Love, faith, and cognitive dissonance in interfaith relationships: A CBT-informed analysis of Indonesian digital narratives on the song Mangu

Interfaith relationships in Indonesia involve negotiations among romantic attachment, religious commitment, moral and spiritual identity, family belonging, and sociocultural expectations. Although interfaith relationships have been widely examined from sociological, theological, and legal perspectives, less is known about how these tensions are cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually narrated in naturally occurring digital spaces. This study examined Indonesian YouTube users’ narratives concerning interfaith relationships, religious conversion, hidayah , sociocultural pressure, and separation in comments surrounding the song Mangu by Fourtwnty featuring Charita Utami. An exploratory corpus analysis using Voyant Tools was first conducted on a broader corpus of 16,356 Indonesian-language YouTube comments to identify lexical patterns and support data familiarization. Subsequently, qualitative content analysis was conducted on 51 criterion-selected comments through inductive thematic analysis, followed by a bounded, non-diagnostic CBT-informed interpretation. Five themes were identified: struggles in maintaining interfaith relationships; religious conversion as a pathway to relational and spiritual alignment; sociocultural and familial pressure; hidayah and changes in belief; and firmness of belief followed by relational separation. Across the narratives, similar contexts of religious difference were assigned different meanings and followed by multiple pathways, including continued negotiation, maintenance of separate religious identities, conversion, reconciliation, and separation. A CBT-informed reading suggests that these pathways may be understood through interactions among cognitive appraisal, core and intermediate beliefs, emotional responses, coping processes, and meaning reconstruction. However, conversion, hidayah , and separation were not treated as inherently adaptive, pathological, or clinically verified processes. The study contributes a context-sensitive framework for interpreting digital narratives at the intersection of religion and intimacy and highlights the need for ethically neutral counseling support that addresses intrapersonal, interpersonal, and sociocultural dimensions.