Paper short abstract:

Mediatisation is transforming the existing forms of religion, altering also what it means to believe and belong. The aim of the presentation is to show how deeply religious Roman Catholic women are negotiating their religious belonging and doing Catholicism in digital environments.

Paper long abstract:

Mediatisation is transforming the existing forms of religion, altering also what it means to believe and belong. The aim of my presentation is to show how deeply religious Roman Catholic women are negotiating their religious belonging and doing Catholicism in digital environments. In my analysis I draw on qualitative data obtained within the project on Polish women’s religiosity which included 48 individual in-depth interviews with educated Roman Catholic women, members of religious groups, living in large cities in Poland and ethnography conducted in a hybrid (online-offline) religious community for women. The data we gathered shows that the digital context is transforming both how we understand 'belonging' and what 'religious' means today. Digital environments produce niches that allow for questioning or reinterpreting the message of religious institutions, but can also sustain identification with official religion in the face of emerging deficits in the offline sphere (e.g. in the local church or secular environment). Online communities, often functioning as loose social networks, offer women new forms of religious belonging based on the absence of barriers to entry and exit, shallow or fluctuating engagement and the possibility to narratively construct their identities. The translocal nature of digital environments, the use of different types of resources and at least partial liberation from direct clerical supervision make hybrid religious forms and content possible and permissible. Although, as our research shows, these phenomena do not necessarily imply a questioning of doctrine or an undermining of institutional authority, they problematise how we understand the boundaries of the ‘religious’.