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M A T E R I A L I T Y ,  R E L I G I O N 
A N D  T H E  D I G I T A L :  A 
T H E O R E T I C A L  E X P L O R A T I O N 
O F  M A T E R I A L  R E L I G I O N  I N 
I M M E R S I V E  P L A T F O R M S
V i c t o r i a  D o s  S a n t o s ,
E d u a r d o  C r u z
Introduction
With the widespread adoption and continuous advancement of 
computational technologies, nearly every religion has established a 
presence in online spaces. This deep shift in the religious landscape 
has been extensively explored by scholars of digital religion, a relatively 
young field of study focused on examining religion in the light of our 
media-saturated society. This field sees contemporary religious practices 
and beliefs are shaped by the interplay between online and offline con-
texts, which, rather than opposing one another, continuously intersect 
and influence each other. As Heidi Campbell assures, “scholars engaged 
in digital religion studies recognize that religion, as practiced within 
our current social and cultural milieu, is increasingly influenced and in-
formed by interactions with computer-mediated digital technologies.”1 
Therefore, “religious individuals, institutions, and understandings are 
1  Heidi A. Campbell, “The Dynamic Future of Digital Religion Studies,” in Stepping Back 
and Looking Ahead: Twelve Years of Studying Religious Contact at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg 
Bochum, ed. Maren Freudenberg, Frederik Elwert, Tim Karis, Martin Radermacher, and Jens 
Schlamelcher (BRILL eBooks, 2023), 219, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004549319_009. 
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2024.483 Poligrafi, no. 113/114, vol. 29, 2024, pp. 7–31
p o l I g R A F I
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all impacted by the social-technical infrastructure and ethos of the net-
work society.”2
Although religious practices in virtual platforms are currently on the 
rise, growing phenomenon, there is still a persistent conception of on-
line experiences as artificial or less real, diminishing their value and au-
thenticity. This situation, together with the utopianism often projected 
on computer technology, has produced too much speculation about the 
future of religion and how digital contexts are transforming the founda-
tions and practice of religion in the 21st century.3 Thus, scholars of this 
field have been providing epistemological strategies to understand the 
migration and variations of religious practices when they interact with 
computational media, showing how religion has just been changing in-
stead of disappearing with the presence of digital technology4 welcoming 
“alternative ways of being religious.”5 This can be seen in how religious 
actors and organizations can develop spiritual experiences on virtual 
platforms while also building identity, community, and authority.6
The context that most likely better reaffirmed the entanglement be-
tween computer technology and religion was the CoVID-19 pandem-
ic and the way it radically pushed several religious communities around 
the world to find online strategies to substitute physical interactions.7 
Digital environments became not merely an option, but the only pos-
2  Ibid.
3  Heidi A. Campbell, “Introduction,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in 
New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell and Ruth Tsuria (london: Routledge, 2013).
4  lars De Wildt and Stef Aupers, “playing the other: Role-playing Religion in Video-
games,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 5–6 (30 August 2018): 867–84, https://
doi.org/10.1177/1367549418790454.
5  Katja Rakow, “Religion 2.0: Thinking about religion through technology,” in Writing the 
Liberal Arts and Sciences: Truth, Dialogue, and Historical Consciousness, ed. M. Bouquet, A. 
Meijer, and C. Sanders (Amsterdam University press, 2021), 89.
6  Mia lövheim, “Mediatisation of Religion: A Critical Appraisal,” Scottish Journal of Reli-
gious Studies 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 153–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2011.5797
38; Radde-Antweiler, Kerstin, “How to Study Religion and Video gaming,” in Kerstin Radde-
Antweiler, Methods for Studying Video Games and Religion (Routledge, 2017), 207–16, https://
doi.org/10.4324/9781315518336-13; Wendi Bellar and Heidi A. Campbell, Digital Religion: 
The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2022), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003058465.
7  giulia Evolvi, “Religion and the Internet: Digital Religion, (Hyper)Mediated Spaces, 
and Materiality,” Zeitschrift Für Religion Gesellschaft Und Politik 6, no. 1 (19 october 2021): 
9–25, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41682-021-00087-9.
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sible scenario where people could approach their traditions, maintain 
community boundaries, and practice their faith, adapting themselves to 
virtual platforms through creative and even disruptive modalities. We 
witnessed many churches launching livestream Masses, virtual funerals 
in social media sites, sacred Sufi dances through VR technology, pagan 
witches performing rituals in Second life, to name a few actions. Even 
though those years disrupted social life, online religious strategies did 
mean a lot to the faithful.
This broader consideration of virtual environments as affordable 
media for everyday religion can be addressed from the theory of media-
tion, in which media in general serve as a way believers can approach 
religious experiences.8 Mediation theory addresses objects, texts, bod-
ies, and spaces working as media, as a constitutive part of religion itself9 
rather than tools10 that have an impact on religion.11 In the case of 
digital media, for instance, can provide other dimensions of experi-
ence when taking part in spiritual performances. At the same time, 
as Hoover and Echchaibi assert in their theory of “the third space of 
digital religion,”12 many online spaces help people articulate what reli-
gion means to them while shaping and transforming religious cultures 
in the process. In such a way, the digital, instead of being just a mere 
8  Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies 
and the Question of the Medium,” Social Anthropology 19, (2011): 23–39, https://doi.
org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00137.x.
