<![CDATA[Religious character education in Indonesian Islamic elementary schools (Madrasah Ibtidaiyah, MI) faces pressure from digital disruption, post-pandemic learning loss, and weakening school-family alignment, yet dominant frameworks assume character domains develop symmetrically. This study examines how religious character education is implemented in Islamic Religious Education at Madrasah Ibtidaiyah Negeri (MIN) 1 Cilegon, a state Islamic elementary school in an industrial city, identifying the factors conditioning its effectiveness and the impact produced. A single-case design combined interviews and focus groups with 18 participants, 24 observations, and document analysis over five months, analyzed in NVivo 14 through two coding cycles using the moral knowing-feeling-acting framework. Findings show the school operates a four-layer cyclical habituation architecture, daily to annual, sustained by teacher modeling and embedded across the formal and hidden curriculum; effectiveness is moderated by school-family synchronization asymmetry, as parental work schedules constrain home mentoring; and impact is documented for behavioral indicators but only indicated, psychometrically unconfirmed, for affective-spiritual dimensions. Drawing on habituation theory and parental-involvement research, the study argues domain asymmetry is a structural default of MI schooling, not implementation failure, and proposes an Asymmetrically Configured Habituation (ACH) model with three falsifiable propositions on domain asymmetry, temporal stratification, and school-family synchronization conditionality]]>
