The Digital Landscape of God: Narrative, Visuals and Viewer Engagement of Religious Videos on YouTube

2025-09-13

AI Summary

This study investigates how religious videos on platforms such as YouTube elicit spiritual experiences and enhance audience engagement through narrative and visual design. Employing a mixed-methods approach, it develops a taxonomy of religious video content, integrates LLM-assisted coding, multimodal content analysis, and interaction data mining to systematically examine how narrative structure, visual aesthetics, and AI-generated content influence engagement metrics. Results reveal significant inter-religious variation in affective arousal, symbolic representation, and cinematographic techniques; a positive correlation between AI-generated content and interaction rates; and synergistic effects between narrative genres (e.g., testimonial vs. doctrinal) and visual strategies (e.g., close-ups, slow motion) in fostering immersion and communal identification. The study contributes an empirically grounded model of digital spirituality, offering actionable insights for designing more inclusive and participatory religious media practices.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Video Understanding & Activity Analysis
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems

Abstract

The digital transformation of religious practice has reshaped how billions of people engage with spiritual content, with video-sharing platforms becoming central to contemporary religious communication. Yet HCI research lacks systematic understanding of how narrative and visual elements create meaningful spiritual experiences and foster viewer engagement. We present a mixed-methods study of religious videos on YouTube across major religions, developing taxonomies of narrative frameworks, visual elements, and viewer interaction. Using LLM-assisted analysis, we studied relationships between content characteristics and viewer responses. Religious videos predominantly adopt lecture-style formats with authority-based persuasion strategies, using salvation narratives for guidance. All prefer bright lighting, with Buddhism favoring warm tones and prominent symbols, Judaism preferring indoor settings, and Hinduism emphasizing sacred objects. We identified differentiated patterns of emotional sharing among religious viewers while revealing significant correlations between content characteristics and engagement, particularly regarding AI-generated content. We provide evidence-based guidance for creating inclusive and engaging spiritual media.

Problem

• Analyzing narrative and visual elements in religious YouTube videos
• Understanding viewer engagement patterns across major religions
• Investigating content characteristics and emotional response correlations

Innovation

• LLM-assisted analysis of religious videos
• Taxonomies for narrative and visual elements
• Correlations between content and engagement