Fully Native Online Religion: Participation-Based Authority and Emergent Governance in an Indonesian Catholic Community
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59029/int.v5i2.91Keywords:
fully native online religion, participation-based authority, endogenous institutionalizationAbstract
This study aims to explain how a religious community that originates entirely in digital space can develop authority, religious practices, and governance without ordained clergy or formal ecclesiastical structures. This inquiry is important for understanding forms of religious life that do not merely transfer pre-existing offline communities onto digital platforms. The study employs a qualitative netnographic approach to the Indonesian Catholic Telegram Community (ICTC), an Indonesian Catholic diaspora community with more than 1,000 members. Data consisting of 118,870 messages from the community’s first six months were collected through digital chat archives and analyzed using abductive thematic analysis informed by constructivist grounded theory coding procedures. The findings show that authority developed through four stages—contribution, recognition, expectation, and crystallization—producing eight informal roles. Religious life developed through digitally adapted devotional practices, community-support practices, and platform-native communal practices. Humor performed five functions: identification, clarification, norm enforcement, boundary-making, and conflict resolution, while nine mechanisms of emergent governance sustained communal order before written rules were codified. These findings have implications for developing more participatory yet transparent governance in digital religious communities. The study’s originality lies in the concepts of fully native online religion, participation-based authority, and endogenous institutionalization as extensions of digital religion studies
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