By Leonardo De Chirico, Evangelical Focus.
While people expect the church to offer easily digestible products that can keep pace with the entertainment market, each individual remains the center of their own life, and the church is a convenient afterthought.
“Low-intensity” is an expression that has entered the jargon of the sociology of religion. Unless I’m mistaken, it was Bryan Turner who first used it in his book Religion and Modern Society. Citizenship, Secularization and the State (2011), in his analysis of the contemporary religious phenomenon.
In the current scenario, religions have not disappeared—on the contrary—but religious practice follows institutional, loyal, codified, continuous, and committed paths to a lesser extent, preferring instead a form of religious “consumption” that suits the mood of the moment: hybrid (partly in person, largely digital), nomadic (hopping here and there), intermittent, unpredictable, and situational, following celebrities rather than religious authorities.
Low-intensity religion is comparable to consuming a religious spectacle: it is engaging in the moment, short-lived, and can be changed the next time around; ordinary life remains unaffected by its influences; once the spotlight fades, everything returns to the way it was before—or almost. Religious practice becomes a “commodity,” a consumer good, tailored to the customer’s interests.
Sociologists such as Luca Diotallevi use the term “low intensity” to describe the face of contemporary Italian Catholicism. In books such as The Paradox of Francis: Secularization Between a Religious Boom and the Crisis of Christianity (2019), “Mass Has Faded.” Participation in Religious Rites in Italy from 1993 to 2019 (2024) and, more recently, in essays such as “The Challenge of Leo XIV,” il Mulino (2/2026), pp. 75–84, a situation is described in which Italian Catholics are “low-intensity” Catholics: religious practice is sporadic, ethical living even less so, the value of the parish is almost nonexistent, and yet the trace of Catholicism has not disappeared: it circulates at “low intensity” around the pope’s celebrity and events that attract attention for a brief time.