Does the Church Believe in the Power of New Technologies?

How institutions react to the penetration of communication technologies into new spheres is covered by mediatization researchers—a theory in which scholars focus not only on technical progress, but also on how people respond to new devices, algorithms, machines, etc., and how they interact with them.

Religious institutions are of particular interest in this regard: beyond the technical barriers to adopting new technologies widely experienced by users. Put simply, new technologies may not be perceived neutrally, but rather as spiritually beneficial or, conversely, dangerous. In other words, decisions about adopting and using technologies are made based on the traditions and values characteristic of a particular religious community.

As leading researchers on this topic note, there are three main strategies for religious communities to engage with digital technologies:

1. Accept the technology and begin using it
2. Reject the technology and restrict its use
3. Consider the technology valuable, but only with certain rules that bring it closer to the community's values.

In practice, however, reactions to new technologies most often come down to the third strategy, where the community or institution establishes rules under which the use of technology becomes acceptable and beneficial.

Church responses in which technology is unconditionally accepted or completely banned are quite rare, and most often such decisions are also accompanied by disputes. For example, Russian Orthodox churches have been using an electronic bell-ringing system for several years now, which recently went viral on social media: in the viral video, a priest from the Church of the Great Martyr Catherine in Murino demonstrates their electronic bell system. The implementation of such a system in churches could, on the one hand, serve as an example of accepting remote device control technologies—the technology proves acceptable because it helps churches that lack bell-ringers. At the same time, disputes arise about whether the spiritual component disappears from the ringing with such mechanized sound production, so considering it absolute acceptance would be too categorical, an oversimplification.

An opposite example—a call to limit technology use—could be the Vatican's condemnation of online sales of relics, which became particularly noticeable regarding the Carlo Acutis. However, even here the call itself did not stop the practice, which generally prevents us from speaking of a complete rejection of using marketplaces.