Religion and Facebook

Here is an interesting article from Christianity Today about 'Religious Self-Profiling' on new social media sites like MySpace and Facebook. It looks at how young people (majority users of SNS) define their religion (in the 100 words or less) in their status. It draws on this research from a University of North Carolina PhD student.

What they discover is that often people's religious views are implicit and ambigious, as opposed to outright 'evangelical', 'Christian'. They may uses other coded references such as their offline activity etc. They conclude that perhaps young people are more concerned to not limit their marketability to others and also because explicit Christian labels may have negative politic/social connotations they do not want to be associated with.