During the pandemic, many European religious communities moved their worship online out of necessity. But since then, many communities have maintained an online element of their ritual life, and have refined the means by which they do so. The result is not so much a continuation of the forms of digital worship that existed before the pandemic, when this videoconference and streaming technology was not yet mainstream, but forms that are genuinely new. While most of these new rituals claim continuity with what has come before, their difference in medium, construction and participation mean that they represent, at the very least, new aesthetic forms of traditional rituals. As such, they will necessarily be experienced and understood differently by participants than their offline predecessors, and this change demands academic analysis.
Building on the methods of performance studies and data gathered from the recent project Religious Communities in the Virtual Age (Recovira), this paper presents an initial aesthetic analysis of some of the most common forms of online worship and ritual that European religious communities have developed in the last five years. This includes attention to the affective work that ritual can do, the dynamics of authority and coordination, the nature of community and participation, and the possibilities for change embedded in both the forms of these rituals themselves and the novel processes by which they are made, edited, and shared. The argument is not that rituals are performances in the sense that pieces of theatre are, but that, correctly applied and adapted, the tools developed for the aesthetic analysis of theatre and performance can shed light on the meaning of and work done by online rituals, even when these are not overtly articulated.