When the Screen Becomes the Pulpit

In a lecture hall, a student asked in earnest, “Who exactly is my religious teacher today?” The question seemed simple, yet it touched the core of a major transformation underway in Muslim society. In the past, religious authority grew through study circles, Islamic boarding schools, lecture halls, and long traditions of direct transmission. Today, that authority emerges from mobile phone screens: one-minute videos, sermon clips, podcasts, social media posts, and even anonymous accounts that suddenly go viral.

What has changed is not merely the medium of communication, but the social structure of knowledge. Digital media has become a space for the encounter of ideas, a space for learning, for preaching, for economic activity, and for the formation of Muslim public identity. Religious conversations move rapidly across various digital platforms and reach millions of people in a very short time. The question of who is trusted becomes far more decisive than the question of who speaks most often.

The Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII), through its 2025 Indonesian Internet Profile Survey, recorded that internet penetration in Indonesia has reached 80.66 percent, or around 229.4 million people. At the same time, various digital literacy surveys show that the public’s ability to verify information still requires strengthening.

These data reveal one important reality: access to information is increasing very rapidly, while the capacity to sift through information is growing more slowly. It is in this space that scholarly authority faces a new test.

A Changing Public Sphere

In this article, authority means the ability of a person or institution to be trusted as a source of sound and responsible religious knowledge. Public trust was once built through a track record of scholarship, chains of knowledge transmission, academic works, and social service. In the digital era, trust is often shaped by visibility, frequency of appearance, the ability to produce content, and the power of algorithms.

Manuel Castells (1996) described contemporary society as a network society, a place where information moves through interconnected nodes. In such a structure, the centre of authority becomes more fluid. Anyone can speak to the public without going through formal institutions.

This phenomenon opens up great opportunities for the democratisation of religious knowledge. Many people now have access to learning that was previously difficult to reach. Lectures by scholars from various cities and countries can be followed from one’s own home.

This expansion of access is a development to be welcomed. The main challenge lies in the mechanisms of verification and the formation of public trust. The digital space is filled with an extremely dense flow of information. Fragments of verses circulate easily without context, hadiths spread without methodological explanation, and religious opinions are consumed like fast-food entertainment. Digital platform algorithms operate based on user attention. Content that stirs strong emotions often gains wider reach than calm scholarly explanation.

The attention economy reinforces this tendency. Content creators receive incentives based on viewer numbers, interactions, and watch time. In such a situation, the boldness to appear is often more profitable than scholarly caution. The digital public sphere therefore requires more voices that bring calm, knowledge, and ethical responsibility.