Exploring Religious Community Online: We are One in the Network

by Heidi A. Campbell

Exploring Religious Community Online is the first comprehensive study of the development and implications of online communities for religious groups. This book investigates religious community online by examining how Christian communities have adopted internet technologies, and looks at how these online practices pose new challenges to offline religious community and culture.

Genres: Religion

213 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2005

About the author

Heidi A. Campbell is Professor of Communication, affiliate faculty in Religious Studies and a Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is also director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies, and a founder of Digital Religion studies. Her research focuses on technology, religion and digital culture, with emphasis on Jewish, Muslim & Christian media negotiations. She is co-editor of Routledge’s Religion and Digital Culture book series and the Journal of Religion, Media & Digital Culture. She is author of over 100 articles and books including When Religion Meets New Media (2010), Digital Religion (2013, 2ⁿᵈ edition 2021) and Digital Creatives and the Rethinking Religious Authority (2021). She has been quoted in such outlets as the Houston Chronicle, USA Today, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and on the BBC World Service. She also received the RCA Scholar of the Year Award and TAMU’s Transformational Teaching Award.

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very fascinating look under the hood into the mindsets and practices of several online religious communities, approached in a comprehensive, scholarly, and yet easy to read manner. The book describes in detail the various kinds of communities formed and maintained online, as well as the practices, habits, and attitudes of such communities, and attempts to parse out what this means for Christians and other religious communities in the internet age. My one complaint with the book is that while it does delve into some of the philosophical questions relating to media and religion, I wish that it would have dove a little deeper into these and some of the more pressing theological questions that the internet presents. The book does a fantastic job of describing and detailing how religious people actually use and approach the internet, but doesn't necessarily delve into theological questions of whether or not they should, or how theology and philosophy might instruct religious entities to thoughtfully use this medium. All in all, this feels like a fairly small flaw. Most books on this subject perhaps focus too heavily on abstract philosophy and never get around to discussing practice. That this book starts from a practical approach and stays there, then, cannot be considered a fatal misstep by any means.

[Margy Levine Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a scholarly study of online Christian communities done from about 1998-2004, so it’s a bit dated (for example, there’s no mention of Facebook). But she does a nice history of the Internet, of online community, and of the emrgence of online religious communities, and then she studies three of them – three Christian email mailing lists with thriving, close-knit communities.