ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a public Facebook group called Project Engage. It analyzes the interactions in these groups as a form of religious mediatization that is more closely connected to grassroots sentiments of everyday Malaysians, and ask how these mediatized inter-/intrareligious occurrences can be situated in the evolving religious narrative of Malaysia. The online ethnographic description and analysis of Malaysian Facebook group will take the socio-constructivist approach to mediatization theory, which refers to “the process of a communicative construction of socio cultural reality and analyzes the status of various media within that process”. Stig Hjarvard asserts that mediatization is nondeterministic, yet he contextualizes religion as a cultural institution that has “in various ways become influenced by the media”. Hjarvard argues, in his notion of banal religion, that pop-culture’s uses and representations of various religious elements in its content has made it the dominant representation of religion in society, and thus a major authority in religion.
