Interrogating the Church’s Relationship to Technology Through Pandemic Internet Memes

Through this thematic categorization, we observed that memes served as a dynamic visual-textual language that enabled individuals to articulate multiple-level stories of social and spiritual meaning-making around the COVID-19 crisis. From this, we analyzed how memetic discourse can simultaneously serve as a communal space for defusing emotions, expressing catharsis, and sense-making for individuals. Specifically, we noted that memes served as a tool for crafting and affirming distinctive understandings of the relationship between organized religious communities and churches and digital technology during the pandemic. This paper explores how studying memes can reveal popular narratives that people hold about the relationship between technology and the church, informing perceptions of the move from offline to online worship services during the COVID-19 global pandemic. I suggest that by approaching memes as multi-dimensional, storytellers invite consideration of the ingrained assumptions many church congregations and leaders hold about digital media in contemporary society and its potential impact on church culture. Over the past eight years, I have dedicated much time to memetic research, considering the role that internet memes play in revealing popular assumptions about religion in contemporary society. 1 From this research, I assert the unique visual-textual language of internet memes can house complex layers of meaning about a variety of social-cultural issues.