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

Abstract

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. Of most interest in this article are the stories that memes tell about religion and religious groups during the pandemic related to technology. I argue that this provides a unique insight into the Digital Theology that is emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the dominant theological assumption about technology widely circulate online and promoted via memes.