9  Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, “Embodiment,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious 
Practice in New Media Worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell and Ruth Tsuria (london: Routledge, 
2013), 103–20, 108.
10  From this perspective, the term “media” is broadly understood as encompassing all devices 
that help people experience transcendence, something that we regard as intrinsic to what reli-
gion is all about. Media’s nature is not “reductible to the object, the “stuff” that they constitute 
(a primary level), but encompass several levels: their materiality, their technological affordances 
[…], the ways in which they are deployed in religious practice, the sensory response they elicit, 
how their meaning is interpreted by their users and beholders, and the authorization process 
they entail.” Cf. Jessie pons, “Religion, Media, and Materiality. Introduction,” Entangled Reli-
gions 11, no. 3 (2023), https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2023.11430.
11  Knut lundby and giulia Evolvi, “Theoretical Frameworks for Approaching Re-
ligion and New Media,” in Digital Religion (Routledge, 2021), 233–49, https://doi.
org/10.4324/9780429295683-23.
12  Stewart M. Hoover and Nebil Echchaibi, “Introduction: Media Theory and the Third 
Spaces of Digital Religion,” in The Third Spaces of Digital Religion, ed. Stewart Hoover and 
Nabil Echchaibi (london: Routledge, 2023), 1–36.
p o l I g R A F I
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‘information medium,’ has proven its potential for more interactive and 
participatory performances.13 
When discussing the notion of mediation in religion we are irre-
mediably bringing attention to its material dimension. By materiality, 
we refer to spaces, objects, bodies, texts, and other media, and how 
they make the transcendental or spiritual tangible and present within 
the physical world. A material approach “takes as its starting point the 
understanding that religion becomes concrete and palpable through 
people, their practices and use of things, and is part and parcel of pow-
er structures.”14 Some of the media that can better portray materiality 
online are 3D social virtual worlds,15 which have become highly popu-
lar for religious and spiritual interests.16 Similar to other contemporary 
media, such as digital games, 3D social virtual platforms offer high 
levels of immersivity, interactivity, and agency by embodying avatars 
in customizable spaces. As it will be described below, these features 
foster deeper interactions between users and the virtual environment, 
enabling deeper engagement with the objects and elements existing in 
those spaces. 
With these introductory remarks in mind, the central questions this 
paper aims to theoretically address are the following: How do rituals 
in virtual platforms enable the articulation of material culture online? 
In what ways are these platforms negotiated across different religious 
traditions? How do these practices of mediation affect the way digital 
media is addressed? We also propose that, since any religious experience 
inherently requires a material dimension, the focus should move away 
13  Christopher Helland, “online Religion/Religion online and Virtual Communities,” in 
Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises, ed. Jeffrey Hadden and Douglas Cowan 
(london: JAI press/Elsevier Science, 2000), 205–223.
14  Birgit Meyer, Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion 
(Universiteit Utrecht: Faculteit geesteswetenschappen, 2012), 7.
15  These virtual worlds are 3D interactive systems enabling users to build and personalize 
their avatars, their own virtual spaces, and objects. There, users can communicate and collabo-
rate with others and develop a variety of sociocultural practices.
16  Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, “Religion is Becoming Virtualised. Introduction to the Spe-
cial Issue on Religion in Virtual Worlds,” in Being Virtually Real? Virtual Worlds from a Cul-
tural Studies’ Perspective, ed. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler (Heidelberg: Heidelberg journal of 
Religions on the Internet, 2008), 1–6, http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/voll-
texte/2008/8294/pdf/Radde.pdf 2008.
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from questioning the authenticity of religion in digital environments. 
Instead, the focus should center on examining the dynamic negotia-
tions between religious traditions, users, and virtual platforms, explor-
ing how these interactions enable the expression and embodiment of 
religious materiality in online spaces. To do so, we will first introduce 
what religious materiality is and how we can understand it in the online 
context. Then the focus moves on to ritual practices taking place in 3D 
social virtual platforms, which are the media where one can better ob-
serve online sensuous interactions. We will conclude with a reflection 
on how to address materiality through digital media. 
Conceptualizing material religion
In the introduction of their volume Materiality and the Study of Reli-
gion, Hutchings and McKenzie highlight how ‘religion’ and ‘materiality’ 
are, in fact, interrelated concepts, since they both involve bodily aspects, 
objects, spaces, and performances.17 Even more clearly, conceiving any 
religious structure is impossible without materiality, since all religions 
are understood “in relation to the media of its materiality”18.  The ‘ma-
terial turn’ in the study of religion has opened new avenues for examin-
ing religious objects, viewing them as more than mere decorative or de-
scriptive elements separated from what religion truly is. Anthropologist 
David Morgan has extensively contributed to integrating the notion of 
material culture into religious studies, which was downplayed in the 
past ignored in favor of other aspects of religion, such as beliefs, literary 
sources, and philosophical debates.19
For Morgan, the material culture of religions is understood “in terms 
of several categories of practice that put images and objects to work as 
17  Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie, “Introduction,” in Materiality and the Study of Re-
ligion: The Stuff of the Sacred, ed. Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie (New York: Routledge, 
2017), 4.
18  Matthew Engelke, “Material Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, 
ed. Robert A. orsi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University press, 2011), 209–229.
