The most important religious revolution of our time is not happening in the mosques or in the churches. It is happening on the screens.
For millions of young Muslims around the world, the spiritual life that once flowed through the mosque is now being transmitted live from a bedroom, upload to YouTube and shared in Tiktok. CONTACTION PREACHERS, SHEIKHS DE Instagram, WhatsApp Fatwas: They are often discarded as decline symptoms: Religion cheated on memes, centuries of tradition eroded by hashtags.
But look more closely and you can see something else. The emergence of what I and other scholars of religions have taken the “cybernetic ummah”, a world -class Muslim community online, where faith and identity are remodeled through the digital connection, it is not the death of Islam. It can be your renewal.
From the death of the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century until the fall of the caliphate in 20, Islam has always evolved in response to the break. Each interruption fractured the old certainties and the dispersed authority, forcing believers to renegotiate what it means to be Muslim. What we are witnessing today is simply the last chapter in this 1,400 -year struggle about the meaning and message of the world's second largest religion.
Five centuries ago, the printing press started the religious authority away from the priestly elite of Europe. Today, a smartphone in the palm of a young Muslim is doing the same with Islam. For centuries, the scholarly scholars of Al-Azhar and other clerical institutions claimed the monopoly of the interpretation. If you wanted a Fatwa, an authorized religious failure, you went to them. Today, it is likely that a believer in Yakarta, Indonesia or Detroit consults a live influencer or search in an online Fatwa bank to seek guidance of a cleric trained in seminar.
And Islam is barely alone. Evangelical Christianity has been transformed by the emergence of the “Internet Church.” Tiktok is full of pastors micro-termons whose followers rival those of pop stars. Megachurs now put so much time in the construction of the community between digital congregations on YouTube as they do for those who slide in physical banks every Sunday.
The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this change: millions of Christians learned that communion could be mediated through a screen, the adoration transmitted, the faceted confession. Judaism has also been adapted: the host sessions of the “Ask Me Anything” Rabbines in Reddit, and Orthodox women share interpretations of the Torah on Instagram that would have been excluded from Yeshivas makes only a generation.
A 20 -year -old at Cairo can now discuss the Koranic interpretation with a 20 -year -old in Los Angeles in real time. A Christian teenager can discuss biblical verses with a partner in São Paulo. A Jewish woman in Tehran can avoid her local rabbis and join a global conversation about women's rights in Judaism. The authority is changing from the pulpit to the smartphone screen, from the seminar to the message board. That change is disturbing, but it is also deeply in line with the past and the promise of religious traditions.
These changes matter far beyond theology. When religious authority goes from clergy to believers, politics and power move with it. Arab spring showed how digital platforms could feed democracy demands in Muslim societies. Qanon showed how they could raise new forms of fanaticism in Christians. Faith Online can destabilize governments as easily as it can defeat the hierarchies of tradition.
Critics warn that this democratization risks chaos: competitive theologies, contradictory teachings, extremists who thrive alongside progressives. And those risks are real. But the disorder has always been the engine of renewal. The Christian reform destroyed a church in a thousand sects, unleashing both sectarian violence and unprecedented spiritual vitality. The history of Islam tells a similar story: the flowering of Sufism, the birth of the new law schools and the current digital revolution, all began as challenges for the entrenched authority.
Religious leaders fear fragmentation, and understandably. But what seems that disorder can actually indicate resilience. The traditions of faith are ossified when their stories and rituals are frozen by the guardians. They thrive when believers grab them again.
The digital religion is disorderly, contradictory, cacophonic. But this is how living traditions are seen. Religion is not a relic of being filed in museums or confined to sanctuaries. It is a dynamic force, remade in each generation, which belongs to clergy and states, but to believers.
The future of faith will not be decided by clerics in pulpit. Believers will decide on screens.
The writer and academic based in Los Angeles, Reza Aslan, is the author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” and “not God but God: the origins, the evolution and future of Islam”, now available in a 20th anniversary edition.
