church previously due to disability, care responsibilities, or the ineptitude of local establishments, were now able to negotiate religious exploration from home, often with a community miles away. Most interestingly, those who felt uncomfortable exploring faith due to social pressures were able to engage with Alpha privately. By drawing on new literature on secularism, conversion and the digital space within the Anthropology of Religion, this paper argues that the privacy of online Alpha created digital communities where participants could renovate their plausibility structures and change their beliefs.