The next religious revolution is happening online

Digital religion is messy, contradictory, cacophonous. But disorder has always been the engine of renewal.

- REZA ASLAN GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

THE COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift to streaming religious services. The faithful are not going to undo that transformation.

(EL&A Getty Images)

THE MOST IMPORTANT religious revolution of our time isn’t happening in mosques or churches. It's happening on screens.

For millions of young Muslims around the world, the spiritual life that once flowed through the mosque is now being livestreamed from a bedroom, uploaded to YouTube and shared on TikTok. Twitch preachers, Instagram sheikhs, WhatsApp fatwas — these are often dismissed as symptoms of decline: religion cheapened into memes, centuries of tradition eroded by hashtags.

But look closer, and you may see something else. The rise of what I and other scholars of religions have taken to calling the “Cyber Ummah” — a worldwide Muslim community knit together online, where faith and identity are reshaped through digital connection - is not the death of Islam. It may be its renewal.

From the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century to the fall of the caliphate in the 20th, Islam has always evolved in response to rupture.

Each disruption fractured old certainties and dispersed authority, forcing believers to renegotiate what it means to be Muslim. What we are witnessing online today is merely the latest chapter in this 1,400-year struggle over the meaning and message of the world’s second-largest religion.