How much will the internet change religion…

..and why hasn’t it changed it so much yet?

Or perhaps it already has?

At any rate, I’ve thought for a while that the internet could dramatically change how religion is practised.

Think about it in the following way: religion is a way of provding meaning, and a story with which people can understand their own history and future. In the past, this was done in a very standardised way; for example, all people in a given community would have heard the same sermon.

In an age of personalisation, that model sounds dated.

What comes next? Some thoughts on this appeared in an article in the FT:

• Rabbi Stanton believes that too many religious institutions have ignored their communities’ evolving needs. “People are yearning for spirituality and a place to reflect [but they associate] houses of worship with materialism, hypocrisy and vapid reflections on life,” he says.

• Covid-19 is creating “a winner takes all marketplace” in religion in which a few dozen houses of worship stand to achieve national or international reach while life gets harder for the rest, Rabbi Stanton says. That would echo what internet economics have done to newspapers and many other industries. 

I’m not so convinced by the second quote — the final model will involve a great deal more differentiation and personalisation than a few dozen houses of worship could offer. I suspect an entirely new kind of structure will arise.