An Ecosystemic Approach to Digital Christianity: How Faith and Identity Formation Evolve Among Youth in Singapore

RELIGION AND SOCIAL COMMUNICATION VOLUME 23, NO. 2 (JULY - DECEMBER 2025)

ISSN 3057-0883 (ONLINE)

Author

Wayne Choong*

* Nanyang Technological University

Abstract

This sociological and ethnographic study develops and employs an ecosystemic approach to examine the effects of digitalization on religious beliefs and practices among young Christians in a Pentecostal megachurch in Singapore. Through extensive fieldwork and qualitative data analysis, this paper uncovers how the religious identity of young Christians evolves within a dynamic ecosystem shaped by indirect and direct digitalization. It outlines how Christian beliefs and practices transform indirectly through the digitalization of faith-based communities and religious authorities, and directly through individual engagement with social media and communication apps. This research contributes to understanding the interplay between religion and digitalization in the lives of young Christians in Southeast Asia, which calls for further exploration in this diverse cultural context. Conceptually, this paper proposes a framework for a more systematic and comprehensive study of the blended nature of online and offline religion, digital religion.

Keywords

digital religion, digital Christianity, religious identity formation, religious authority, religious communities, ecosystemic approach

References

Ammerman, Nancy T. Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Baym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.

Bunt, Gary R. iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Burke, Peter. “Identity.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory, edited by Peter Kivisto, 63–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Buss, David M., and Nancy Cantor. Personality Psychology: Recent Trends and Emerging Directions. New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.

Campbell, Heidi. When Religion Meets New Media. New York: Routledge, 2010.

———. Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Cheong, Pauline Hope. “The Vitality of New Media and Religion: Communicative Perspectives, Practices, and Changing Authority in Spiritual Organization.” New Media & Society 19, no. 1 (2017): 25–33.

Cho, Peter S. “The Synthesis of Religious and Medical Healing Rituals in the Song.” In Asian Religions, Technology and Science, edited by István Keul, 134–48. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Chong, Terence. “Megachurches in Singapore: The Faith of an Emergent Middle Class.” Pacific Affairs 88, no. 2 (2015): 215–35.

———. Pentecostal Megachurches in Southeast Asia: Negotiating Class, Consumption and the Nation. Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2018

Chow, Alexander. “Public Faith, Shame and China’s Social Credit System.” In Missio Dei in a Digital Age, edited by Jonas Kurlberg and Pete M. Phillips, 236–56. London: SCM Press, 2020.

Clark, Lynn Schofield. “Spirituality Online: Teen Friendship Circles and the Internet.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2004): 24–30.

Cornelio, Jayeel Serrano. Being Catholic in the Contemporary Philippines: Young People Reinterpreting Religion. New York: Routledge, 2016.

———. “The Diversity of Contemporary Christianity in Southeast Asia.” SPAFA Journal 2 (March 2018): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.26721/spafajournal.v2i0.582.

De Sousa, Marco Túlio., and Ana Paula da Rosa. “The Mediatization of Camino de Santiago: Between the Pilgrimage Narrative and Media Circulation of the Narrative.” Religions 11, no. 10 (2020): 480–498. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11100480.

De Sousa, Marco Túlio., Mihaela-Alexandra Tudor, and Giulia Evolvi. “Media, Religion and Religiosity in the Digital Age.” Tropos: Comunicação, Sociedade e Cultura 10, no. 1 (2021): 1–14. https://periodicos.ufac.br/index.php/tropos/article/view/5194.

Dugan, Kimberly. Millennial Missionaries: How a Group of Young Catholics Is Trying to Make Catholicism Cool. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Evolvi, Giulia. “Religion, New Media, and Digital Culture.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.917.

Fakhruroji, Mochammad. “Mediatization of Religion in ‘Texting Culture’: Self-Help Religion and the Shifting of Religious Authority.” Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies 5, no. 2 (2015): 231–54.

Featherstone, Mike. “Ubiquitous Media.” Theory, Culture & Society 26, nos. 2–3 (2009): 1–22.

Fine, Gary Alan. “Adolescence as Cultural Toolkit: High School Debate and the Repertoires of Childhood and Adulthood.” Sociological Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2004): 1–20.

