Being Socially Religious

Recently, a trends and perceptions survey on people's religious behaviour on social media revealed that a large number of users on WhatsApp and Instagram have suddenly become religiously vocal and are flaunting religious messages, images and deities as their display pictures.

This is rampant among the subcontinental users. While this new trend shows the 'benign' religious side to their persona, it also commodifies spirituality and relegates it to an object of ostentation; spirituality, the kernel of apparent religiosity, seems to have taken a back seat.

The term spirituality has nothing to do with religiosity or divinity. Spirituality is an abstract and intangible rubric under which all sublime human virtues, traits and attributes are encapsulated and enshrined. So, for that matter, even an atheist or apatheist can also be spiritual so long as she believes in the sacred and sacrosanct purpose of her existence with respect to the larger existence of humanity.


To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir's famous statement that, 'One is not born a woman; one becomes one,' we're not born religious, we become religious on social platforms. Someone aptly said that humans are essentially spiritual but socially religious. To be spiritual is to be silently introspective. Religion, like knowledge, is demonstrative and clamours for attention, but spirituality, like wisdom, is reflective and chooses solitude.