Politics of Piety: How Piety Commodified in Contemporary Political Communication of Indonesia

Abstract

The concept of commodification develops to include not only the commodification of audiences, content, and labor at the organizational level but also the commodification of intimate/personal aspect of human being. One of the personal aspects is how people practice religion: piety/religiosity. This commodification is manifested through language use mediated through communication technology. This paper describes how political candidates commodify Islamic piety constructed by the use of language via Twitter (a microblogging platform). For this reason, we collected data from Twitter accounts belong to the candidates for Indonesian presidency2019-2024 and their running mate Twitter accounts. Data are obtained by observing their Twitter accounts during campaign silence period. We identify expression of piety by using piety dimensions we develop. We analyse the messages with the commodification concept. This research shows that Islamic piety is commodified as instrument of political communication. Presidential candidates and their running mate commodify piety by verbalizing: the believing, purifying, glorify, praise, self-surrender to Allāh (genitive proper noun referring to the God in Islām), and ritual worships. It means they present self-image as the pious one. We conclude that commodification of religion in political communication should be understood contextually: commodification of "what religion is" or commodification of "how religiosity is. Commodification of personal aspect of individuals denotes national dan global trend in the form of personalization of everything. New communication technology serves as tool of this proses.