19  David Morgan, “Material Analysis and the Study of Religion,” in Materiality and the Study 
of Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred, ed. Tim Hutchings and Joanne McKenzie (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2017), 14.
p o l I g R A F I
12
ways of engaging the human body in the configuration of the sacred.”20 
The sacred here can be understood as any object or practice that secures 
the interconnection with agencies able to enhance life and charge it 
with purpose.21 More than objects, material culture is “it is the way 
in which an object participates in making and sustaining a life-world. 
To study religious material culture is to study how people build and 
maintain the cultural domains that are the shape of their social lives”.22 
They are not simply ‘objects’ or ‘places’, but encompass more intricate 
elements, such as emotions, sensations, food, and “all manner of bod-
ily practices regarding such things as prayer, purification, ritual eating, 
corporate worship, private study, pilgrimage, and so forth.”23 Having 
said that, the embodied material dimension cannot be separated or ig-
nored since it is deeply entangled with the existence and development 
of religion itself.
This is also considered in the theory of mediation, where “[a] mate-
rialized study of religion begins with the assumption that things, their 
use, their valuation, and their appeal are not something added to a 
religion but rather inextricable from it.”24 Religious material culture 
occurs through practices of mediation, which stress “the connection 
between religious experiences and the realm of the sensorium and to 
assume a material culture perspective.”25 According to Meyer, “a prac-
tice of mediation between humans and the professed transcendent [...] 
necessarily requires specific material media, that is, authorized forms 
through which the transcendent is being generated and becomes some-
20  David Morgan, “The Material Culture of lived Religions: Visuality and Embodiment,” 
originally published in Mind and Matter: Selected Papers of Nordic Conference 2009. Studies in 
Art History (Helsinki: Society of Art History, 2010), republished in The Jugaad Project, July 7, 
2019, https://www.thejugaadproject.pub/home/the-material-culture-of-lived-religions-visuali-
ty-and-embodiment.
21  Ibid.
22  Morgan, “Material Analysis and the Study of Religion,” 15.
23  Ibid.
24  Birgit Meyer, David Morgan, Crispin paine and S. Brent plate, “The origin and Mis-
sion of Material Religion,” Religion 40, no. 3 (2010): 209, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.reli-
gion.2010.01.010.
25  Knut lundby and giulia Evolvi, “Theoretical Frameworks for Approaching Religion and 
New Media,” 238.
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how tangible.”26 When referring to certain material media becoming 
authorized forms, she includes a conventional notion of media, such 
as books, radio, TV, and computer technology, to basically all kinds of 
objects or spaces – such as plants, animals, or images – that transmit or 
mediate “the ‘here and now’ and a ‘beyond,’ between ‘immanent’ and 
‘transcendent.’”27
Bringing materiality to the fore, the discussion centers on how re-
ligions are practiced and experienced by individuals and communi-
ties through various mediation practices.  Here, we highlight the term 
“lived religion,” which has been defined as the daily life of religious 
people.28 In other words, lived religion is about “everyday religious ex-
perience, paying special attention to corporeality, symbolic objects, and 
discourse.”29 This reflection is important because it takes us to the im-
manent frame of religion, where the surrounding materiality, includ-
ing our own corporality, takes place. Merleau-ponty’s phenomenology 
of the body is embedded in this understanding of religion as ‘lived,’30 
where “practice and experience are connected through corporeality and 
symbolically lived materiality.”31 
At the same time, lived religion approach “is attentive precisely 
to this dialectic between community traditions and personal choices 
(adaptations),”32 in ways that are not necessarily aligned with the insti-
tutionalized and official views of the sacred. lived religion makes it pos-
sible to appreciate the dynamism of religious subjectivity, which often 
26  Birgit Meyer, “Material Mediations and Religious practices of World-Making,” in Religion 
Across Media: From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, ed. Knut lundby (New York: peter lang, 
2013), 8.
27  Birgit Meyer, “Religion as Mediation,” Entangled Religions 11, no. 3 (2020), https://doi.
org/10.13154/er.11.2020.8444.
28  gustavo Morello, Lived Religion in Latin America. An Enchanted Modernity (Nueva York: 
oxford University press, 2021), 32. 
29  lidia Rodríguez Fernández et al., “lived religion y fenomenología de la religión: el caso 
latinoamericano,” Revista de Estudios Sociales [online] 82, no. 10 (2022): 27, https://journals.
openedition.org/revestudsoc/53104.
30  Kim Knibbe and Helena Kupari, “Theorizing lived Religion: Introduction,” Journal of 
Contemporary Religion 35, no. 2 (2020): 157–176, https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2020.17
59897.
31  Ibid., 27.
32  Ibid.
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disrupts normative dynamics maintained by religious authorities. That 
is to say, everyday experiences are about how religious actors encounter 
and relate with the sacred through acts of mediation that can both fol-
low tradition and foster innovation. In both approaches – traditional or 
innovative, spaces, things, or practices involving the body acquire new 
meanings that otherwise would not exist in – as Eliade would say – in 
the profane world.  
