If Moses had an iPhone: Christian AI Influencers, Racialized Aesthetics, and the Mediatization of Ecclesial Authority

This paper explores the emergence of AI-generated Christian influencer characters circulating on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In a viral TikTok video with over 30 million views, an AI-generated Moses recounts the Exodus narrative in the style of a POV influencer vlog. Accounts such as holyvlogsz, followed by 450,000 users, portray biblical figures—Daniel narrating the lion’s den or Mary announcing her pregnancy—as social media personalities addressing contemporary audiences. Through content analysis of these viral videos, the paper interprets the phenomenon through the lens of mediatization theory, which examines how media logics increasingly structure religious communication. The paper also analyzes the racialized aesthetics of AI-generated biblical figures, showing how visual conventions derived from Western Christian imagery and global platform culture shape representations of sacred characters and influence emerging forms of digitally mediated religious authority. The paper investigates the merging of histories and futures in the AI Christian influencer.