Artificial Intelligence and Religious Policy: Ethical Governance in the Digital Public Sphere

Artificial intelligence increasingly mediates religious communication, knowledge, and participation in the digital public sphere, yet research remains fragmented across digital religion, human rights, and AI governance. This study examines how AI-mediated religious communication shapes authority, visibility, and participation; identifies associated ethical and rights-based concerns; and analyzes the institutional conditions relevant to its governance. Using a qualitative, non-experimental, exploratory-analytical design, the study draws on academic publications, policy documents, regulatory instruments, institutional guidelines, human-rights reports, and documented analyses of digital religious practices. Materials were purposively selected for substantive relevance and examined through structured reading and extraction, open and focused coding, thematic synthesis, source triangulation, and iterative cross-source comparison. The analysis identified three interconnected domains: access, visibility, and religious authority; religious freedom, inclusion, and algorithmic risks; and accountability, contestability, and institutional responsibility. AI-mediated technologies can broaden access to religious resources while simultaneously shaping the visibility and perceived authority of religious actors and interpretations. Expanded access can coexist with unequal representation, privacy risks, profiling, and constraints on meaningful participation, while distributed responsibility can create accountability gaps when consequential outcomes are difficult to explain or challenge. These relationships are context-dependent rather than predetermined effects of AI. By integrating sociotechnical and algorithmic-governance perspectives, the study provides an analytical framework for understanding ethical governance as the intersection of technological mediation, religious pluralism, fundamental rights, participation, and identifiable institutional responsibility.