Rereading Peter L. Berger's Social Constructs on the Fragmentation of Digital Religious Authority

Abstract

This paper reviews Peter L. Berger's social construction in the context of the fragmentation of religious authority in digital era. Berger emphasized that social reality is the result of human construction through the process of externalization, objectification, and internalization. Externalization in which humans express themselves and create a social world through daily activities. Objectivity is a social product of human beings to be an objective reality that is recognized by all, such as norms, laws, religions. Meanwhile, internalization is the process of reabsorbing the objective reality into consciousness, so that it is considered natural and taken for granted. However, in the digital era, this process is disrupted because religious authorities are no longer single and stable, but are fragmented by discourse competition between traditional clerics, the state, academics, and digital actors. This fragmentation shows that the legitimacy of authority is not solely determined by religious institutions, but also by the logic of media, symbolic capital, and virtual interaction. This paper proposes a critique that the social construction of religious authority in Indonesia is not sufficiently understood in a classical framework that presupposes the stability of meaning but needs to be approached through the dynamics of digital contestation and identity politics. This article emphasizes the importance of reconstructing Berger's theory to be relevant to explain the changes in religious authority in an increasingly plural and digitized society.