IN 2003 the San Francisco-based company Linden Lab launched Second Life. Despite its similarities to other Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), the company insisted that Second Life was not a game, but rather ‘an online digital world, built, shaped, and owned by its participants’ (Linden Lab 2004). Although now in decline, for a short period Second Life was seen as the next big Internet phenomenon and was the focus of attention by investors and media alike.

Like all virtual worlds, Second Life (SL) exists in a complex relationship with ‘real life’ (RL), a relationship which is defined both by the encoded parameters of the virtual space and by the social and cultural practices of the people who use the platform. Although the kinds of clearly constructed virtual experiences available to people in worlds like SL have often been taken as merely representational at best, or ersatz at worst, scholars have slowly begun to shed light on the creative ways in which humans construct their social and cultural worlds, not just online but offline as well. As the anthropologist Tom Boellstorff has observed, for instance:

Second Life culture is profoundly human. It is not only that virtual worlds borrow assumptions from real life; virtual worlds show us how, under our very noses, our ‘real’ lives have been ‘virtual’ all along. It is in being virtual that we are human: since it is human ‘nature’ to experience life through the prism of culture, human being has always been virtual being. (Boellstorff 2008: 5)

Boellstorff's comments make a case that an equivalent ontological weight should be accorded to both ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ experiences. They also suggest that scholars must study digital virtual contexts both as existing in relation to offline contexts and simultaneously as distinct in specific ways from offline settings. Like our ‘virtual’ offline lives, we experience life online not only through a digital platform but ‘through the prism of culture’. Just as this prism is dynamic and varied in offline settings, so are online settings structured by diverse and ever-shifting cultural constructions.

These insights hold true no less for religious cultures than for any others. SL, as a broad platform encompassing many cultural constructions, quickly developed a rich and diverse set of religious cultures.