Smartphones and the education of religious youth in Indonesia: Highway to hell or path of righteousness?

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in secondary schools in Manado, Indonesia, this article examines digital infrastructures and their accompanying (im)moral potentialities in the development of Christian and Muslim youth as evaluated by educators. On the one hand, smartphones are portrayed as portals to a globalizing world in which youth might succumb to negative influences (with a particular anxiety surrounding pornography) based on their perceived inchoate moral development and insufficiently strong religious foundation. On the other hand, these teachers and administrators recognize the potential that smartphones have to be used for deepening spiritual engagement, connection, and proselytization. This particular case study offers insights into the ways in which institutions charged with religious and moral development of youth seek to leverage rather than categorically reject mainstream culture, navigating the globalizing influences of the secular world toward the possibility of attaining a greater good.

Doni, ¹ a young man in his early 20s, is a student at a Protestant university in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. He has started his teaching practicum at a public high school in Manado as part of his training to become a Protestant religious education teacher. ² On this morning in 2016, his hair is slicked back and he is wearing hipster-style clothing, including a tight-fitting collared shirt which he has buttoned to the top in following the current fashion trend. Doni looks on approvingly as a student leads her classmates in energetic worship songs, before another takes over to lead the scripture reading. She announces that today, they will be reading from the book of Matthew, chapter 15, verses 21 through 28. Rather than pulling out books and flipping through the pages, students could be seen fishing around in their backpacks for their smartphones in order to use various applications for Bible reading, as they commonly did in class with their regular religious education teacher. Doni suddenly reacts, ‘Hey, who didn’t bring their Al-Kitab (Bible)?’ directing the guilty individuals, who were quite confused, to stand up. More than 20 students, the vast majority of the class, stand up to be collectively (and rhetorically) interrogated by Doni: ‘Why didn’t you bring a Bible? Isn’t that what you have at home? Or maybe you have the Veda or the Qur’an? Next time, if you don’t bring it, you’ll be sent outside the classroom’. At the end of the lesson, he reminds students once again to bring their physical Bibles to class the following week, promising ‘We will read loud enough so that the other classes can hear the Word of God!’

Doni is not opposed to the use of technology. In fact, he is an avid user of social media, particularly for religiously related purposes. He regularly posts Facebook status updates about going to church with his family on Sunday and comments on friends’ profiles with religiously inflected birthday wishes. One of his posts features photos of students from the school praying at a worship event, to which he added the caption ‘Precious in the Sight of the LORD’. Doni could be described as a ‘digital native’ based on his young age, or as a ‘netizen’ (a term which has already been adopted into everyday use in the Indonesian language) based on his ongoing activity in various online communities and on various platforms. Yet, he still portrayed the students’ use of smartphones to access scripture as a sign of laziness and lack of commitment to the faith. The other Protestant religious education teachers at the school, mostly middle-aged, regularly allowed students to use their smartphones to access the Bible, and did not have any specific policies requiring them to bring the physical book to school. Perhaps he was worried that students’ attention would wander, using their phones not to follow along in the Bible but to access social media online, as I had recently observed a group of Protestant teenagers doing during a Sunday church service while prompted by the pastor to follow along with a scripture reading. Doni’s insistence that students bring their Bibles to school in the form of a physical book draws attention to the way in which the use of smartphones, relative to the spiritual and moral development of youth, can become morally fraught.

This article focuses on the ways in which educators in Manado, Indonesia, evaluate digital infrastructures provided by devices like smartphones and assess their accompanying (im)moral potentialities in the development of Christian (Protestant and Catholic) and Muslim youth. In many cases, smartphones – and the Internet access they typically provide – are viewed as portals to a globalizing world where youth might encounter negative influences that ultimately threaten their spiritual engagement and moral development. These range from concerns about smartphones as a potential distraction from religious duties to major apprehension about the Internet as teeming with categorically immoral pornographic content. At the same time, many educators see the potential of harnessing smartphones and the platforms they provide access to as ‘holy infrastructures’ (Mellquist Lehto, 2020: 200) enabling deepening religious engagement. The particular position of youth, often portrayed as lacking a sufficiently robust spiritual foundation to handle the potential challenges that might confront them on the smartphone screen, impacts the way in which these potential moral ambiguities or concerns take shape in high school policies about smartphone usage, and in the implementation of educators’ varied approaches toward guidance.

