Reading Religion in Internet Memes

Abstract

This article provides a preliminary report of a study of religious-oriented internet memes and seeks to identify the common communication styles, interpretive practices and messages about religion communicated in this digital medium. These findings argue that memes provide an important sphere for investigating and understanding religious meaning-making online, which expresses key attributes of participatory culture and trends towards lived religion.

The Dissonance of “Civil” Religion in Religious-Political Memetic Discourse During the 2016 Presidential Elections

“…A unique insight gained through our study, but missing from the findings of other studies of religion in memes, is that the primary understanding of religion evoked here is that of Civil Religion. This claim is important because it challenges previous research arguing Internet memes primarily represent an enacting of "Lived Religion" (Aguilar et al, 2017;Bellar et al, 2013), where religion offers a picture of how individual people understand and live out traditional religion in their everyday lives. Hall (1997) defines "lived religion" as traditional religious symbols and narratives freed from their established structures and dogmas to become flexible tools, open to reinterpretation, allowing individuals to reconstruct or reimagine the spiritual meaning in daily life.…”

“…This means memes often deal in the currency of stereotyping by using popular assertions about particular groups, including their beliefs and practices. As Bellar et al (2013) argued, religions communicated via memes "feature reductionist or essentialized understandings of religion and employ a limited range of popular assumptions or metanarratives about religion in order to communicate to a broad audience" (p. 24). This is especially true of memes that engage both religion and politics.…”

Percepciones y sentidos de lo sagrado en las generaciones digitales

“…De hecho, los memes combinan lenguaje e imágenes sagradas y seculares a la vez, los mismos que son modificados y reconfigurados por las personas al crear expresiones de la religión o generar una comprensión o punto de vista personal. También se utilizan los memes para afirmar creencias religiosas y, en otros casos, para manifestar cuestionamientos sobre la religión (Bellar, et al, 2016).…”

Introduction

“…We would love to see more studies in the upcoming years that focus on Muslim memes (cf. Bellar et al 2015), blogging by halal foodies, religious e-Xpression (Epafras 2016), or other seemingly trivial uses that similarly make up digital Islam. Important questions arise here: Will digital expressions of Islam soon be a building block for an emergent popular regionalism (cf.…”