What we are also highlighting here is that practices of mediation 
evolve and differ, not only based on the specific religious tradition but 
also on how individuals subjectively engage with their faith and the 
historical and social context where they are situated. These variations 
in mediation tactics are evident when noticing the new spaces, objects, 
performances, and environments that are integrated into a given reli-
gion, shaping how it is experienced and expressed in daily life. Religions 
are not static, and they can adapt by integrating media belonging to a 
specific period.33 As Meyer assures “[t]he availability and negotiation of 
media fuels processes of religious transformation and shapes the ways 
in which religious groups are positioned in society.”34 These changes are 
perceptible when examining how traditional forms of authority, com-
munity and identity are being challenged. At the same time, all media 
“are distinct in their essence and incommensurate: they comprise many 
variations (…), each have their own valence and agencies, impacting 
the hearer or viewers in distinct ways.”35 
This relatedness between material culture and the adoption of new 
practices of mediation prepares our discussion to address how individu-
als and communities have assigned other ways of relating to virtual 
platforms as spaces where religion can take place. Computer media is 
currently a ubiquitous technology that it has challenged traditional 
modes of living while also proposing new environments and modes of 
33  The invention of gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, for instance, 
notably influenced the later appearance of protestantism in Europe. Thanks to a greater spread 
of anticlerical ideas, Martin luther distributed his influential theses against papal indulgences. 
In such a way, it can be affirmed that each technological innovation comes with distinct socio-
cultural changes, fully including the religious domain.
34  Meyer, “Religion as Mediation.”
35  David Morgan, “A generative Entanglement: Word and Image in Roman Catholic Devo-
tional practice,” Entangled Religions 11, no.3 (2020), https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2020.8443.
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experience. We are immersed in a hybrid scenario where “the digital” is 
embedded in almost all human practices, including religion. We can-
not simply ignore the aspects belonging to “the material” when we are 
referring to religions taking place on online platforms, specifically ritu-
als and other daily activities of religious expression. Traditions, we can 
assert, are actualized through variations that challenge the purported 
unmovable and static condition of religion. Applying these ideas to 
digital environments, a “material religion” approach would explore how 
users encounter and re-signify virtual platforms through creative en-
gagements able to resonate with their religious or spiritual traditions. A 
material approach would also look at the different ways bodies and 
spaces are constructed online, and how they are experienced during 
practices such as rituals.
Rethinking religious materiality online
As mentioned above, in the past three decades a relatively new field 
of study has emerged among religious scholars – that of digital religion. 
It focuses on addressing the interactions and hybridizations occurring 
between computer technology and religion. Digital religion has passed 
through different stages.36 First, it went from considering the internet 
as an alternative reality, completely disconnected from our real lives, 
and where all religious manifestations occurring there didn’t have any 
type of consequence on the real offline world.37 progressively, the field 
of study evolved into what Heidi Campbell, one of the founders of the 
discipline, has defined as “a framework for articulating the evolution of 
religious practices online which are linked to online and offline con-
texts simultaneously.”38 For the scholars in this area, there is no clear 
36  Morten Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg, “Introduction: waves of research,” in Religion 
and cyberspace, ed. Morten Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg (london: Routledge, 2005), 
1–11; Mia lövheim and Heidi Campbell, “Considering Critical Methods and Theoretical 
lenses in Digital Religion Studies,” New Media & Society 19, no. 1 (2017): 5–14, https://doi.
org/10.1177/1461444816649911.
37  Brenda Brasher, Give me that online religion (New Brunswick: Rutgers University press, 
2004).
38  Heidi Campbell, “Community,” in Digital religion: Understanding religious practice in new 
media worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1. 
p o l I g R A F I
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distinction between religious actions that exist online and those that 
occur offline,39 since both contexts are constantly interacting with each 
other. 
To what has been shown so far, digital media has progressed beyond 
merely examining the ‘digitalization of religion,’ into a more profound 
understanding of how religion today is actively shaped by digital tech-
nologies. Digital religion does not simply refer to religion being per-
formed online, but to how the characteristics of digital technology are 
diluted in the ways religion manifests in digital environments.40 In this 
sense, digital media not only transform traditional religious practices 
but also foster the emergence of entirely new forms of religious ex-
pressions and experiences. The approach of digital religion enables a 
broader understanding of how religious groups relate with virtual plat-
forms, considering that these media are not all the same and that their 
‘uses’ may vary according to the users’ religious tradition and their own 
spiritual needs. We will explore these aspects later in this section. 
Although there has been a notable use of digital technologies by 
religious authorities and scholars, when it comes to practices in virtual 
platforms the prejudices persist. When the digital is considered as im-
material and disembodied, it becomes challenging to envision any form 
of authentic religious engagement within it. However, the CoVID-19 
lockdown was able to prove how several religious practices – such as 
rituals, community meetings and other spiritual activities – dependent 
on spatial and bodily aspects, could be performed online. We are not 
asserting that online and offline practices are identical or that the online 
can embrace all the offline aspects. As Mcluhan noted, every exten-
sion of human capability comes with a form of amputation, but why 
not also consider that each amputation brings about a new extension?41 
39  Christopher Helland, “online Religion as lived Religion: Methodological Issues in the 
Study of Religious participation on the Internet,” Online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the 
Internet 1, no. 1 (2005), https://doi.org/10.11588/heidok.00005823; Evolvi, “Religion and the 
Internet”; piotr Siuda, “Mapping Digital Religion: Exploring the Need for New Typologies,” 
Religions 12, no. 6 (2021): 373, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12060373. 
40  Christopher Helland, “Digital Religion,” in Handbook of Religion and Society, ed. David 
Yamane (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 177–196, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31395-5.
41  Fragment taken from a lecture of Victor Krebs called “Virtuales, Digitales y Ubicuos” from 
the seminar Next: Imagining the Future, 2020. Caracas, Venezuela, https://www.youtube.com/
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While many digital objects may appear to be mere reproductions or 
imitations of their offline counterparts, the digital realm generates its 
own unique kinds of aura. Furthermore, they can offer experiences that 
might be challenging to replicate offline. For example, performances 
streamed on YouTube can combine music and visuals, providing im-
mersive levels of engagement that transcend traditional formats.
