Religious life was converting to tech before COVID

Congregations were increasingly using technology during worship services even before the pandemic, research shows.

COVID-19 has made technology essential to collective religious life. Livestreamed services, which people view from home, are the new normal.

The 2018-19 National Congregations Study, conducted on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, found, among other things, broad use of smartphones during worship services. Congregations encourage their audiences to use their smartphones for everything from reading Scripture to tweeting about services to donating money to the cause.

For the research, Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves and several coauthors used data from the most recent wave of the National Congregations Study, a nationally representative sample of congregations across the religious spectrum.

Roughly 1,200 leaders of churches, synagogues, mosques, and Hindu and Buddhist temples were interviewed for the survey, which Chaves has directed since it began in 1998.

All three (one, two, three) studies on the subject appear in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Chaves answers questions about the findings here:

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