Gao, Qi, Orville Woods, Lily Kong, and Shengyu Shee. “Lived Religion in a Digital Age: Technology, Affect and the Pervasive Space-Times of ‘New’ Religious Praxis.” Social & Cultural Geography, 2022, 1–20.

Goh, Daniel. “Rethinking Resurgent Christianity in Singapore.” Asian Journal of Social Science 27, no. 1 (1999): 89–112.

Gomes, Catherine, and June Chua Tan. “The Global Appeal of Digital Pastors: A Comparative Case Study of Joseph Prince, and Brian and Bobbie Houston.” In Religion, Hypermobility and Digital Media in Global Asia: Faith, Flows and Fellowship, edited by Catherine Gomes, Lily Kong, and Orville Woods, 149–77. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

Han, Sam, and Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir. Digital Culture and Religion in Asia. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: SAGE Publications, 2000.

———. “Virtual Ethnography: Modes, Varieties, Affordances.” In The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods, edited by Nigel G. Fielding, Raymond M. Lee, and Grant Blank, 257–70. London: SAGE, 2008.

Hoover, Stewart M. “The Culturalist Turn in Scholarship on Media and Religion.” Journal of Media and Religion 1, no. 1 (2002): 25–36.

Hutchings, Tim. Creating Church Online: Ritual, Community and New Media. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017.

Lim, Adrian E. H. Digital Spirits in Religion and Media: Possession and Performance. London: Routledge, 2018.

Lim, Francis Khek Gee. Mediating Piety: Technology and Religion in Contemporary Asia. Leiden: BRILL, 2009.

Mathews, Mathew, Leonard Lim, and Shanthini Selvarajan. “Religion, Morality and Conservatism in Singapore.” IPS Working Papers, No. 34, 2019.

Mathews, Mathew, Tan Keng Key, Melvin Tay, and Aaron Wang. Our Singaporean Values: Key Findings from the World Values Survey. IPS Exchange Series, No. 16, 2021.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Park, Joon, Kyungmin Cho, and Sam Han. “Religion and Media: No Longer a Blindspot in Korean Academia.” Journal of Korean Religions 8, no. 2 (2017): 5–10.

Piela, Anna. “Identity: The Niqab Is a Beautiful Extension of My Face.” In Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media, edited by Heidi A. Campbell and Ruth Tsuria, 167–75. London: Routledge, 2021.

Plug, Wilma, Edwin Zeijl, and Manuela Du Bois-Reymond. “Young People’s Perceptions on Youth and Adulthood: A Longitudinal Study from The Netherlands.” Journal of Youth Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 127–44.

Rambo, Lawrence R., and Charles E. Farhadian, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Roberts, Ken J., Sarah M. Clark, and Colin Wallace. “Flexibility and Individualisation: A Comparison of Transitions into Employment in England and Germany.” Sociology 28, no. 1 (1994): 31–54.

Slama, Martin. “Practising Islam through Social Media in Indonesia.” Indonesia and the Malay World 46, no. 134 (2018): 1–4.

Sullivan, Thomas. “Ecosystems Perspective.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Marriage, Family, and Couples Counseling, edited by James Carlson and Sharon Dermer, 504–6. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2017.

Tavory, Iddo, and Stefan Timmermans. Abductive Analysis: Theorizing Qualitative Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Tsuria, Ruth. “Identity: #EmptyThePews: Ex-Evangelicals’ Identity on Twitter.” In Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media, edited by Heidi A. Campbell and Ruth Tsuria, 159–66. London: Routledge, 2021.

Wang, Qianlong, Michael D. Myers, and Darsana Sundaram. “Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.” Business and Information Systems Engineering 5 (2013): 409–19.

Yip, Jean, and Sean Ainsworth. “‘Whatever Works’: The Marketplace Mission of Singapore’s City Harvest Church.” Journal of Macromarketing 36, no. 4 (2016): 443–56.

Young, Glenn. “Reading and Praying Online: The Continuity of Religion Online and Online Religion in Internet Christianity.” In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne Dawson and Douglas Cowan, 93–106. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Pages 322-346

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62461/WC040325

Submitted: Feb. 28, 2025; Accepted: Apr. 3, 2025; Published: Jul. 1, 2025

© 2025 The authors. This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).