Digital Religious Communication and the Facilitation of Social Resilience, Part 2: Empirical Test of the Theoretical Model. A Study of the Twitter Activity of Ecumenical and Social Justice-Oriented Groups during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

As societies have sought to adapt to the (post-)pandemic realities, one of the most profound and far-reaching consequences has been a society-wide acceleration of the turn toward the digital. Following a crucial link between social media communication and resilience, the article (1) aims to investigate how “digital religious communication” on social media can be used to measure and assess ecclesial organizations’ social resilience. In a second step, the Twitter communication of 126 ecumenical and social justice-oriented organizations is then analyzed for how much they communicated about the pandemic during the early phases, for the sentiment of their communication, and for religious semantics and narratives used to address the pandemic. In doing so, the study (2) inquires after the role of communicating religious self-understandings in navigating the pandemic, deepening thereby understanding of the connection between “digital religious communication” and the facilitation of social resilience in the face of crisis.