ABSTRACT
Established religious institutions are increasingly shifting their activities away from meeting people’s needs for internal growth and purpose and toward more external forms or pursuits unrelated to spiritual life. Thus, the media not only transmits information, but it also actively produces and frames religious issues, thereby defining what is sacred. Semantic network analysis was used in the study to investigate khutbahs (sermons) and Twitter data from the Turkish Official Religious Institution. Findings reveal that digital religious activities have a stronger relationship with secular topics in tweets than with khutbahs. It is also an attempt to explain how digital media favors secular views over religious views, putting pressure on religious institutions to conform. The result of digital mediatization in the sacred context is a new social and cultural condition in which the power to define and practice religion has been altered. The findings also make a methodological contribution by addressing long-standing questions in digital mediatization of the sacred using “computational social science” methods. These tools are used to analyze khutbahs and tweets to study the mediatization of the sacred in a non-Western context, and the results have implications for the secularization debate.
