The Seismic Spiritual Shifts Shaping Digital Campfires
What brands need to know about the changing shape of religious identity
The Covid-19 pandemic may have helped supercharge the proliferation of online communities, but the larger cultural shifts driving the trend began long ago.
Among the most profound is the decline of traditional religious institutions. Religion, once considered a backbone of American society, has been sidelined dramatically in recent decades. Attendance at religious services in the U.S. has plunged to an all-time low, and the “religiously unaffiliated” share of the population has grown at a rapid clip.
Author and Harvard Divinity School Ministry Innovation Fellow Casper ter Kuile has devoted his life's work to investigating how the societal role once occupied by religion has been supplanted by or remixed with other practices that often only vaguely resemble traditional religious ones. His new book, The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices, explores this phenomenon in detail.
Below, 5 insights about this seismic shift along with key takeaways for businesses that Casper shared with me during our recent Digital Campfire Download conversation.
1. We may be abandoning religion, but we’re not abandoning our search for meaning
Forty percent of millennials say they have no affiliation with a religious tradition, and Casper says that number is expected to rise as high as 50 percent for Gen Z. As these traditional religious affiliations decline, people are naturally looking to fill the void left by their disappearance with other sources of meaning. In his new book, Casper argues that a potential alternative for people to embrace are the small daily rituals that already hold meaning for them — cooking a favorite recipe, taking a contemplative walk around the neighborhood, snuggling the kids before bedtime—and re-framing those rituals as living, breathing spiritual practices.
The take-away for businesses: Consider framing your offering not only as an experience, but also as a small ritual that dovetails with your user’s daily life. Think this sounds far-fetched? DTC brands like Crown Affair and Equal Parts, and mediation apps like Calm are already doing this.
2. Religious tradition is in the midst of a large-scale unbundling process
Over the last several decades, newspapers have gone through a large-scale unbundling—essentially a dismantling of its components thanks to the rise of digital technologies—with individual apps and websites delivering the various stand-alone value offerings that newspapers used to provide all in one place. And they’re delivering those products and services better than newspapers ever did. Think Tinder replacing personal ads, Zillow replacing home listings, ESPN replacing the sports pages. The same is true of institutional religion, says Casper: a collection of products and experiences offer users the spiritual solace and enlightenment that were once the exclusive purview of religion. But while we’ve benefited from remixing traditions that allow us to enjoy a more personalized experience, in the process we’ve lost the sense of community that comes with having a shared set of practices. The result? A sense of isolation and a longing for connection.
The take-away for businesses: Instead of engaging with your product or service in isolation, ask how you can present it in a way that offers people a shared experience or practice. If you’re wondering where to start, look for opportunities where people are already searching for meaning, like the workplace for example: “The number of people who are showing up at work today with an expectation that it’s going to be meaningful and purposeful is a major shift that has happened within just one generation,” says Casper.
3. Understand that people are already turning to brands to fulfill their need for connection
Much has been written about how brands like SoulCycle built cult-like followings by tapping into the collective desire to connect to something larger than themselves. Today, this practice has gone mainstream, so the question becomes, How can brands go beyond selling and engage with people’s spiritual lives?
The take-away for businesses: Build with extreme levels of intention. Spend time upfront to ask questions such as, How do we want to be together in this community? and specifically, What’s OK and what’s not OK?” One of Casper’s favorite communities that was built with this level of intentionality is the Sanctuaries DC, a Washington D.C.-based group for people of all religious and non-religious backgrounds. The founder spent about two years talking to people in coffee shops and going to meet-ups with the goal of building relationships with a multi-racial and multi-religious group of people. Eventually, he found a cohort of leaders with whom he started the group.
4. Influencers are replacing institutions
As our affiliation with religious institutions wanes, it makes sense for us to increasingly affiliate with individuals. Instead of looking to a religious leader for guidance, we look to a therapist. Instead of taking inspiration from a pastor’s sermon, we find it in a #realtalk Instagram caption.
The take-away for businesses: Individual personalities are often key to building community-first brands. Think fitness brand Peloton, which cited superstar instructors such as Robin Arzon in its IPO filing as key to its success. Other brands might fulfill this objective by behaving in ways that are simply more human, like Steak-Umm with its distinctive personality-driven Twitter presence.
5. In this time of large-scale social isolation, our most meaningful connections can come from connecting with our close friends—or a crowd of strangers
Social isolation and loneliness are at an all-time high. Indeed, a recent study from YouGov found that 30 percent of millennials say they “always or often feel lonely” vs. just 20 percent of Generation X and 15 percent of Baby Boomers (and this was before Covid-19 hit and forced us all into actual isolation). So in a primarily digital world, what types of online connection best stave off loneliness? To determine this, Casper finds it helpful to use a “concentric circles of relationships” model. In the inner circle are our closest friends, in the middle circle are about 150 people with whom we can reasonably maintain stable social relationships (sometimes referred to as “Dunbar’s number”), and in the outer circle is everyone else—“the crowd.” During quarantine, it’s difficult to maintain the types of relationships that often occupy the middle circle, says Casper, because they usually require in-person interactions to sustain, and it’s obviously hard to meet in groups of more than a few people right now. His advice? Invest in the inner circle via small “quaranteams” or “pods” we can visit with IRL, and the outer circle via online platforms that enable us to feel deeply connected to a large crowd of strangers by participating in a shared experience (think muti-player online games like Fortnite or Animal Crossing: New Horizons).
The take-away for businesses: When thinking about who your community is for, focus your efforts on building for either groups of close friends and family, or strangers united by a shared passion, interest or experience.
Want to hear more from Casper? Check out our full conversation from the July 9th episode of The Digital Campfire Download here.
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Additional reporting by Cara Straus.
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Each month I’ll be putting a different BIPOC-run digital campfire in the spotlight and inviting you to donate, with the understanding that I will never ask you to donate if I have not already done so myself. This month, I’m spotlighting The Nap Minstry, an organization founded by Tricia Hersey that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations as well as a radical tool for community healing through performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing. If you’re in a position to donate, and would like to, please join me in directly supporting The Nap Ministry’s mission here or here.