Religion and Spirituality on Social Media in the Aftermath of the Global Pandemic
This addresses the problem of how religions adapted to online platforms during the pandemic for researchers and religious communities, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new context.
The paper tackled the sudden shift of religious activities online during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing Twitter data and questionnaire responses from July-September 2020 to understand people's perceptions and activities, finding temporal variations and implications from data triangulation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Church closed its physical doors for the first time in about 800 years, which is, arguably, a cataclysmic event. Other religions have found themselves in a similar situation, and they were practically forced to move online, which is an unprecedented occasion. In this paper, we analyse this sudden change in religious activities twofold: we create and deliver a questionnaire, as well as analyse Twitter data, to understand people's perceptions and activities related to religious activities online. Importantly, we also analyse the temporal variations in this process by analysing a period of 3 months: July-September 2020. Additionally to the separate analysis of the two data sources, we also discuss the implications from triangulating the results.