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During the summer of 2023 news and debates about public burningsof the Qur’an dominated the Swedish and international media. In theaftermath of the flames and the debate this article aims to presentand discuss the representation of the event as a ‘crisis’ in the Swedish daily press between 1 April and 1 October 2023. The article usesa quantitative analysis of the main topics in a selection of Swedishand Nordic daily newspapers, and a combination of co-occurrenceand qualitative frame analysis of how the event came to be debatedin a sample of Swedish opinion articles. Theories of mediatizedconflicts as dynamic and complex processes revealing the state ofdemocracy in a society are used to analyse the findings. The resultsare discussed in light of previous research on Qur’an burnings inSweden and on debates about previous events involving clashesbetween freedom of speech and freedom of religion in the Nordiccountries. The article concludes by arguing that the ‘Qur’an crisis’ asa mediatized conflict co-structures an ongoing negotiation betweendifferent positions on the most fundamental values of democracy,which has become increasingly contentious in Swedish public andpolitical debate.

In this article, we analyse implicit connections between gender equality and particular forms of religion in Sweden, as expressed in political discourse and social media debates. Instagram posts responding to the Christian Democrats [Kristdemokraterna] political party's proposal to ban the wearing of veils in Swedish primary schools in 2021 were analysed through methods of co-occurrence analysis and feminist critical discourse analysis. By applying the concept of banal religion from mediatisation of religion theory, the results reveal how implicit connections between veiling as opposed to gender equality in the proposal turn into explicit debates on Instagram regarding what kind of religious practice is compatible with Swedish identity and values. This reveals the ambiguous nature of Instagram as a digital platform that may enhance hegemonic ideas of gender, ethnic, and religious identities, but that may also enable Muslim women to challenge understandings of Islam and gender equality in the public debate.

Religion has become a hot topic in Sweden, often perceived as the most secularized corner of the world. This article analyzes how Islam and Lutheran Christianity come to be used in the construction of national identity, through discourse analysis of an opinion piece by the Christian Democrats in 2021 on banning veils in elementary schools, and the following discussion on Twitter(1). The concept "banal religion" from mediatization of religion theory is used to analyze when implicit understandings of religion and national identity become "heated" into a polarization between Islam and Swedish values. This represents a novel use of the concept that can contribute to previous research on religion and national identity by revealing how this dynamic is played out in hybrid media, where the logics of conventional news media become mixed with those of social media.

Gender has become a prominent theme in research on digital religion, as part of a focus on the particular social, cultural, and embodied context. The most salient issue has been women’s religious agency, in particular within certain gender-traditional communities. The chapter presents three themes emerging in research on gender and digital religion since the year 2000 and discusses how these connect to current approaches to women’s agency within religious studies. The first theme focuses on how digital media enhances women’s agency through expressing religious experiences and connecting to a larger public. The second theme concerns uses of digital media to handle tensions between gender-traditional norms in religious communities, and ideals of gender equality and women’s independence in the wider society. The third theme bring out how digital technology enhances but also challenges women’s agency in new ways. The chapter ends with highlighting critical issues on agency within the area of digital religion that should be attended to in future studies.

The affordances of digital media highlight changes in the way individuals understand and express their sense of self in everyday life, as well as the way researchers have understood identity as an analytical category. Starting from an understanding of identity as an ongoing process formed in social interaction, this chapter presents and discusses two key themes that have saturated studies of identity in digital media and research on digital religion. The first of these themes concerns differences between “offline” or face-to-face, and “online” or digital contexts of social interaction, and how such differences shape the presentation of self-identity. The second theme concerns whether digital media as context for social interaction enhances the individual’s ability to form a self-understanding that gives meaning to her life-experiences, and negotiate the ways in which she becomes positioned by discursive and social structures that she encounters in interaction with others in various social spheres. The chapter concludes that the hybrid and personalized manifestations of religious identity that emerge in digital media spaces should not be disregarded as individualistic. Rather, they are deeply indicative of the new forms of social and technical infrastructures under which religion exists in contemporary society.  

In contemporary society debates over the public presence of religion often takes place in various forms of media. The increased mediatization of highly modernized societies means that control over the presence of religion in the public sphere is shifting from religious actors to the media. Mediatization also implies that the affordances of various media forms will enable or constrain interactions between social actors with diverse world-views. The case for the analysis will be a debate about the boundaries for public expressions of religious beliefs and arguments in Swedish society: the so called hand-shaking affair taking place in April 2016, where Swedish Green party politician Yasri Khan was interviewed in TV4 by a female reporter and refrained from shaking her hand with reference to his values and Muslim upbringing. The debate that followed highlight tensions between freedom of religion and gender equality in Swedish society and took place in several forms of media. The chapter focus on the critique of Khan’s action expressed in editorials and in Facebook, and discuss to what extent the affordances of these media forum enable the forms of democratic deliberation proposed by Sheila BenHabib and Chantal Mouffe.