This case study offers insights into the ways in which institutions charged with religious and moral development of youth attempt leveraging, rather than rejecting mainstream culture (Hefner, 2019), navigating moral challenges of posed by the secular world for the possibility of attaining a greater good (Fader, 2009). In considering the influences of the ‘outside world’ – intentionally vaguely employed as a catch-all term – and the way in which smartphones provide instant access to it, administrators and teachers fear the influences of globalization; yet, many also see the benefits in teaching youth to harness its positive aspects while rejecting its morally dangerous ones. Ayala Fader (2020), based on her ethnographic work on digital media and ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York, has argued that an analysis of ‘shifting anxieties and debates over a new medium’ can uncover the particularities in the understandings of personhood, ethics, and authority which are in circulation. Adopting an approach which considers smartphones and the Internet access they provide as infrastructures provides a perspective on ideas about the moral development of youth and the ways in which technology is understood as accelerating processes of development in either positively or negatively evaluated directions. After introducing the methodology and ethnographic context, I relate the case study to the literature on social media and the religious engagement of youth. Then, I provide examples of how smartphones are framed in Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim religious education courses in Manado, examining how religious perspectives are used to argue that smartphones create an infrastructure that enables either accelerated moral decay or enhanced piety.

Methodology and background

Data for this article were collected using ethnographic methods, including participant observation and interviews by the author, over a 17-month period in the province of North Sulawesi, Indonesia from 2015 to 2016. The data were collected within the scope of a larger research project focusing on the way in which schools become sites of deliberation about the contours of religious belonging in the national framework. I spent significant time observing civic and religious education courses and other everyday activities at three secondary schools (a public high school, public madrasah, ³ and a private Catholic school), and also interviewed principals and teachers at other local schools, including local pesantren (Islamic boarding schools). In speaking with educators of various religious backgrounds across the region, it became clear that smartphones represent a distinct area of concern for educators responsible for the moral and spiritual development of youth. When interviewing teachers about how they approach ‘character education’ (a current buzzword), smartphones invariably came up as one of the major challenges in educating morally upright, religious citizens today. In comparing and contrasting policies and approaches to smartphones among these schools, it becomes clear that technology is – across the board – considered a morally fraught territory which requires guidance from educators and often takes into account religiously-grounded moral principles.

The religious dynamic of North Sulawesi (and its provincial capital Manado) is particular in Indonesia as a Protestant-majority province in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. On the provincial level, Protestants make up 61% of the population, whereas Muslims represent 33%, and Catholics 4% (with the remaining percentage made up by adherents to the other official religions recognized in Indonesia: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism) (Badan Pusat Statistik Sulawesi Utara, 2021: 254). While many studies on religious attitudes toward digital media have focused on discourses within one particular religious community (with the exception of Ferguson et al. (2021)), this article focuses on discourses circulating within educational communities primarily comprised of Protestant, Muslim, and Catholic students and educators. In Indonesia, in public as well as private religious educational settings, religion is typically viewed as a public good, and students are encouraged to become more pious in their own religious traditions as a way of becoming good individuals and upright citizens (Larson, 2018). Here, taking an approach which considers both Christian- and Muslim-influenced discourses about smartphones in educational settings is particularly instructive in demonstrating the similarities among religious communities and the way in which smartphones are ambiguously viewed as both potentially morally edifying and problematic for youth in Indonesia.

Internet usage via smartphones has become a part of daily life for many Indonesians, even as it is important to recognize that there remain obstacles to Internet access for many. Here, the focus is on smartphones – referred to in Indonesian as HP (an abbreviation of the English ‘handphone’) – because mobile connections are the primary mode of Internet access for Indonesians. Although regions outside of Java typically have less developed infrastructure, 78.6% of the population in North Sulawesi were Internet users in 2019, which is higher than the overall national figure of 73.7% (Indonesia Survey Center, 2020). In the largely middle-class (and in some cases elite) educational environments where I conducted research, teenagers were assumed to have easy access to the Internet, and often via their own personal smartphones. At times, cell phone signals in certain areas of the province were not strong enough for students to access their preferred platforms of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram (as one student joked, ‘Welcome to Indonesia, miss!’ after I commented on my own difficulty in accessing the Internet one afternoon).

Despite intermittent connectivity issues, or sometimes running out of cell phone credit to apply toward browsing, the middle-class and elite students I spoke with in North Sulawesi largely expected to (and took for granted) the ability to access the Internet via their smartphones on a daily basis. In preparing students at the private Catholic school for an overnight field trip in a small village, one administrator got the students’ attention by telling them not to bring their smartphones if they don’t need them, to which students responded with audible gasps of disbelief. While he had worried about students losing their iPhones in the potato fields of the small village, he conceded that they might indeed be practical for students to communicate with their teacher chaperones on the field trip, and he ultimately permitted and even advised students to bring them along. For most students in these educational environments, smartphones had already become integrated in their daily routines and social practices.

