Online gaming also was found to be negatively associated with religious and spiritual salience and with such practices as religious attendance, personal prayer, and reading sacred texts. Online gaming had the strongest effect on religious commitment. Laderi and Uecker speculate that the role-playing and interactive nature of online gaming, often involving different religious traditions and gods, may encourage the questioning of one’s own religion, while its social aspect allows secular participants to connect with like-minded people. While video streaming was also linked to a lower rate of religious practice, the researchers found that posting original content on social media was positively associated with such observance. Religious practitioners, they write, “may interpret the digital spaces as extensions of their spiritual lives, using online platforms to access religious content, share faith-related reflections, and stay connected to religious communities. In doing so, they may recreate or adapt elements of offline religious practice for online engagement.”
(Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14685906)
The survey found that 48 percent of the nonbelieving respondents prayed, at least occasionally, while 42 percent said they believed in an afterlife. Catholics showed a fairly high rate of dissent from church positions, although there was a high correlation between the degree of their religious practice and their agreement with the church’s doctrinal and moral teachings. Nevertheless, among many of the respondents there was often some contradiction between the general positions they espoused and their attitudes towards their practical implications. For instance, while 73 percent of the Catholic respondents agreed that “there is no right or wrong way to experience sexuality,” 73.5 percent also said that using pornography could be harmful, while 45 percent said this about contraception.
