“Law, Religion, and Attention: Protecting the Dignity of Worship Online” by Ramazan Özgü

A computer at the Science Museum by Robert Brook (CC BY 1.0).

Imagine a member of a congregation who wakes on Sunday morning too ill to attend church. She is particularly reluctant to miss the sermon. Fortunately, a local service is being broadcast live on television. She follows it from the opening hymn to the final blessing. The prayers, silences, readings, and sermon remain uninterrupted. Illness keeps her physically apart from the congregation, but the medium creates a measure of proximity: she can participate in the service as it unfolds.

Now change only the means of transmission. The same woman follows the service through a video-sharing platform. This is not a service from a famous cathedral or an unfamiliar congregation. It is her own church, the place where she ordinarily worships. From her window, she can even see the church tower. The familiar interior, voices, and liturgical sequence make the distance feel smaller. She listens attentively. Then, in the middle of the sermon, the image disappears and a commercial begins. Its sound, visual language, and purpose have no connection with the act of worship. When the service returns, the preacher has moved on.

The comparison raises questions for both religious and secular law. What does such an interruption mean for the dignity of worship and the community’s responsibility to preserve its liturgical form? What follows from inserting an unrelated commercial message into that form? Secular law must ask whether freedom of religion has anything to say about the conditions under which worship is mediated. The issue has an individual dimension for the participant, a communal dimension for the congregation, and an institutional dimension for the religious community whose worship is presented by another actor.

I first examined these questions from a European legal perspective in a paper presented at the 2026 annual conference of the European Academy of Religion. This essay revisits that argument in a summarized form. It asks how ecclesiastical norms, religious-freedom guarantees, broadcasting law, and European platform regulation respond when advertising interrupts worship.

Worship, continuity, and attention

Religious attention does not require perfect concentration or freedom from every distraction. Here, it describes a person’s ability to direct attention toward a religious practice without having the conditions of that engagement commercially rearranged beyond the person’s control. It is an analytical perspective, not the name of an established freestanding legal right. For someone unable to attend in person, a transmission may provide an important connection with communal worship. A remote participant can attach religious significance to the service’s sequence, including its silences. Access to the words and images alone does not capture everything that matters about the experience.

Continuity and attention identify related but distinct interests. Continuity concerns the outward form and sequence of worship: the sermon follows the reading, silence follows prayer, and the blessing concludes the gathering. Attention concerns the participant’s capacity to remain oriented toward that practice. An inserted advertisement does more than pause a video file. It deliberately redirects sight and hearing toward a commercial message chosen by an outside actor. Broadcasting law, as we will see, protects continuity. Attention helps explain why that continuity matters to the person participating from home.

The dignity of worship in Christian legal traditions

Christian legal traditions have long recognized that the mediation of worship requires particular care. Article 20 of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, states that radio and television transmissions of sacred rites should be conducted with discretion and dignity. In the Protestant context, Article 11 of the Regulations Governing Church Life of the Evangelical Church of the Union in Germany, for example, links filming and photography to respect for the dignity of worship and the privacy of participants, while imposing specific rules on broadcasts.

These norms differ in origin and scope, and neither governs advertising on every digital service. They nevertheless show that the presentation of worship is not simply a technical matter left entirely to broadcasters or platforms. It forms part of the religious community’s responsibility for the service. From this perspective, the dignity of worship includes preserving its liturgical form and sequence when it is transmitted beyond the church building. Comparable concerns can be found, in different forms, in the norms and practices of other Christian traditions.

The underlying concern is not unique to Christianity. Different traditions have different ways of organizing worship and of defining the boundaries of a service. Yet a Quran recitation, a Torah recitation or a livestreamed darshan may also involve a shared religious act whose sequence carries meaning. Therefore, a general legal response must be framed through the practice’s neutral features rather than one tradition’s theology.

Religious freedom beyond the church door

Article 4(2) of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany guarantees the undisturbed practice of religion. Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the manifestation of religion or belief, including communal worship. Neither guarantee supplies an automatic entitlement to free or advertising-free use of a chosen platform. Both make the conditions of religious participation a legitimate subject of legal inquiry.

The European Court of Human Rights’ Article 9 guide recognizes that states may sometimes have positive obligations where interference originates with private actors. The doctrine requires a fair balance and does not, as such, guarantee preventive measures. It frames rather than decides the question whether existing safeguards adequately address repeated platform disruptions of worship.

The individual seeks to participate attentively; the congregation has an interest in the continuity of its shared act; and the religious institution bears responsibility for how its worship is presented. Digital distribution can separate that responsibility from practical control: the community provides the service while the platform may determine its commercial presentation.

What broadcasting law already protects

Section 9(1) of Germany’s Interstate Media Treaty prohibits advertising or teleshopping from interrupting broadcasts of religious services. The prohibition is categorical. While the treaty specifies when films and news programs may be interrupted, a broadcast service must remain commercially uninterrupted from beginning to end. Germany is not alone. Section 44(4) of Austria’s Audiovisual Media Services Act (Audiovisuelle Mediendienste-Gesetz, AMD-G) similarly provides that transmissions of religious services may not be interrupted by television advertising or teleshopping. Both national provisions reflect a longer-standing European rule. Article 11(5) of the European Union’s 1989 directive on television broadcasting already prohibited advertisements from being inserted into broadcasts of religious services. The current directive preserves that rule in Article 20(2).

These provisions do not expressly create a general legal right to the “dignity of worship.” Their structure nevertheless reflects a clear legislative judgment: the continuity of a religious service carries sufficient weight to displace the ordinary commercial scheduling of a program. In this limited but practical sense, broadcasting law protects more than the availability of religious content. It protects the service as a continuous act of worship.

