Digital Religious Communication and the Facilitation of Social Resilience

Abstract

This article looks at the relationship of digital religious communication to “social resilience” or “community resilience.” The importance of, in particular, narratival communication of meaning for group resilience has been highlighted by Houston et al. Religious narratives as reflected communication of meaning are recognized to have quantified themselves in communities’ digital communications, thereby rendering themselves accessible to empirical assessment. From this perspective, we present a model for measuring community resilience quantitatively. Existing resilience models from research on ecological, mechanical, and community resilience were combined via their shared resilience trajectories to design the model. To further facilitate the empirical application of the model, we provide a conceptualization of digital religious communication and its viability as an effective indicator of community resilience. One significant advancement of this focus on digital communications and community resilience assessment consists in the qualities characterizing such communications as both communicators’ own self-prompted communications while also being quantifiable. This enables reconstruction and analysis of a more organic communication environment than that made accessible in survey-based approaches while also capable of achieving a higher level of representativity than ethnographic or case study approaches.