Covid-19 and Perceptions of Digital Religious Options on the Island of Ireland – Promoting Faith, or Hastening Secularization?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Religious groups’ relationships with digital technology changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper draws on data gathered as part of a three-year, multi-context research project, including online questionnaires of leaders and members, interviews, and analysis of hundreds of documents published by religious groups and faith-based outlets. It charts the original enthusiastic uptake of digital technology among Christian groups on the island of Ireland, which led some leaders to advocate cultivating digital religious cultures as a counter to secularization. It also explores how Christian enthusiasm for digital religious options waned, especially within Catholicism, in the latter stages of the pandemic. Catholic leaders observed declines in in-person attendance, provoking discourses linking digitalization to secularization. Protestant groups remained more optimistic, encouraging members to use digital resources to supplement in-person practice. While noting these trends, we profile the enthusiastic cultivation of a digital religious culture among participants in an online compline (night prayer) group in a Catholic parish in Belfast. Finally, we contrast Irish Catholic approaches to digital religious options with Catholic approaches to the digital in the other contexts included in our research study: Canada, Germany, and Poland, noting that despite misgivings, the Irish Catholic Church was more positive about maintaining digital options than in these other contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".