Virtual Congregation: Intensity of Watching YouTube on Religious Understanding during Covid-19

Abstract

Social media is not only a means of entertainment but also an increase in religious knowledge. The phenomenon of staying at home, working from home, and lockdown as a direct impact of Covid-19 has given a lot of free time to surf in cyberspace. This paper hypothesized that the intensity of watching YouTube during the Covid-19 period affected students' religious understanding with an Islamic education background. The test was conducted on 42 students living in the State Islamic University of Fatmawati Sukarno Bengkulu dormitory. There is a positive influence between the variable intensity of YouTube users on religious understanding with a significance of 0.001. The value of R Square (R) of the two research variables that have been tested is 0.232. Thus, the variable intensity of YouTube users affects the variable of religious understanding by 23.2%, while other variables outside this study influence the remaining 76.8%. In the future, it is necessary to test the influence of similar platforms that are more attractive to millennials in the future.