I made a wish at the temple, and the abbot made it come true: Algorithmic mediation, religious leadership, and social trust in China

This article examines how algorithmic mediation reshapes religious leadership and trust in contemporary China. Public scandals and satirical works reveal deepening disillusionment with monks’ wealth-seeking behaviors and moral failings. Using grounded theory, the study draws on interviews, digital texts, and extended field observations to develop a theoretical model with five categories: algorithmic mediation, pluralized trust, legitimacy, governance, and digitalization. Algorithms enhance visibility yet gradually erode sacredness, creating traffic-based legitimacy and recurring trust crises. Believers navigate these crises through parasocial intimacy, intergenerational differences, and hybrid online–offline practices, while state and platform governance impose additional structural constraints. Digitalization broadens the religious economy but also drives commodification, fragmentation, and commercialization. Satire and distrust expose fragile conditions under which religious trust becomes unstable and contested. The article advances digital religion research and highlights significant implications for policymakers, religious organizations, technology platforms, and scholars of culture and society.