Social media and youth religious engagement

For many youths in Indonesia, social media activity has become intertwined with religious practice in various ways, a development which also relates to the rise of the middle class and the increase in practices of consumption related to religious engagement and identity (Slama, 2018: 1). Many popular Islamic preachers in Indonesia, even those who reject popular culture and promote conservative and/or Islamist ideologies, are active on social media, using marketing and branding techniques on popular platforms to make non-mainstream ideas more palatable (Hew, 2022). However, even in cases where religious communities have actively embraced the use of social media and the potential it holds for increasing piety and outreach, the affordances of media infrastructures can bring up ambiguities which require moral and religious navigation. For example, the same online visibility and networking which make possible a deepening of religious practices also bring up questions within Indonesian Muslim circles about what might count as riyā’, or performing pious activities with the intention of showing off to others (Husein and Slama, 2018). In Islamic thought, worship or performance of good deeds will not be counted in one’s favor on the Day of Judgement if the doer is primarily motivated by the thought of being seen or praised by others. These uncertainties require considerations about the form and content of the Internet in relation to moral selfhood and character.

In educational settings in Indonesia, where administrators and educators are charged with shaping pious and morally upright citizens, the potentialities of smartphones and social media platforms take on particular significance. In observing – and also imagining – their impact on youth, teachers project understandings of how everyday use of smartphones might accrue to impact the moral development and character in students over time. In characterizing educators’ perspectives on smartphones and the possibilities they afford, it is useful to think about them as infrastructures that could potentially pave the way toward increased religiosity and spiritual development, or alternatively lead to temptation and moral degradation. Heather Mellquist Lehto (2020: 200) has referred to diasporic Korean churchgoers’ virtual engagement as building up ‘holy infrastructures’, describing to the confluence of material and immaterial that can emerge in online religious networks and ritual. I suggest that this term can also be applied to relate to the potentialities that religious educators view and try to build up through their students’ smartphone usage. Digital infrastructures involve the material and spiritual, and educators project these potentialities into the future as they imagine their consequences in establishing a particular kind of personhood in their students.

As is demonstrated through the ethnographic evidence presented in this article, Christian and Muslim educators in Indonesia adopt varied approaches in their quest to help youth navigate their use of smartphones in such a way that will benefit their individual growth and therefore contribute to building up the moral fiber of the future of Indonesia. These digital infrastructures are viewed as potentially holy and spiritually enriching only if youth receive the proper religious grounding and guidance for how to use them. Otherwise, they are understood as particularly dangerous as they can invite in temptations and external influences which youth are not considered mature enough to handle. For educators and the young Indonesians with whom they engage, the digital is not understood as a separate realm, but as a ubiquitous part of everyday life and with a strong connection in shaping individual moral selfhood.

The virtual and physical become intertwined through digital media (Fewkes, 2019: 4), and furthermore, the integration or juxtaposition of various spheres brings up moral questions that take on importance in religiously grounded educational contexts. In considering the kinds of infrastructures – material and immaterial – which are built up through engaging with smartphones, it is important to remember that it is not only the digital realm which is shaping religious practice, but vice versa. As Alatas (2021: 43) explains relative to circulation of anecdotes about the actions of saints among Indonesian traditionalist Muslims, Facebook, as far as religion is concerned, cannot be understood exclusively as a medium of communication, as it also transformed by the way in which users engage the platform as ‘digital infrastructure of theology’. Christian and Muslim educators in Manado hope that youth can ultimately leverage the affordances of digital media to shape it into a positive influence toward their religious education and development, but argue that they need guidance in order to accomplish this.

No signal, life goes on

At a private Catholic boarding school outside Manado, the Catholic religious education teacher Ibu Maria was eager to use active learning methods and accordingly had her small class of 10 students organize their desks in a circle around her to encourage discussion. The topic of the class was ‘the influence of mass media’, and Ibu Maria vocalized her goals for the session, including that the class should be able to identify the positive and negative impacts of mass media, and also to explain Jesus’ critical attitude toward the law. Before jumping into her PowerPoint presentation, Ibu Maria congratulated students on their ability to use media wisely. Even though all of the students have smartphones in their bags, she commented, no one was trying to secretly use theirs during the class discussion.

