Digital religion in platform societies: authority, mediation, and social cohesion in algorithmic publics (2010–2025)

This article critically synthesizes scholarship on digital religion and social cohesion published between 2010 and 2025. Drawing on a corpus of eighty-eight studies, we show that contemporary religious communication is increasingly governed by platform infrastructures, algorithmic visibility, and networked publics conditions that reshape religious authority, ritual practice, and community formation in ways that can both reinforce and fracture cohesion. Rather than treating platforms as neutral channels, the review conceptualizes digital religion as a layered socio-technical ecosystem whose outcomes hinge on the interaction between platform design, actor strategies, and audience participation. To integrate these literatures, the article advances the Platformed Cohesion Model (PCM), which specifies four interacting layers platform, actor, discourse, and cohesion through which digitally mediated religion produces variable effects on vertical cohesion (trust and legitimacy in institutions) and horizontal cohesion (solidarity and belonging among publics). The review concludes by identifying major gaps in cross-platform comparison, algorithm-centered inquiry, and audience-centered approaches, and proposes a research agenda for CMC scholarship that treats cohesion as an emergent property of platform-conditioned religious communication.