Platforms as Infrastructural Religions: Authority, Visibility, and Algorithmic Power in the Digital Age

This paper advances the Platforms as Infrastructural Religions framework by examining how religious interpretation is reconditioned when it circulates within engagement-ranked digital infrastructures. It introduces Externalized Interpretive Sovereignty to describe a structural shift in which religious institutions retain internal authority over doctrine, while the public prominence of interpretations—what becomes central, representative, or urgent—becomes partially governed by platform systems that allocate visibility through ranking, recommendation, and behavioral optimization. To maintain analytic boundary discipline, the paper distinguishes infrastructural mediation (the conditioning of interpretive prominence through engagement optimization) from algorithmic adjudication (moderation and boundary enforcement), reserving the latter for a subsequent installment. It then specifies four mechanisms through which mediation operates: engagement optimization as selection pressure, authority migration toward platform-native legitimacy, repetition and perceived orthodoxy within personalized feeds, and compression under attention economies. Two illustrative cases ground the argument. First, the paper analyzes religious practice applications as a low-polemical devotional setting in which routine formation and encounterability become organized through subscription and interface architectures, producing layered sovereignty without formal doctrinal displacement. Second, it examines digitally mediated Christian nationalist discourse as a politically intensified case demonstrating structural alignment between engagement-optimized infrastructures and identity-fused interpretive forms, without attributing origins to platforms. The paper concludes by extending the analysis from religious interpretation to broader questions of collective truth recognition, arguing that as prominence becomes contingent on infrastructural visibility rather than deliberative validation, epistemic sovereignty increasingly unfolds within algorithmically structured environments.