Faith-Filtered Political Communication: Negotiating Meaning Among First-Time Voters in Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Election

First-time voters play a crucial role in Indonesia’s 2024 Election, particularly within pesantren (Islamic boarding schools), which serve as influential environments in shaping youth perspectives. This study examines how santri (students in Islamic boarding schools) construct political meaning, interpret democracy, and make voting decisions within a religious educational context. Using a qualitative approach, the study involved 15 participants from three pesantren in East Java. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed thematically to identify patterns in how santri understand political life. The findings reveal that santri understand politics not as a contest for power, but as a moral responsibility and form of social worship, while democracy is interpreted through the Islamic principle of musyawarah (deliberation). The pesantren environment shapes political understanding through everyday moral and communicative practices rather than explicit political instruction, while social media serves as a key source of political information that is filtered through religious values, producing a reflective and ethically grounded mode of engagement. These findings demonstrate how pesantren function as communicative spaces of political socialization, where religious values, institutional interactions, and mediated information intersect to shape critical, ethical, and socially responsible first-time voters.