Religious Conversion in the Era of Cyber Proselytism in Indonesia: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Media Religious Content

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Published: Mar 15, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15642/religio.v16i1.4069
Keywords:
Religious conversion; cyber proselytism; critical discourse analysis; digital religion; social media; persuasive ecology.

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Loekisno Choiril Warsito
UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya
Le Ngoc Bich Ly
Payap University, Chiang Mai

Abstract

The proliferation of social media has transformed online spaces into arenas of active religious persuasion, as evidenced by conversion movements organized around hashtags such as #hijrah and #SaveMaryam. This study addresses religious conversion in the era of cyber through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of 68 purposively sampled content items drawn from Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and WhatsApp, published between 2021 and 2025, encompassing both Islamic da’wa and Christian cyber evangelism. The analysis integrates Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach, and Wodak’s discourse-historical framework with digital religion theory and Rambo’s model of religious conversion. Four principal discursive strategies are identified: authenticity discourse; accessibility discourse; community discourse; and crisis discourse. These strategies constitute an integrated “persuasive ecology” in which each reinforces the others to address the cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions of religious persuasion simultaneously. The findings demonstrate that cyber proselytism is not traditional religious persuasion transposed into digital form but a qualitatively new discursive formation shaped by platform affordances and algorithmic logics.

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How to Cite
Warsito, L. C., & Ly, L. N. B. (2026). Religious Conversion in the Era of Cyber Proselytism in Indonesia: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Media Religious Content. Religió Jurnal Studi Agama-Agama, 16(1), 112–145. https://doi.org/10.15642/religio.v16i1.4069
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Vol. 16 No. 1 (2026): March
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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© The Author(s). Published by Department of Religious Studies, Faculty of Ushuluddin and Philosophy, Sunan Ampel State Islamic University Surabaya, Indonesia.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

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