Faith-Based Responses to Youth Radicalization: Religious Education, Digital Media, and Community Prevention

Abstract

Youth radicalization is one of the most difficult moral, educational, religious, and public security challenges facing contemporary societies. It cannot be reduced to one cause, one ideology, one community, or one digital platform. Young people may become vulnerable to extremist narratives through identity crisis, moral confusion, discrimination, family breakdown, political grievance, social isolation, online propaganda, peer networks, trauma, and the search for belonging. This article argues that faith communities can play a constructive and nationally significant role in preventing youth radicalization when their work is rooted in sound religious education, digital literacy, pastoral care, family support, interfaith cooperation, and community-based prevention. Drawing on the Qur’an, Hadith, Prophetic Seerah, comparative religious ethics, theories of religious boundaries, public responsibility, social identity, moral formation, digital media studies, and contemporary prevention literature, the article develops a Faith-Based Community Prevention Model. The model combines theological clarity, moral education, digital resilience, trusted mentoring, early support, and public partnership. It rejects both securitized suspicion of religion and naive romanticization of religious communities. Instead, it shows that mosques, churches, synagogues, schools, families, universities, and civic institutions can work together to protect youth from violent extremism while preserving human dignity, religious freedom, and social trust. In keeping with the scholarly pattern of recent work on interreligious boundaries, faithful public ethics, and responsible artificial intelligence, this study connects classical religious resources with contemporary concerns such as online recruitment, hate speech, Islamophobia, antisemitism, religious illiteracy, youth vulnerability, and civic peace. The article concludes that the most effective faith-based response to youth radicalization is neither surveillance alone nor preaching alone. It is a holistic moral ecology in which youth are educated, heard, spiritually guided, digitally equipped, socially included, and connected to peaceful forms of religious identity and public service.