Jehovah's Witnesses' adoption of digitally-mediated services during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This is the first paper to analyse the digitalisation measures that Jehovah’s Witnesses adopted during the pandemic and their behavioural consequences. The paper examines how the Witness community met the challenges of the pandemic by rapidly shifting to prerecorded and videoconference meetings, allowing online interaction between congregants. Based on a survey and focus groups, the effect of digitalisation of meetings on the feelings and attitudes to learning of Witnesses is analysed, investigating to what extent digitally-mediated religious services affected them in comparison with in-person meetings with regard to prayers, songs, speaking assignments, audience comments and social interaction, in both active and passive roles. The main conclusions are that digital meetings did not diminish their feelings of relationship with God or their intellectual learning, but performed less well than in-person meetings with regard to songs and social interaction. The authors reflect on how Jehovah’s Witnesses, while strictly upholding COVID-19 measures (they did not meet physically even where legally allowed due to their respect for life), navigated their feelings in the transcendent experience of uniting believers in a virtual environment.