[A review that appeared first in the LSE Review of Books; the full text is now available at Webster Research and Consulting.]

[UPDATE (January 2019): there is now a summary version of this forthcoming chapter available to read.]

I’m delighted to be able to say that an article of mine is to be part of a volume now under contract with Boydell and Brewer. Edited by Thomas Rodger and Philip Williamson, it has the title Church and State. The Church of England and British politics in the twentieth century, and should be published in 2019……

[UPDATED: February 2019. This book is now in production and should appear in April or May. See the summary here]

[UPDATE: this chapter is now published. See a fuller summary.]

I am currently working on a chapter contribution to the forthcoming Sage Handbook to Web History, edited by Niels Brugger and Ian Milligan. Although the inclusion of the paper is subject to peer review, here’s my abstract. It should appear some time in late 2017.

“This chapter seeks both to assess the state of current scholarship on online religion, and to suggest potential directions for future research. There are now 20 years of research in the field of Internet Studies in relationship to religious organisations, faith and practice. However, it is less clear that this body of work yet represents a specifically historical inquiry about religion on the Web, although it will in many cases provide the foundation of such work. Much of the research to date has concentrated on the nature of emerging communities of individuals: communities that were either an alternative or a supplement to face-to-face relations in particular localities. This chapter draws out trends emerging in this scholarship over the 25 years of Web history, as the affordances of the Web have developed. Attention has also been paid to the balance of institutional authority and individual self-expression in a religious space that is unregulated, or at least that must be regulated in new ways. The chapter asks how far this scholarship may be integrated into wider histories of offline religious authority and practice, which have themselves undergone shifts and transformations of perhaps equal significance.

“Rather less prominent in the literature so far is the institutional history of religion. Making use of the archived Web in particular, the chapter sketches the outline of a new area of inquiry: the evolution of the religious web sphere, both as a global whole, within each of the global religions and denominations, and at a national level. To what degree has the nature of the Web, a decentralised international network system which contrasts with the hierarchical nature of most religious organisations, moulded the religious web sphere into a different shape? Early studies in this area have suggested that, in certain key ways, the religious web sphere can be read as a reimplementation of older structures of influence, attention and esteem that were visible before, and remain visible offline. Insofar as the religious web does not mirror the traditional offline structure of religious organisations, the chapter also reflects on how far this changed shape may be accounted for by broader trends in religious history, in a period of rapid change. How far does it relate to the recent history of religion in the media more generally?

“At a more abstract level, the chapter will attend to the degree to which the myths of the Web, and indeed of the whole Internet – of a pluralistic, idealistic, liberating force with an agency of its own – have shaped understandings of the Web’s religious history. It examines how far the last quarter century has really been a period of rupture and discontinuity, and how much has in fact stayed the same, or continued on a path on which it was set before the Web appeared. It will also assess how far the field has so far been focussed to excess on the new, to the neglect of understanding the histories of how practices and technologies that were once new become mainstream.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have steered clear of political topics before now, wanting it to remain a vehicle for my professional writings, either on history or on digital scholarship. I’m making an exception for the recent referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union and here’s why.

Politics involves spin, a certain amount of exaggeration, the presentation of the most favourable interpretation of a situation. We understand this, I think; and (as Evgeny Morozov has argued) political life is probably impossible without it. In order to carry large groups of people with them, politicians must be able to make broad claims, about political philosophy and the likelihood of certain future events. That they are open to dispute is no intrinsic difficulty.

I voted Remain, and believe the result to be potentially catastrophic for the UK, and potentially very damaging for the rest of Europe. However, the Remain camp were certainly guilty of some exaggeration in some cases, about the potential economic meltdown that Brexit would cause (although as I write the FTSE 250 share index is more than 10% down in two days’ trading, and the pound at a 30-year low against the US dollar.) However, I think the conduct of the Leave campaign is of a different order.

Time after time, Leave campaigners made verifiably untrue statements about the present situation, and about clearly known facts about the future. Penny Mordaunt MP, a minister of the Crown, repeatedly insisted on live television that the UK would be unable to veto Turkish membership of the EU, a matter publicly contradicted by her own party leader, the Prime Minister. And this was not a momentary confusion: the same claim is made by the poster below.

I could multiply example after example of these, but will rest with the worst of them all: the £350million figure that the UK supposedly pays to the EU budget each week. Journalist after journalist challenged the number over several weeks, as the true figure after the rebate the UK receives is about half that. Time after time the Leavers insisted on it, even after the UK Statistics Authority, about as impartial as they come, expressed disappointment that the figure was still being used, and that to do so ‘undermines trust in official statistics’. But no, still the posters stayed up, and there it was, still on the Leave battle bus as they arrived for the big debate at Wembley Arena 36 hours before polls opened.

I shall not go into the way in which these and other claims have been breezily disowned in the days since the result, in a show of reckless frivolity that characterised the campaign generally. My point is that this kind of downright lying poisons the wells for the whole of our political culture, for everyone, whether you voted Remain or Leave. It further fuels precisely the cynicism about politics that seems to have behind some of the paranoid rumours that circulated before the vote that it might be rigged. And it adds to the righteous anger of many of the 48% who are disappointed by the result, but might have accepted it otherwise. I wish I had a easy remedy: a way to repair the damage done to the fabric of our public discourse, but right now I don’t have it. Leaver or Remainer, we all lost on Thursday.