Assessing the Life Cycle of Religious Habituation as a Social System: A Qualitative LCA Perspective on Value-Based Governance in Elementary Education

Purpose: This study aims to reconceptualize religious habituation in elementary education as a social system with a cumulative life cycle of ethical impacts. Rather than treating religious activities as isolated pedagogical practices, the study examines how repeated institutionalized religious habituation functions as a governance mechanism that shapes long-term moral, social, and environmental dispositions among students. By adopting a life cycle perspective, the research seeks to extend the scope of Life Cycle Assessment toward non-material, value-based social outcomes that remain underexplored in current LCA literature. Method: The study employs a qualitative case study design conducted at an Islamic elementary school, using in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. Data were collected from school leaders, religious education teachers, habituation coordinators, and students across grade levels. Analysis followed an iterative thematic process aligned with a social LCA logic, tracing the stages of input, institutional process, repeated practice, and emergent social outcomes over time. Findings: The findings reveal that religious habituation operates as a structured and cyclical system rather than a set of sporadic activities. Regular practices such as collective prayer, Qur’anic recitation, environmental cleanliness routines, and social charity generate cumulative ethical effects, including strengthened religious commitment, heightened environmental responsibility, and sustained prosocial behavior. These outcomes emerge not as immediate results but as long-term products of repeated institutional reinforcement. Significance: This study contributes to Life Cycle Assessment scholarship by proposing a qualitative framework for assessing ethical and social impacts beyond material production systems. It highlights religious habituation as a legitimate unit of analysis within social LCA and offers a novel pathway for integrating moral governance and value formation into life cycle thinking, an area still rarely addressed in Scopus-indexed research.