Strengthening Students' Religious Character During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Students need a religious character to deal with changing times and moral degradation. The value of religious character includes three dimensions of relationship: the relationship of the individual with God, family and peers, and the universe. Religious character education that is sourced from religious teachings and muamalah and applicable moral values has been implemented and is firmly embedded in the educational institutions of Indonesia. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers to keep their distance in educating, accompanying, and controlling students’ worship habits and morals, disrupting the character-building process. Routine activities such as habituation of worship and morals carried out in schools are no longer optimally instilled in students. Therefore, in an educational institution, effective and efficient management is needed so that the implementation of character education can run optimally, effectively, and efficiently during a pandemic. The strengthening of religious character is expected to continue even though teachers and students cannot meet face to face. Several studies have been synthesized with previous research to explain the description of character education management during the pandemic. A systematic literature review has been carried out to overcome this problem by documenting and reviewing all articles related to students’ religious character education from 2019 to 2020. The articles used in this study are 26 national and international accredited journal articles accessed from Lens, Google Scholar, SINTA, DOAJ, and Scopus. The results proved that there is a need for strategically managing religious character education to improve students’ religious character during the pandemic. Keywords: religious character, strengthening, COVID-19 pandemi