Panel: MEDIA PERSPECTIVE: A REFLECTION ON CONTEMPORARY PROGRESSIVE-RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTATION DISPUTES IN THE MEDIA



260.6 - RELIGIOUS TIKTOK IN ITALY: GENDERED VISIBILITY, PLATFORM AUTHORITY, AND INEQUALITIES OF RECOGNITION

AUTHORS:
Conti G. (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia ~ Reggio Emilia ~ Italy)
Text:
This presentation investigates how Italian religious TikTok creators translate devotional practice into short-form media, and how this process reconfigures authority, visibility, and inequality. Drawing on mediatization and the platformization of religion (Hjarvard, 2008), we approach TikTok as an environment where religious communication is shaped by attention metrics, vernacular aesthetics, and intimacy. The analysis focuses on a corpus of Italian accounts, spanning lay devotional leadership (Benedetta Palella), clerical influencer practices (don Alberto Ravagnani), and consecrated-life storytelling (suor Claudia). We examine how prayers, livestreams, micro-homilies, testimonies, and everyday convent scenes are packaged through TikTok-native formats (trends, filters, stitched responses, direct address) and how these formats produce differentiated regimes of recognition. The argument is that TikTok reorganises evangelisation by redistributing credibility and reach across gendered bodies, age, charisma, and stylistic fluency, generating inequalities within religious publics: whose voice becomes legible as "authentic," whose religiosity is framed as inspirational or suspect, and which forms of devotion are amplified or marginalised. Methodologically, we combine qualitative content analysis with platform-sensitive discourse analysis, coding (1) authority cues (clerical status, doctrinal framing, citation of scripture, pastoral counselling), (2) intimacy and relational labour, (3) aesthetic/performative repertoires (humour, modesty and habit aesthetics, "everyday holiness"), and (4) interactional conflicts (controversies, accusations of exhibitionism, gatekeeping, moderation). The contribution clarifies how "digital missionary" practices in Italy enact a hybrid religious authority at the intersection of institution, charisma, and platform logics, with inequality effects that are symbolic (recognition), social (belonging), and communicative (voice and reach).