Indeed, 2014 was the first year in which students at the Catholic boarding school were allowed to bring their cell phones to class and use them for educational purposes only when instructed by teachers. The school principal explained to me that as part of their policy to allow students to carry around electronic devices, they have also made it their objective to ensure they are ‘used in the right way’ (digunakan secara baik). This was a shift from the previous policy, which required students to only use their smartphones in their dormitories, and to leave them there at all times during the school day. The rule had been enforced by the administration through student council representatives, who performed random ‘sweeps’ of classrooms to locate offenders and confiscate their smartphones. Students were said to have hidden their mobile phones in trash cans in last-ditch efforts to avoid this fate. Everyone was adjusting to the new rules regarding HP, typically with additional guidelines or information often given during morning announcements, such as administrators denouncing the disruptiveness of notifications and vibrations on student cell phones during exam week.

During this class discussion, Ibu Maria projected a series of pictures about technology onto the wall, such as one image of a man and women sitting back to back, each staring at their own laptop screens. She encouraged students to respond as if they were typing comments on Facebook posts. In getting students to reflect on how media has impacted their lives, Ibu Maria asked them if they are aware of a new tradition that takes place before eating a meal. ‘It’s not praying!’ she qualified before giving the answer: that some people like to take pictures of their food to post on social media before taking their first bite.

Students were divided into two groups to discuss the question: ‘Is it true that youth are the victims of media?’ (Remaja korban media, betulkah?) in a debate format. The group charged with explaining the positive aspects of the media adeptly argued for the positive way in which the Internet allows communication with those who are far away, in addition to helping students access information for homework assignments. While the positive answers did not explicitly mention religious or moral development, the negative aspects certainly centered on these concerns. In presenting the negative aspects of social media, the student Rafael drew his classmates’ attention to the high curiosity that teenagers have, such that even innocently going online to look for information for an assignment could ultimately lead to looking at pornographic images. His fellow group member Kezia, echoing the discourse of many of her teachers, said that in the past people were disciplined and hardworking, while now – due to the influence of the Internet – people were becoming lazy. For their homework, Ibu Maria asked her students to write a short reflection on a scripture passage and to come up with a life motto related to the class topic. As an example, she proposed ‘No signal, life goes on’ in English.

During their next class session, students presented one-by-one their recaps of the material covered and takeaways from the previous lesson. One student emphasized the need for youth, subject to high emotions, to learn at school about how to avoid dangerous things online, like scams or pornography websites. However, Ibu Maria instructed him to take time to think and come up with a new motto after he initially suggested, ‘No Internet, no life’, which she publicly evaluated as lacking a critical attitude. His classmate fared better in his choice of motto: ‘Look up and leave your gadgets behind’. As the rest of the students presented their takeaways, they re-iterated the potential positive and negative aspects of media use, underscoring that smartphones are not inherently good or bad, but that it depends on how one uses them. The following two sections focus more in-depth on the way in which educators evaluate the negative and positive (respectively) moral potential housed within smartphones and their relation to the spiritual development of the Indonesian high schoolers who use them.

Smartphones as the highway to hell

At a local all-boys Islamic boarding school in Manado, an ustad (religious teacher), wearing a sarong and a white skullcap, smiled as he invited me to sit on a cushion on the floor in a classroom typically used to practice Qur’anic recitation. He is not only a religious teacher at the school, but the son of the kyai (religious leader and director of the school), and is clearly proud to talk about the achievements and the pedagogical approach of the pesantren. Even though the school has a Wi-Fi connection and a computer room, this school has one of the strictest technology-use policies, requiring students to only use computers or smartphones in a monitored setting. Although the pesantren tradition is generally associated with conservatism, many Islamic boarding schools in Indonesia have started to capitalize on the potential of social media for teaching and outreach, while remaining mindful of and working to manage the potential moral pitfalls it entails (Halim, 2018).

Students at this pesantren in Manado must hand over their personal smartphones to the administration for safekeeping, except during designated free time, when they can use them only in a monitored setting. The ustad credited this policy with major character changes in his students, noting several cases in which students were entrusted to their care with bad habits of downloading and viewing pornographic pictures. Through guidance in religious teaching and strict policies about technology use, he proudly explained, these students have experienced a moral turnaround. He qualified that the pesantren is not against technology, but that their approach to smartphone and computer usage fits within their overall project of instilling discipline and promoting character development through religious practice and guidance.