Digital networks constitute, therefore, a new dimension of the real42 
where the online and the offline are not completely separated but they 
complement each other. Following this, we can affirm that the digi-
tal sphere can be experienced as something more than an information 
medium to become, instead, a playground for creative religious expres-
sion and development. Helland’s43 categorization of religion online and 
online religion can be very illustrative for this reflection. Religion online 
can provide interaction and even immersion, but these activities are still 
tied up to offline practices for instance, churches or religious communi-
ties can use the medium to improve communication among the mem-
bers or “to support their hierarchical ‘top down’ religious worldview.”44 
In contrast, online religion describes a dynamic and interactive way of 
engaging with digital platforms, where online environments are recog-
nized as spaces capable of supporting authentic and meaningful reli-
gious experiences. 
Recognizing that online religious practices do indeed occur implies 
acknowledging the existence of a material dimension within digital spac-
es. While this assertion follows a logical progression – since, as noted, 
‘materiality is constitutive of religion and life itself ’45 – this rendering of 
the material has often been overlooked, with online manifestations of-
ten seen as inauthentic. Consequently, research into digital religion must 
critically engage with concepts of digital materiality and embodiment, 
reflecting on how, for most religious traditions, having a digital presence 
watch?v=qNxbKyXw_9c&list=plqEw2ex0haHBgAVhY3lVC7gDijvKtey0y&index=20.
42  Fabrizio Vecoli, La Religione ai Tempi del Web (Roma–Bari: laterza, 2013), 7. 
43  Helland, “online Religion as lived Religion.”
44  Idem, 5.
45  Manuel A. Vásquez, “The persistence, Ubiquity, and Dynamicity of Materiality: Studying 
Religion and Materiality Comparatively,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and 
Materiality, ed. Vasudha Narayanan (Hoboken: Wiley, 2020), 8.
p o l I g R A F I
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is no longer optional and how the online realm is becoming increasingly 
intertwined with everyday reality. As Campbell asserts: 
Traditionally, the study of material religion has been confined to the of-
fline world. However, there is a growing interest in how material religion 
is manifesting online with emerging studies exploring this new dimension. 
Consequently, this highlights a greater awareness of the relationship between 
religion, technology, and culture and how material religion permeates both 
digital and physical spheres.46 
To explore more broadly how religion is not only portrayed but also 
practiced in virtual platforms, rituals represent an ideal object of study 
because they highlight the relevance of the material and spatial aspects 
of digital environments. Among all religious activities, rituals47 are ul-
timately the most interactive and immersive ones, expressing certain 
meanings and effects48 and, consequently, in which one can experience 
transformation and religion itself. From the perspective of digital re-
ligion, there are two key aspects that can helps us to understand the 
poetics – the process of creation – of rituals performed online: The first 
one is how digital religion is profoundly embedded with the creative 
and sometimes affective ‘appropriation’ of virtual platforms by users, 
enabling the manifestation of religious practices and the connection 
with the sacred. The second one is related to how the online context 
transcends its merely utilitarian use to become an environment where 
religious expressions are not only portrayed but lived in embodied and 
sensuous ways. Through Hoover and Echchaibi’s Third Spaces of Digi-
tal Religion49 and Heidi Campbell’s Religious–Social Shaping of Digi-
46  Heidi Campbell and louise Connelly, “Religion and Digital Media Studying Materiality 
in Digital Religion,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality, ed. Vasudha 
Narayanan (Hoboken: Wiley, 2020), 471.
47  Rituals are one of the most outstanding aspects of religion, since they represent the practice 
that best legitimates, renews, and portrays the relationship between the believer and the spiri-
tual path. Analyzing rituals, not only in terms of content but as a meaning-making dynamic, 
is important because they reveal values at their deepest level, allowing us to understand the 
essential constitution of human societies (Bryan R. Wilson, Contemporary Transformations of 
Religion (oxford: oxford University press, 1976), 241). 
48  Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and dimensions (New York: oxford University press, 
1997), 138. 
49  Stewart M. Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi, “Media theory and the ‘third spaces of digi-
tal religion’,” The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture, 2014, https://doi.org/10.13140/
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tal Technology50 we will be able to address this complex intertwining of 
computer technology and material culture of lived religion.
The third spaces of digital religion, expresses the spaces emerging 
from the engagement of religion and digital media. Third spaces are 
social dimensions created by the users together with the technological 
environment, they exist between the private and the public as alterna-
tives for everyday expressions of spirituality and tradition. There, “indi-
viduals use the technical capacities of the digital to imagine social and 
cultural configurations beyond existing binaries of the physical versus 
the virtual and the real versus the proximal religious experience.”51 The 
importance of these spaces is that they enable awareness about the dy-
namism of everyday religion and how subjects imagine, produce and 
navigate new religious and spiritual places.52 Hoover and Echchaibi's 
theory “accounts for a explore the forms of the religious (or spiritual) 
that are developing in the between-ness of the digital spaces accorded 
by this new form of media.”53 
on the other hand, Campbell’s theory of religious–social shaping of 
digital technology (RSST) can help us to better understand how there 
are different experiences of the internet and how, depending on the 
religion, digital media are not perceived equally. According to RSST, 
religious communities do not reject new forms of technology outright, 
rather they experience a negotiation process in which both members or 
leaders determine the effects technology might have on their commu-
nity.54 Therefore, individuals, communities and institutions are all im-
pacted by the “social-technical infrastructure and ethos of the network 
society but in different ways.55
The different affordances of virtual platforms for religious pursuits 
do certainly redefine our understanding of how religion works but also 
Rg.2.1.3315.4641.
