Competing Moral Educators: A Theory of Algorithmic–Parental Authority Contestation in Islamic Education
Keywords:
algorithmic amplification, interpretive authority contestation, Islamic moral socialization, child moral sensemaking, digital religious authority, parental mediationAbstract
Children’s Islamic moral socialization increasingly occurs in algorithmically curated environments where parental guidance coexists with digitally amplified normative interpretations, yet existing research insufficiently explains how children allocate interpretive authority when these sources offer divergent moral meanings. This conceptual paper develops Algorithmic–Parental Interpretive Authority Contestation Theory (APIACT) to address the gap between parental mediation, religious socialization, algorithmic visibility, and digital religious authority research. Through integrative theory building, the paper connects algorithmic selection, legitimacy attribution, normative incongruence, and child-centered sensemaking into a contingent causal architecture. APIACT proposes that algorithms influence moral socialization indirectly by amplifying normative cues and potential authority carriers rather than functioning as moral educators. When children attribute legitimacy to digitally visible sources whose interpretations diverge from parental Islamic guidance, interpretive authority contestation is activated and resolved through relative authority weighting. This process may produce parental alignment, digital authority displacement, interpretive hybridization, or moral compartmentalization. APIACT advances a middle-range explanation of moral socialization under competing normative infrastructures and provides testable mechanisms, boundary conditions, and directions for empirical research on digitally mediated religious authority.
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