Concerns about pornographic images and videos, and their circulation among teenagers often described as experiencing a time of ‘high curiosity’, are those most commonly voiced with regard to cell phone use among students. Not only is pornography cited to draw attention to what is perceived as the gravest concern related to Internet use, its common discussion evinces the way in which pornography is mobilized as an indicator of public morality. In Indonesia, public debates about pornography were extremely widespread in the years leading up to the 2008 passing of the Pornography Bill, which criminalized the production, circulation, and consumption of materials deemed pornographic. The topic of pornography became a site of debate about religion, politics, and public morality, and discussions about it continually focalize on it as an obstacle toward building up a moral society. Indeed, smartphones have made it possible to circumvent typically enforced norms regarding sexuality and romantic relationships in many cultural contexts, adding ‘moral ambivalence’ even for Pakistani Muslim youth who may typically use their smartphones to send religious messages and engage in pious practice (Rollier, 2010: 423). This has also brought up challenges in Indonesia, where piety and sexual propriety are central in public debate, and these anxieties are projected primarily onto youth as the future generation of the nation. Not only does apprehension about pornography relate to ideas about individual and collective moralities, but also to the danger of outside influence and the need to reject Western culture (Rinaldo, 2013: 256). The use of the Internet is also of concern particularly because of its potential to connect to a broadly conceived ‘outside world’ full of potential negative influences.

At the public madrasah in Manado, though teachers believe that students need to be taught how to use media properly just as at the pesantren, there is no school-wide policy regarding the use of mobile phones. Instead, teachers are able to make their own classroom policies as they see fit. The school has a Wi-Fi network that students can pay a small daily fee to use, and students often do use the Internet during class to work on assignments. Religious education teachers sometimes discuss smartphone use in relationship to Islamic principles. In front of her students, the Islamic ethics teacher Ibu Indah listed off examples of disrespectful behaviors toward teachers and parents as they were discussing teachings in Islam that called for respect toward these individuals. Some negative examples given by Ibu Indah included turning off one’s cell phone so their parents cannot reach them, or playing games during class instead of listening to the teacher. But it was the topic of pornography that made her launch into a mini sermon:

If you have pornographic pictures saved on your HP (…) you will not have good fate if you have ‘strange’ pictures, pornographic pictures. If you have them, please erase them, ok? Try some introspection. If you have them, please erase them, ok? HPs are not for that – what are they for? They’re for sending messages, taking pictures, calling people.

Pornography is rarely defined by these educators and could range from images of women wearing revealing clothing to graphic and explicitly sexual videos. Although viewing pornography is the most common (and often most extreme) negative behavior resulting from smartphone usage that teachers mention, educators also discuss the potential for distraction from religious practices, directly relevant to the directionality of students’ spiritual and moral development. At an overnight religious retreat held for Protestant students from the public high school prior to taking their national exams for high school graduation, student-led worship sessions with energetic songs kicked off the event. I sat in the second row with Doni and with other religious education teachers as the student worship leader invited everyone to turn off and put away their mobile phones. Her request seemed to have an immediate impact on the atmosphere, further aided by the transition to a calmer and more reflective worship song that we were invited to sing while sitting down. Before launching into a prayer, she reminded her classmates, ‘God is always with us, and it’s just up to us if we are also going to really be with him’. Students in this case are reminded by a fellow classmate to avoid the distracting influence of technology, and to focus wholeheartedly on worship.

In addition to the direct impact that using smartphones might have on religious practice and engaging in sinful behavior, some educators also worry about bullying. The Catholic boarding school’s approach toward teaching students how to use technology wisely in their daily lives was tested when students began downloading and using an application called ‘Secret’ that allowed them to chat anonymously, launching a social experiment that quickly devolved into unbridled bullying. Once the dormitory staff had figured out what was going on and notified the administration, students were collectively reprimanded during morning announcements for misusing their smartphones. The head of the dormitory unequivocally rejected this mobile application because it ‘does not teach honesty’, and remarked that these students, the future leaders of Indonesia, are exhibiting concerning behavior.