50  Heidi Campbell, Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One in the Network (New 
York: peter lang, 2005).
51  Hoover and Echchaibi, “Media theory and the ‘third spaces of digital religion’,” 14. 
52  Ibid.
53  Helland, “Digital Religion,” 183.
54 Knut lundby and giulia Evolvi, “Theoretical Frameworks for Approaching Religion and 
New Media.”
55  Campbell, “The Dynamic Future of Digital Religion Studies,” 219.
p o l I g R A F I
20
the ways religion affects people’s technological choices concerning com-
puter media. Buddhists, Catholics, Neopagans and Muslims, just to 
name a few, might have different options about the media they choose 
and the types of relationships they establish with them. For example, 
the interaction that a Christian might have with a given platform to 
perform a cult might be radically different to how Buddhists relate with 
the same media to perform Cybersangas. Having said that, the digital 
can no longer be seen as a single, monolithic entity. Instead, users ex-
perience different aspects of the digital world depending on the spac-
es they engage with based on their own values and context. As RSST 
has shown, users can relate to and even understand particular types of 
digital media when they are reinterpreted or seen under the logic of a 
certain religion. This refers to the agency of religious communities in 
employing new technologies as suitable platforms for religious engage-
ments.56 In short, the material dimension of religion happens online by 
means of the user’s subjectivity, the potentialities of the platform itself 
and the influence of a given religious path.
Regarding the type of media generally used for sensuous and im-
mersive religious practices, 3D social virtual platforms are among the 
most popular to depict and practice religion. These platforms have been 
spreading their applications to cultural contexts, having a significant 
impact on the development and perception of religious experience. We 
can notice a variety of traditional and nontraditional religions using 
these immersive media as a tool to congregate and practice their faith 
and as a gateway to different ‘spiritual’ realities.57 In the next section we 
will briefly introduce 3D social virtual platforms and how they can be 
an excellent example to explore the ways materiality can be manifested 
in computer-based scenarios when they are addressed by religious indi-
viduals or communities.
56  Campbell, Exploring Religious Community Online, 2.
57  Ryan Hornbeck and Justin l. Barrett, “Virtual reality as a spiritual experience: a perspec-
tive from the cognitive science of religion,” Northern Lights Film and Media Studies Yearbook 6, 
no. 1 (2008): 75, https://doi.org/10.1386/nl.6.1.75_1.
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The case of 3D social virtual platforms
given their interactive and immersive nature, 3D social virtual plat-
forms are a highly attractive scene for practicing any intimal or personal 
activity, as in the case of spiritual traditions. During the last two dec-
ades, they have become a popular media among users wanting to ex-
perience virtual reality for social and cultural pursuits, having a signifi-
cant impact upon religious experience, formation, and behavior. Due 
to their potentialities in offering embodied and sensuous experiences, 
VR-based platforms are one of the media allowing more agency and 
interaction for users. Many of the activities taking place in these virtual 
worlds possess a high level of transparency thanks to features such as 
haptic feedback, lifelike graphics and surround sound. Virtual Reality 
today can take the user to simulate offline scenarios, or it can create new 
ones with 3D objects and other virtual elements. 
platforms like Second life,58 Horizon Worlds, VRChat, and Rec-
Room, have demonstrated they are suitable for practically all types of 
social and cultural activities. In these media, users can not only custom-
ize the configurations of the virtual environment and their avatars but 
also engage with digital objects, interact with non-playable characters 
(NpCs), and communicate with other users’ avatars. Their popularity 
among religious groups is such that practically every world religion has 
followers on these platforms. Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, 
and Neopagans are just one of the many traditions addressing these 
media as spaces of worship, study groups, or meeting points to connect 
with people practicing a similar faith. 
These VR-based social platforms enable a dynamic and sensory com-
ponent, which can better portray how religious rituals are experienced 
and creatively adapted into online spaces. Therefore, because online 
rituals influence not only how religion is practiced but also how digital 
media is seen and addressed, they might also welcome new ontologi-
cal ways of relating to digital media, not simply as instruments but as 
58  Christopher Helland, “Ritual,” in Digital religion: understanding religious practices in new 
media worlds, ed. Heidi Campbell (london: Routledge, 2013), 25–40; Tom Boellstorff, “plac-
ing the virtual body: avatar, chora, cypherg,” in A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body 
and Embodiment, ed. E. Frances Mascia-lees (oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 504–520. 
p o l I g R A F I
22
valid environments able to provide authentic spiritual experiences. As 
proposed above, this paper argues that the interactive and immersive 
nature of VR59 allows for particular new ways of embodied and partici-
patory human-computer interactions, enabling the manifestation of a 
specific type of materiality characteristics of the online realm. Such a 
perspective should challenge the dichotomy between online and offline 
spaces, encouraging a more integrated understanding of coexistence. At 
the end, human experience consists of “multiple realities,”60 “countless, 
separate social worlds, each of them with its own internal logic and 
principles of organization.”61
one of the most interesting aspects of these virtual worlds is avatar 
embodiment and customization. In the field of embodiment and digi-
tal immersion, studies have shown how avatars62 allow users to make 
themselves present in the virtual environment,63 enabling creative man-
ifestations of identity64 and vividly conveying emotions and experienc-
es.65 In these ways, avatars are seen as contemporary immersive virtual 
reality devices capable of bi-directional changes,66 influencing both the 
online and offline realities of users. Nonetheless, research on how avatar 
59  Shailey Minocha, Minh Tran and Ahmad John Reeves, “Conducting Empirical Research 
in 3D Virtual Worlds: Experiences from two projects in Second life,” Journal of virtual worlds 
research 3, no. 1 (2010), https://jvwr-ojs-utexas.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/811. 