The boundary is not simply television versus the internet. German broadcasting law can also apply to online transmissions. In addition, the second sentence of Section 74 of Germany’s Interstate Media Treaty extends the prohibition on interrupting worship to certain other services, including linearly transmitted television-like telemedia. By contrast, its first sentence does not extend Section 9 to on-demand broadcast-like services. Depending on its legal classification, a live transmission may therefore benefit from an interruption ban that does not apply in the same way to an on-demand recording. Whether that ban also constrains advertising inserted by a third-party platform requires a separate assessment.

The platform gap

Religious communities now distribute services through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and smaller video platforms. Their advertising models and creator controls differ. Yet uploading a service does not necessarily settle who controls the advertising shown with it. A community may remain responsible for its liturgy while exercising limited influence over its commercial presentation. YouTube provides a useful example. The platform explains that advertisements may appear on videos whose uploaders have not monetized them, including channels outside its Partner Program. This does not predict whether an advertisement will appear during a particular recording. It shows why declining advertising revenue is not always the same as controlling the viewer’s experience.

The technical problem is not beyond existing platform design. YouTube already gives eligible creators mid-roll controls for monetized videos, including the ability to turn mid-roll advertising off or select placements. Its guidance even notes that some formats, such as meditation videos, may be unsuitable for mid-roll ads. These tools do not presently establish a general protection for worship, especially where a channel is not monetized. They do show that platforms can distinguish between advertisements placed before or after a video and those inserted into its internal sequence. Extending equivalent control to a clearly identified service of worship would build on an existing technical architecture.

The Digital Services Act: a path, not a ready-made answer

For designated very large online platforms, the EU’s Digital Services Act offers a possible route. YouTube is among the services designated by the European Commission. Articles 34 and 35 of the Digital Services Act require these platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks, including actual or foreseeable negative effects on fundamental rights. Article 34 expressly directs attention to advertising systems, including the selection and presentation of advertisements. Article 35 identifies changes to advertising systems as one possible mitigation measure.

Article 10 of the EU Charter protects freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. It is not one of the Charter provisions singled out by number in Article 34(1)(b), but that list is introduced by “in particular” and sits within an open-ended reference to fundamental rights. Article 10 can therefore provide the relevant religious-freedom benchmark when a risk assessment examines interference with worship.

The current Digital Services Act does not expressly give every user a right to advertising-free worship. In my view, however, a clearly identified service of worship should ordinarily be protected against inserted commercial breaks. The broadcasting rules show that this proposal is not based on an entirely new value. It carries an established judgment about the continuity of worship into a distribution environment where the older service categories leave a gap.

A single interruption may reveal how a system operates, but it will not usually establish a systemic risk. An assessment would examine frequency, placement, controls, effects on participation, and realistic alternatives. Not every unwelcome advertisement engages the Digital Services Act. A platform-wide design choice capable of repeatedly interrupting worship nevertheless deserves analysis under the Act’s fundamental-rights framework.

A workable and proportionate accommodation

Any proposal must answer a practical question: what counts as a service of worship? A platform should not decide theological truth or reserve protection for legally recognized bodies. A workable system could combine good-faith self-designation with neutral indicators: the primary purpose is shared religious practice, the transmission is presented as worship, and the community identifies a defined period for the service. Misuse could be reviewed afterward instead of requiring advance religious adjudication.

The same framework can accommodate different traditions and formats. A church may mark the interval from the opening hymn to the blessing; a mosque, synagogue, or Hindu community may identify the corresponding period in its own practice. For a livestream, the protected interval could be marked in advance or in real time. For an on-demand recording, mid-roll advertising could be disabled throughout the service or within the designated segment. Advertising before or after the service could remain available.

Proportionality matters because platforms also enjoy the freedom to conduct a business under Article 16 of the EU-Charter and have a legitimate interest in financing their services. The proposed measure would be narrow. It would not require free hosting, prohibit all advertising connected with religious content, or shield religious organizations from criticism. It would target only commercial breaks inserted into the internal sequence of an identified act of worship. Opt-in designation, neutral criteria, existing ad-placement controls, and ex-post review would limit both technical burdens and the risk of abuse.

Such a measure would address all three dimensions of the problem. It would protect the individual participant’s attention, preserve the congregation’s shared sequence, and give the religious institution meaningful control over the commercial presentation of its worship. For a very large platform already subject to Article 35 of the Digital Services Act’s requirement of reasonable, proportionate, and effective mitigation, that is a modest accommodation rather than a demand to redesign the entire service.

Keeping the claim narrow

The relevant protection concerns participation in worship, not religious subject matter as a whole. Lectures, debates, institutional statements, political advocacy, and commentary about religion remain available for ordinary editorial and commercial treatment. Religious organizations and their teachings also remain open to public scrutiny. The claim is narrower: when a platform carries an identifiable act of worship, it should not commercially fragment that act from within.

Law cannot produce the attention on which religious practice depends. Nor can it remove every distraction from a person’s home. It can decide, however, whether the systems through which worship is distributed may deliberately redirect that attention in the middle of the service. European broadcasting law has already answered that question for television. The Digital Services Act provides a legal language for asking it again of the largest platforms. Protecting the continuity of worship online would respect its dignity, the community that offers it, and the person who can see the church tower but cannot cross the threshold.

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Recommended Citation

Özgü, Ramazan. “Law, Religion, and Attention: Protecting the Dignity of Worship Online.” Canopy Forum, October 2, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/10/02/law-religion-and-attention-protecting-the-dignity-of-worship-online/.

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