religious institutions, religious community, and religion-as-platform

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?

I’m excited to see what Avance does with these questions, but I have to admit that my mind went first to a post I wrote last week, about what it would mean to treat religion theoretically as a platform. After all, online communities have a funny relationships with platforms. They may owe their existence to platforms, but they also exist somewhat independently of those platforms. Reddit provides a compelling example here: Subreddits obviously can’t exist without Reddit, but it’s the subreddits that do a lot of the heavy lifting. This tension becomes clear in moments like the Reddit blackout of Summer 2023, where subreddit moderators and communities clashed with platform executives in a quite remarkable way that I wish had had more of an impact on the platform’s direction.

I wonder if this kind of distinction between platform and community could be helpful in the context of “religion-as-platform.” For a number of reasons, I—along with many other scholars—have had to argue for making a distinction between “Mormonism” and “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” in our research. Here, “Mormonism” is the community, and “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” is the platform. The community owes its existence to the platform, but there’s a certain extent to which the community acts independently of the platform, and there are occasional tensions between the platform and the community. As with social media platforms, there are also explicit efforts by the platform to police the community.

This metaphor isn’t perfect, but I don’t think its imperfections are insurmountable, either. In some ways, Reddit has more control over subreddit communities than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exercises over the Mormon community. That is, if you only understand the subreddit community as existing in that subreddit, a Reddit account ban is more powerful than a Latter-day Saint excommunication, which by no means prevents someone from engaging with the Mormon community. A sprinkling of James Paul Gee’s affinity spaces, though, might be helpful here, in which a space can transcend multiple platforms.

This is more spitballing, so don’t hold me to any of this yet, but I think there’s something to it—and I’m also excited to read more of Avance’s work instead of getting lost in my own tangents.

• Rosemary Avance
• Mediated Mormons
• online Mormonism
• SSSR 2026
• SSSR
• MSSA
• platforms
• religion
• Mormonism
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• affinity spaces