60  Alfred Schutz and Thomas luckmann, The Structures of the Life-world, Volume I (Evanston: 
Northwestern University press, 1973).
61  Mary Chayko, “What is Real in the Age of Virtual Reality? ‘Retraining’ Frame Analysis for 
a Technological World,” Symbolic Interaction 16, no. 2 (1993): 172, https://doi.org/10.1525/
si.1993.16.2.171.
62  Avatars can be understood as “graphic representation that acts as a digital proxy through 
which internet users, a cybernetic community or a computer interface (as in the case of video 
games), negotiate their presence and interact with synthetic objects or other avatars of the 
digital world” Cf. Andrea pinotti, “procuratori del Sé: Dall’avatar all’avatarizzazione,” in Visual 
Studies: L’avvento di Nuovi Paradigmi, ed. Tommaso gatti and Dalia Maini (Milan: Mimesis, 
2019), 28.
63  T. l. Taylor, “living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds,” in The Social Life of Ava-
tars: Presence and interaction in shaded virtual environments, ed. R. Schroeder (london: Spring-
er, 2002): 40–62, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0277-9_3.
64  Franco Faccennini, “Digital Avatars,” Philosophy Today 65, no. 3 (2021): 599–617. 
65  Donghee Shin, “Empathy and embodied experience in virtual environment: to what ex-
tent can virtual reality stimulate empathy and embodied experience?,” Computers in Human 
Behavior, 78 (2018): 64–73. 
66  pinotti, “procuratori del Sé.”
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embodiment in immersive virtual platforms can produce lived religious 
experiences has not received enough academic attention. As Radde-
Antweiler wrote, “the majority of research on embodiment, religion, 
and digital culture was focused on linguistic or visual communication”67 
although “with the invention of research on video games and religion, 
the concept of embodiment became more prominent.”68 
Besides, the fact that virtual spaces can be creatively transformed 
and personalized, allows a higher degree of embodiment and the users’ 
agency towards the digital world, their objects, and other people’s ava-
tars. Due to such characteristics, these media have become particularly 
effective for religious expressions such as rituals. Based on Kim Knott’s69 
consideration of space as “a medium in which religion is situated,” Evol-
vi proposes that “space is created through interpersonal relations and 
embodied experiences, and includes both religious and non-religious 
manifestations.”70 Virtual spaces, therefore, are modified, defined, and 
perceived through the active presence of users. Their religious experi-
ences and expectations are the ones assigning those spaces sacred value. 
Due to the increasing immersive, interactive, and imaginative effect of 
virtual reality technology, game spaces can recreate in users a primal 
experience of intimacy with the surrounding world, allowing them to 
express their own subjectivity and to feel they “are” actually there.
Considering such characteristics, it is not a surprise that VR be-
comes a coherent and powerful tool to experience religion. The rapid 
innovation and exponential presence of the digital context in social ar-
eas has encompassed and merged with a wide variety of religious and 
spiritual activities: from Christian sermons and Buddhist meditations 
chambers to Muslims prayers and Neopagan rituals, these computer 
technologies are present in users’ decisions. VR technologies allow us-
ers to engage with them and propose strategies to experience religious 
traditions in virtual environments – indistinctively of their level of in-
stitutionality, offering a wide array of methods for spiritual expression 
which can become officially accepted. on such a way, we could affirm 
67  Radde-Antweiler, “Embodiment,” 109.
68  Ibid.
69  Kim Knott, The location of religion: a spatial analysis (london: Routledge, 2014), 3.
70  Evolvi, “Religion and the internet,” 16. 
p o l I g R A F I
24
that the more a religion is wired the more it will incorporate the values 
of the software it embraces.71 
Besides understanding how religious traditions impact users’ nego-
tiations towards a given technology, we could expand Campbell’s the-
ory of religious–social shaping of digital technology (RSST) by asking 
how religion can determine the integration of a given technology into 
a religious system. In conclusion, we propose to shift the focus from 
questioning the authenticity of online materiality or the validity of on-
line religious practices. Instead, attention should be directed toward 
understanding the strategies that religious actors employ to ritualize 
virtual environments, transforming the instrumental use of computer 
technology into a dynamic and ‘lived’ space for spiritual possibilities. 
Furthermore, VR technologies also generate a real sense of being pre-
sent in a virtual scenario, as well as natural responses to the experiences 
which are being produced. Experiences that can be lived may be genu-
ine and real. 