Teachers also encourage students to avoid the negative behaviors like materialism that can emerge from smartphone ownership. In Ibu Rahma’s class discussion about character (akhlak) according to Islamic teachings, she asked students for examples of good and bad akhlak. The class leader, a confident and articulate boy, suggested that if he gets a new phone and reacts by bragging and showing off to his friends, he is encouraging jealousy in his friends, an example of bad character. Ibu Rahma then directed students to look for verses about good and bad character so they can better understand the Qur’anic injunctions on the subject. In her Catholic religious education class, Ibu Maria also touched on the dangers of materialism and consumerism under the scope of inviting students to remain critical toward ongoing trends. She asked what kind of cell phones are the newest and most popular, and without hesitation, her students enthusiastically replied, discussing the latest version of the iPhone. She remarked that some students get into competitions throwing birthday parties, comparing the scale of the event and the kinds of gifts they might get – including new phones. Indeed, competition and jealousy over smartphones, and even some instances of theft, had recently plagued the boarding school as they implemented their new technology policy.

From the perspective of these educators in Manado, technology is not inherently bad. Indeed, it can provide many opportunities to integrate religious practice into everyday life and develop into moral individuals. While the policies and the approaches regarding how to do so vary, there is a consensus that students need guidance from teachers to avoid the negative potentialities inherent within these digital infrastructures. I asked one of the religious teachers at the public madrasah whether she thought youth today are experiencing a ‘moral crisis’ (krisis moral), a term which I had heard used by many of her fellow teachers. I was surprised when she hesitated, clearly not fully in agreement with this characterization. When she replied, she stated that there can be turmoil (gejolak-gejolak), citing the way youth use smartphones as an example. However, she also put the onus on educators to properly guide students, explaining that problems can arise if teachers do not anticipate how students are going to use their phones. Her colleague at the madrasah Ibu Indah had also recently lectured students on the need to trust the authority of teachers. As she slipped between the Indonesian language and colloquial Melayu Manado, she emphasized how cell phones can be a negative distraction in the classroom, and students just sit and play on their phones as teachers are trying to help them gain knowledge and become better people. Her takeaway message to her students was to avoid becoming angry if a teacher confiscates your phone, as the teacher is simply trying to help you learn.

Rather than being concerned with the Internet as a potential infrastructure of surveillance (Iddins, 2020), even in this case where the Indonesian state has attempted to censor and/or block pornographic websites, educators are most worried about the chaos of the Internet as a site where anything goes. In this way, the Internet is conceived of as a space of unlimited possibility, and unlimited moral and immoral potentialities depending on how it is engaged. During this engagement, the afforded infrastructures are seen as either drawing one toward evil or assisting an individual in building up their religious practice and engagement.

Following media toward the path of righteousness

In explaining the Catholic theological principle of kerygma, or the proclamation of the gospel, Ibu Maria told her students that engaging in kerygma can be as simple as updating your Facebook status. Posting ‘Jesus is awesome!’ (Yesus luar biasa) is already a simple way to witness to others and to build them up. She joked about the kind of banal, everyday status updates she normally sees, such as ‘I just finished eating’ or ‘I have a stomach ache’, encouraging students to think about the impact they might have on others if they instead post ‘Thank you God, today I am happy!’ (Terima kasih Tuhan, hari ini aku bahagia). Ibu Maria, in line with the approach of the Catholic boarding school in teaching students how to use technology properly, is giving students examples of ‘spiritualising the internet’ (Campbell, 2005: 2), or ways in which they might integrate the Internet into their religious practice and make it a part of their spiritual lives. Through such discourses about technology use, the aspiration on the part of educators is that students will be able to both deepen their spiritual engagement (and enthusiasm) and avoid the negative pitfalls of social media.

Even in environments in which religious leaders might be more hesitant to embrace smartphone technology, recognizing its potential to contribute to religious endeavors is one way to integrate digital media into religious practice. For example, young religious scholars who recognize the possibilities of social media in strengthening the religious network and reputation of their pesantren in South Sulawesi have made the decision to become active on social media networks (Halim, 2018). In addition, Wahyu Kuncoro (2021) explains that Tablighi Jama’at adherents in Indonesia, although typically stereotyped as against technology, have adopted social media as a way to make their preaching more efficacious, even while remaining cognizant of the potential moral downfalls that could result from its use. For the majority of the Protestant religious education teachers at the public high school (Doni excluded), reading the Bible had become an activity that was mediated by smartphone use, as students were allowed to use their HP for the purpose of deepening religious engagement.

