Promises, Piety, and Black Women’s Religious Networking in the Digital Age

“…process? The project offers insight on how faith communities and American religious movements develop in, and respond to, an increasingly digital age. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Kera Street Harvard University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

As an examination of the role of new media on the lived religious experiences of black women in the evangelical orgainzation Pinky Promise, my dissertation seeks to understand how new media tools shape conversations and responses to religious social values on gender, sex, and sisterhood. This project contributes to a larger set of questions about how religious lives are imagined and presented online, the impact of media on the ways people believe, and the significance of race and culture in communities of faith, both online and offline. It asks: how do shared moral values take shape and get expressed in online spaces? What are the effects of online technologies on theological understandings of self, community, and God? And how do social constructs like race, gender, and sexuality--and the religious commitments that are tied to them--follow believers into the digital realm? Given the impact of digital media on social-cultural landscapes over the last two decades, the purpose of this study is to highlight how online tools have reoriented conceptions of the religious. I argue that without an adequate understanding of how new media transforms religious commitments, we undervalue the significance of the digital age on notions of faith. As a hotbed of religious experience and digital engagement, Pinky Promise is an ideal case study for this project because of the prevalence of single-gender groups in the history of American religion, and their continued impact in evangelical communities throughout the United States. The organization's strong presence on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram highlights the dynamism and utility of digital media tools for individual practices and collective notions of faith. The organization's membership, compromised mostly of black American women, also highlights the robust relationship between race, gender, and faith in the contemporary moment.