Consider, for instance, the Christian community known as ‘VR 
Church.’ Its founder, pastor DJ Soto, conducted a virtual baptism where 
the avatar of the person being baptized was submerged in virtual water, 
while Bishop Soto shared messages about god’s infinite love. Similarly, 
in the Neopagan community ‘pagans in VR,’ also on VRChat, mem-
bers organize and perform collective religious rituals throughout the 
year, crafting digital representations of magical tools and altars. These 
examples demonstrate how radically different religious traditions – the 
first one primarily rooted in theological orientation and the second one 
centered on ritual performance rather than belief72 – can creatively in-
tegrate digital innovation, reinterpreting virtual environments as sacred 
spaces for spiritual expression.
Building on this perspective, religious practices in virtual environ-
ments can be significantly enhanced by the interactive and immersive 
qualities these spaces offer. They should not be addressed as substitutes 
of offline performances, but as environments that can enable us to see 
71  Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (london: Routledge, 2012).
72  Sabina Magliocco, “Reclamation, appropriation and the ecstatic imagination in modern 
pagan ritual,” in Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, ed. James R. lewis (leiden: Brill, 2008), 
223–240, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004163737.i-650.69.
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and hear in ways previously unimagined. In few words, VR based plat-
forms can allow users to reach levels of experience that would not exist 
in our physical offline reality, expanding the boundaries of what can be 
imagined and experienced.  
Some redefinitions of digital materiality
While immersive virtual platforms can convey a sense of body and 
space, embracing the idea of ‘online materiality’ remains challenging, 
particularly when our interactions with it are not as tangible or direct. 
The digital, however, is not so distant from the notions of ‘touchable’ 
perception. In the digital age, virtual tools and interfaces are actual-
ly operated through hands, meaning that they are, in a certain sense, 
touched by us. Besides, if digital culture is taken etymologically it 
would mean ‘the culture of fingers’ since the sense of the world digitus 
is not only that of ‘number’ but also ‘finger’.73 
In his paper “How Digital Worlds Become Material,” Richard 
Kedzior also explores broader ways of addressing ‘online materiality.’ It 
is “not just a projection of socio–cultural conditions, but also an active 
agent of change able to structure action, create new meanings, and en-
able social connections.”74 For scholars like Miller,75 “different under-
standings of immateriality become expressed through material forms” 
and religion is a powerful example of this when in many traditions the 
approach to the sacred is mediated through temples, sacred objects, or 
rituals. From this perspective, “the material is not only what is tangi-
ble or physical, but also what is culturally significant, meaningful, or 
consequential.”76 As Miller argues,77 the definition of materiality needs 
to consider “the large compass of materiality, the ephemeral, the imagi-
73  Alessandra Violi et al., “Introduction: learning from Stone,” in Bodies of Stone in the 
Media, Visual Culture and the Arts, ed. pietro Conte, Andrea pinotti, Barbara grespi, and Ales-
sandra Violi (Amsterdam: University press, 2020) 9–18.
74  Richard Kedzior, How Digital Worlds Become Material. An Ethnegraphic and Netnographic 
Investigation in Second life (Helsinki: Edita prima ltd, 2014), 15.
75  Daniel Miller, Materiality (Durham: Duke University press, 2005), 4.
76  Ibid. 
77  Ibid.
p o l I g R A F I
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nary, the biological, and the theoretical; all that which would have been 
external to the simple definition of an artifact”. 
Digital materiality emerges “as a set of arrangements between in-
tangible graphical representations, digital artifacts, or simulations, ex-
perienced by consumers through the mediation of computer screens.78 
Although they may lack physical material properties, digital elements 
can still be considered material when viewed through the lens of their 
practical instantiation and symbolic significance.79 Thus, in the process 
of digital consumption “what matters most about an artifact is not what 
it’s made out of, but what it allows people to do.”80 
Conclusions
It has already been shown how digital media, as well as the increasing 
state of connectivity of individuals, have fostered spiritual practices that 
are emerging and developing in the cyberspace. Traditional religions 
have penetrated this digital environment, and other ones, not properly 
institutionalized, have found the right terrain to settle and expand. So-
cial functioning and cultural manifestations were both absorbed and 
disrupted by the popularization of digital technological artefacts, and, 
in turn, they accelerated a general virtualization of objects, experiences 
and relationships.
Spiritual and religious experiences that could have been consid-
ered as science fiction narratives in other decades are common practice 
nowadays: virtual pilgrimage to religious places, humans extended in 
virtual bodies performing rituals in fully immersive digital ecosystems, 
and creations of sacred spaces through the initiative and intentions of 
actors. However, can we consider as ‘spiritually valid’ these types of 
experiences, mediated by VR technologies and synthetically generated 
by a software? How do the process of development and propagation of 
78  Kedzior, How Digital Worlds Become Material, 15.
79  paul leonardi, “Digital Materiality: How artefacts without matter, matter,” First Mon-
day 15, no. 6 (2010), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i6.3036.
80  Ibid.
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cyberspace and virtual reality technologies create new strategies for the 
diffusion of faith?
In sum, this paper intended to offer an outline of some theoreti-
cal reflections that work as heuristic devices to address these questions 
properly. Religious practices are not only embodied, sensorial and emo-
tional but also linguistic activities capable of constructing individuals 
and the social world. Meaning that religious material culture online 
does not conceive virtual platforms as tools with fixed characteristics or 
uses. Instead, through affective and sensuous interactions with digital 
media, they acquire new dimensions of meaning. Therefore, given plat-
forms may become sacred spaces, virtual objects can become ritualistic 
or worship elements, and avatars can become extended bodies. 
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