Cyber Evangelism: Navigating the Cringe Nature of Religious Social Media Content
*This article was originally published on PolyesterZine*
Karl Marx famously said that religion is the ‘opiate of the people’. Following that thread, I think laughter is the opiate of those who are chronically online. The content that keeps us glued to our screens is often geared towards making us laugh, whether comedy was the intended purpose or not. Unintentional humour is in high demand. Especially in today’s digital culture, videos and posts that are assumed to be uploaded earnestly, end up being the funniest of them all, due to the devastatingly wide gap between the perceived intention and the audience impact.
Banking on the continued virality of comedy are, surprisingly, the spiritual subsects of social media. I don’t have to scroll far on TikTok to find spiritual content. It’s even more pervasive on Instagram reels where there is endless content laced with spiritual messaging across a range of institutions and belief systems. From Christians inviting me to walk with Jesus, ‘Holy girl’ coaches selling ‘get rich quick’ e-books, and dubious ‘energy wave’ healers peddling their sex therapy courses, it seems that those blessed by the divine are opening up their doors to peddle their wares in a totally unprecedented manner.
Spirituality was a much easier sell when the world was less connected and information was less accessible. It’s easy to manage public perceptions of your religion if you keep all your religious texts in libraries and most people can’t read them - for centuries Christians were not empowered to read the Bible themselves. But religious leaders and institutions can’t gatekeep knowledge on the scale that they used to, which makes keeping a squeaky clean reputation harder than ever. Yet the access to audiences that social media platforms offer to spiritual groups and institutions is a double-edged sword: more eyes on you means more opportunity for sales and support, but also more opportunity for scrutiny. The open forum also means that people can react in real time with quips, laughing emojis and tagging their friends to join in on the mockery.
The difference between my Instagram feed and my TikTok For You Page is never more poignant than when I stumble across exorcism roleplay videos on the former. While people can be incredibly cruel and weird on TikTok, the echo chambers are often fairly contained where people don’t often encounter opposing views, making trolling on that platform a little different to the Insta comment section.
“Are they earnest videos that find virality by accident, or is there an underside to the earnestness of religious content that seeks to be pushed as far and wide as possible?”
Instead, the Reels algorithm takes part in troll baiting for engagement; pushing content for people to mock onto our screens. And a significant amount of these videos happen to be focusing on religion. I asked Robert Wuthnow, Professor of Sociology at Princeton for his perspective…[Become a PolyesterZine member to read the full article]