Constructing Religious Tolerance in Indonesia’s Digital Public Sphere: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Log In Interfaith Podcast on YouTube
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15575/kt.v7i3.54331Keywords:
Critical Discourse Analysis, Digital Religion, Interfaith Dialogue, Mediatization, Religious Tolerance, YouTubeAbstract
Purpose: This study investigates how religious tolerance is discursively constructed, mediated, and received in Log In, a prominent Indonesian interfaith podcast on YouTube. It examines the linguistic strategies through which tolerance is articulated, the representation of religious participants, and the ways audiences interpret interfaith narratives within Indonesia’s digital public sphere. Methodology: The study employs Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), complemented by Social Media Critical Discourse Studies and the mediatization of religion perspective. An intensive single-case design integrates three sources of digital data: an 11,826-word full-episode transcript, YouTube platform metadata, and 1,236 relevance-ranked top-level audience comments. The analysis combines lexical-frequency analysis, thematic coding, qualitative discourse analysis, and descriptive analysis of audience engagement. Findings: Religious tolerance is constructed through inclusive pronominalization, affective vocabulary, modal expressions that frame tolerance simultaneously as an achievable possibility and a moral responsibility, and humor that facilitates the negotiation of religious difference. The predominance of the inclusive pronoun kita (“we”) constructs a collective interfaith subject, while uneven participant-reference frequencies reveal representational asymmetries beneath the podcast’s egalitarian framing, although these frequencies should not be interpreted as direct measures of speaking time. Audience reception further demonstrates that nationalist validation generated the strongest aggregate engagement within the sampled comments, indicating that interfaith harmony is frequently interpreted through national identity rather than exclusively through theological or religious categories. The episode’s closing multi-faith prayer also illustrates an emerging form of mediated interreligious practice conceptualized here as a digital interfaith ritual. Implications: The findings demonstrate that digital tolerance is not merely communicated through social media but co-produced through religious discourse, entertainment conventions, platform visibility, audience participation, and Indonesian nationalist narratives. They also highlight the need to consider representational inequality and platform-mediated visibility when evaluating apparently inclusive digital religious spaces. Originality: This study advances scholarship on digital religion, mediatization, and critical discourse by integrating transcript analysis, platform metadata, and audience reception into a single analytical framework. It provides evidence from a Muslim-majority, religiously plural society and shows how tolerance in the digital public sphere emerges through the intersection of linguistic inclusion, media logic, religious representation, and national belonging.
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