Navigating sacred soundscape in the post-secular age: a critical analysis of the (re)production and consumption of digital non-traditional religious music among Chinese youth

Abstract

This research explores how Chinese youth, most of whom lack formal religious beliefs or affiliations, engage with digital non-traditional religious music, such as electronic adaptations of the Great Compassion Mantra chant, on platforms such as Bilibili. A total of 15 interviews and one year of digital ethnography were conducted to examine how various music mediators, such as music, technology, the environment, and the cultural context, shape youth’s affective states, namely their states of tranquility, trance, and transcendence. This study reinserts musicality into the social and cultural studies of religious music and identifies more fluid, contingent, and processual forms of associations and articulations between different mediators, along with the more emergent and ambient affective states brought about by such mediators, their networks, and related mediation processes. In addition, this study reveals Chinese youth’s hybridized and idiosyncratic practices that combine alternative spiritual elements with secular experiences, highlighting the context-specific ways in which Chinese youth navigate spirituality in the post-secular age.