A canopy of umbrellas: Building religious belonging through practices in online settings

Mediatisation affects most areas of social life, also transforming religious practices. The main objective of the article is to consider how religious belonging is produced and sustained in online settings by practices, both integrating and boundary-making ones. Drawing inspiration from a praxeological lived religion approach, I treat religious belonging as an outcome of practising and identification with a community of ‘practising-like-us’. Based on data obtained from individual interviews with Roman Catholic women in Poland and a digital ethnography study in a Catholic online community, I show that religious belonging in online settings is produced using communicative practices, religious practices initiated or performed in the online sphere, and mediations of elements of practices performed in the offline sphere. I introduce the metaphor of a ‘canopy of umbrellas’, which illustrates religious belonging in the context of individualisation and a culture of constant contact characteristic of a network society.