Religious education teachers are quick to share ways in which they have used online engagement or encouraged smartphone use among their students as part of their moral development. Ibu Rahma, a religious teacher at the public madrasah, creates a WhatsApp group for her homeroom class each year to keep a channel of communication open. She explains that her strategy allows her to extend her influence into students’ home lives by sending them practical and spiritual reminders, in addition to maintaining contact after they move on from her class and eventually graduate. This use of digital media for networking reminds us that it is not only about the relation to an individual’s religiosity, but the way in which ‘digital media also make visible and provide a new form of social infrastructure for the individual’s religion: a network of local communities’ (Lövheim, 2013: 52). For Ibu Rahma, it is certainly important to provide strong spiritual education and guidance while her students are at school, but she can extend her influence in time and space if she is able to appear on her students’ smartphones.

During a class on Islamic ethics at the same madrasah, Ibu Indah was shocked that only a small handful of students claimed to have already completed their morning prayer that day. Encouraging them to take responsibility and also to use technological innovation to develop their spiritual practice, she told them that their excuses for not being able to wake up in time to perform their prayers before school is not an adequate excuse. Now, she explained, they are adults, and can use their cell phones to set an alarm as a reminder.

While using smartphones explicitly for religious activities is encouraged, it is not seen as necessarily required to avoid the pitfalls of technology use. Rather, it is having a strong religious foundation and education more broadly that can ultimately encourage religious engagement and help ensure teenagers do not fall victim to the negative temptations which might continually affront them on their smartphone screens.

Moral panics and the question of authority

At the pesantren, which has the strictest policy regarding technology use of the schools examined, the religious teacher emphasized the importance of creating the right school environment (lingkungan) to instill moral changes in his students. He spoke of the negative impacts of a ‘free lifestyle’ (gaya hidup bebas) and ‘severe moral decadency’ (dekadensi moral yang parah) that can be encountered outside the walls of the school. He understands his role as planting strong religious principles so that when students do find themselves outside, they can hold strong to their religious principles. Despite a variation in policies and pedagogical approaches among Christian and Muslim educators in North Sulawesi, they all tended to agree with the general principle that students need strong guidance grounded in religious values and practice to help them navigate the moral challenges posed in their interactions with the outside world.

While smartphones are understood to pose a moral challenge to those who decide to use them, youth are perceived by educators as particularly at risk because they are seen as not fully developed or sufficiently religiously grounded to navigate the Web’s murky moral terrain. It is for this reason that educators try to guide smartphone usage among their high school students, whether by asking them to use it only in monitored settings or in integrating lessons about media into the curriculum. Educators do not necessarily put all of the blame on youth who fail to use their smartphones as mechanisms toward positive spiritual development. Instead, common discourses about the ‘high curiosity’ (penasaran yang tinggi) characteristic of teenagers absolve some of their responsibility and also underscore the need for educators to provide guidance and spiritual training. Going back to the Catholic religious education class discussion with Ibu Maria, youth are instead framed as potential ‘victims’ (korban) of the media, a status which can be changed by exercising their own agency, positioning themselves critically toward media and using smartphones for a greater good. Thus, educators try to guide smartphone usage among their high school students, whether by asking them to use it only in monitored settings or in integrating lessons about media into the curriculum.

On a critical note, it is important to mention that these concerns voiced among teachers ultimately work to entrench their position of authority and underscore hierarchical inter-generational relations. As Lyn Parker and Pam Nilan (2013: 107) note in their analysis of discourses around youth and ‘free sex’ in Indonesia, the perpetuation of moral panics typically serves the interest of those who already have authority. In creating anxiety around the Internet, teachers stand to benefit from underscoring a problem for which they also hold the solution: religious and moral education for youth. However, this does not mean that youth necessarily passively accept and agree with this narrative. As Claire-Marie Hefner (2022) demonstrates through her fieldwork in Islamic educational settings in Java, young Indonesians are finding creative ways to cultivate a ‘digital edge’, claiming their own forms of authority while still largely signaling agreement with existing moral norms, even as they might critique or question them in certain ways.

The Internet can disrupt established structures authority, leading to a ‘pluralization of voices of religious authority’ (Slama and Hoesterey, 2021: 15), and these impacts are quite important to consider. In referring to the role of media use on the development of religious youth, ‘self-socialization’ has been used to describe the increasing autonomy that youth may have in exploring different forms of religiosity and religious identity through different platforms (Kühle, 2012). However, Moberg et al. (2019: 256) have critiqued the individualist and Western-centric bias of the concept of self-socialization, using data they collected from religious youth in Ghana, Turkey, and Peru to show that media use in religious socialization in these contexts still remains ‘part of a wider web of socialization agents’.

Similar to other moral panics regarding youth in the region (Parker and Nilan, 2013; Stivens, 2002), concerns about the impacts about globalization – and Westernization in particular – take center stage. In this way, concern about smartphones can be seen as another manifestation of these perceived challenges to local cultural values. Using the lens of infrastructure, it is clear that media is seen as having an acceleratory impact with the potential to drive youth down a slippery slope of immorality. In previous moral panics, such as the one analyzed by Parker and Nilan, the tendency of parents and teachers has been categorical rejection (in that specific case, of anything leading to mixed-sex socialization) and tightening control while emphasizing religious values. It is therefore interesting that the tendency in the case of smartphones has not been to categorically reject the use of media and technology among youth, but to make sure it becomes oriented toward specific purposes in order to have an accelerating effect in a positively evaluated direction.

I suggest that this positioning of educators is related to the ‘charismatic’ influence of technology (Lim, 2009), manifesting as continued optimism that technology will positively impact our lives and society despite the ongoing concerns about its negative potential. This echoes an ongoing trend in post-Suharto Indonesia to integrate religious values and practice into aspirations toward modernity and globalization (Rudnyckyj, 2009). The coexisting belief in the positive transformative potential of technology like smartphones and concern for its impact on young students’ characters is therefore not as dichotomous as it may initially appear, manifesting instead as an ambivalence that is dealt with through proper guidance and education.

Instead of rejecting smartphones outright because of concerns about their linkage to moral degradation among youth, educators whom I have met in Manado are for the most part working to integrate socialization about digital media usage within existing religious education. The strategies for doing so are clearly different – ranging from the pesantren which socializes students into a culture of strict monitoring to the private Catholic school which attempts to integrate material explicitly addressing media usage into the religious education curriculum. In other words, educators hope that youth will be able to take ostensibly secular aspects of the outside world, like smartphones, and apply them toward a greater individual and collective good grounded in religious principles.

Conclusion

Applying the concept of digital infrastructures allows for the consideration that moral development might be accelerated down particular pathways and can also help to refer to the mediation that takes place between the digital form, the content, and individual personhood. These relationships can impact the ideologies about media espoused by religious groups. For example, among Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in New York City, an initial concern with impure content (also centered on pornography) ultimately transformed into a concern about the form of the Internet as a force of evil because of its potential to infect individuals with religious doubt, changing their ‘interior affect’ (Fader, 2017: 190). Among Jehovah’s Witnesses in Kyrgyzstan, a different transition occurred, shifting from an outright rejection of digital technology as a medium because of the perverse sexual content it houses to a concern for how it is ultimately put to use (Cardoza, 2019). As religious educators in Indonesia consider the form and content of digital media in relation to selfhood, they tend to agree that it is not the media itself which poses a problem, but the access to content which may be detrimental to spiritual and moral development. However, the form is still seen in terms of its particular capability of having an intensified influence, either helping youth toward their spiritual edification or causing ongoing damage to their moral selfhood.

Educators view smartphones and the digital worlds to which they allow access as not necessarily inherently good or bad, but dependent upon the way in which users engage them. As they consider how to educate Indonesian youth, they have a particular concern for how the digital infrastructures will correspond to the building up of moral infrastructures among Indonesian teenagers. Their conception draws attention to the ways in which this infrastructure can facilitate religious practice and engagement, shepherding one on the path toward righteousness, or can further enable sinful behavior, instead propelling one down a path of moral degradation. Because youth are in this liminal space of ‘not fully adult’, they are assumed to possibly not have a strong enough religious grounding (as religion is understood as an integral part of personhood in this context) to navigate moral challenges coming from the ‘outside world’, most prominently represented through the use of smartphones.

In their conceptions about digital infrastructures and their potentialities about moral development, teachers can be described as ambivalent, recognizing both the positive and negative moral potential of smartphone use on the individuals who constitute the nation’s future generation. Regarding ambivalence among Indonesian Muslim Internet users, Slama and Hoesterey write the following: ‘ambivalence is not simply the result of ethical anxieties, but (…) is generative of new religious sentiments and practices’ (2021: 12). Based on this observation, it will be important to continue to investigate how these strategies adopted by Christian and Muslim educators in Indonesia may impact the way in which youth decide to engage with digital media, and the extent to which religious and spiritual development figures into those forms of engagement.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-scp-10.1177_00377686231182251 – Supplemental material for Smartphones and the education of religious youth in Indonesia: Highway to hell or path of righteousness?

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-scp-10.1177_00377686231182251 for Smartphones and the education of religious youth in Indonesia: Highway to hell or path of righteousness? by Erica M LARSON in Social Compass