A promotional ad for the 2023 Christian Influencer Convention (CIC), held in Las Vegas, opened with “Calling all believers: do you desire to create a profound impact through your faith?” The conference promised a chance to “connect with like-minded influencers who are using their platforms to spread the gospel.”[1]
A 2022 ad for the “He Gets Us” campaign with over 12 million views intones, “There was an influencer who became insanely popular. Everybody started following him. Then one day he stood up for something he believed in. People got angry. The establishment called him an extremist, said he shouldn’t be allowed to share his views. They would stop at nothing to shut him up. So they did what they had to do. They nailed him to a cross.” The ad ends with the words “Jesus was canceled. He gets us.”[2]
Together, these two ads highlight a dynamic in the contemporary U.S. evangelical influencer community around the benefits and risks of social media ecologies. While the former ad encourages Christians to become influencers so that they can use their platforms to gain both followers and converts to the faith, the second equates influencer status with silencing, suffering, and social or actual death. The former ad equates influencing with the freedom to speak publicly and to large audiences about one’s beliefs, while the latter portrays influencing as a secular activity that uses social power to punish religious believers by labeling them “extreme” and canceling them. At stake are a set of questions about individual media consumption and the viability of social media as an evangelizing tool framed in the language of Christian theology: who are you, who are you following and why?
Evangelicalism’s pragmatic embrace of the market and media technologies as part of a broader strategy to “shake the world for Jesus,” as Heather Hendershot has argued, which has given rise to an enormous industry of “Christian lifestyle” products and publications, shaping evangelicals as both consumers and believers while also giving rise to internal debates around whether and how the marketing of evangelicalism has diluted or deformed the message.[3] So intertwined have U.S. evangelicalism and commercialism become that some scholars of American religion argue that evangelicalism is best described as a product shaped by market forces, rather than a religion. Kristin Kobes du Mez argues that evangelicalism is a “culture of consumption, a web of interlinking personal, institutional and distribution networks” rather than a coherent theological identity.[4] Likewise, Daniel Vaca argues that evangelicalism is best defined as a “commercial religion,” a framing that “allows us to acknowledge that shifting modes of technology and capitalism continually reshape the processes through which companies cultivate the markets and publics that we recognize as religions.”[5] Vaca’s work is specifically on how the evangelical publishing industry fueled evangelicals’ “desire to saturate American society with their ‘distinctive’ brand of Protestantism,” but a similar desire to saturate social media also animates the evangelical influencer ecosystem.
And that ecosystem is massive. There are over 45 million tagged Christian influencer videos on TikTok. Christian influencers are recognizable by a similar aesthetic and phrases in their bios like “I love Jesus,” “God fearing,” “Christ follower,” or just “Jesus.” Running through many Christian influencer bios is an often implicit, sometimes explicit justification about using one’s platform as a way to “share” (in evangelical terms, testify to) one’s faith. These sorts of claims dovetail with messages broadcast by Christian ministries and found on evangelical church websites directing all believers to embrace their calling as Christian influencers, “Influencers for Jesus” or “Influencers for Christ.” At the same time, there are strong evangelical critiques of social media as a source of greed, hate, anxiety, fear, and depression, with a few going as far as to say that Satan, not Jesus, was the original influencer.
This presentation explores these debates around evangelical participation in the social media ecosystem through an analysis of Sadie Robertson Huff’s 2022 book Who Are You Following?: Pursuing Jesus in a Social Media Obsessed World. Sadie found fame as a teenager on the A&E reality show Duck Dynasty, which aired from 2012-2017, as a granddaughter of Phil Robertson, patriarch of the Robertson family and founder of Duck Commander, a Louisiana-based hunting and outdoor recreation company. The show portrayed the extended Robertson family as devout evangelicals who ended each episode with prayer. Now 27, Sadie has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, launched a successful career as a Christian speaker, authored eight books with Christian publishing companies, hosts a podcast, and has a prominent social media presence (5 million IG followers, 1.6 million on X and 1.7 million on Facebook). Robertson Huff attempts to negotiate space for Christian influencers like herself to engage with social media platforms through a mixture of psychological and theological arguments; her book holds the risks and rewards of such participation together in a somewhat uneasy tension. In acknowledging both the beneficial and harmful uses of social media and providing guidelines around how to properly orient oneself theologically toward the technology to avoid harming yourself or others, Robertson Huff can be said to exemplify a form of what Rosenthal and Ribak (2013) termed “media ambivalence,” or “the active negotiation of media by subjects who hold ambivalent attitudes toward communication technologies.”[6] Ultimately, Robertson Huff advocates for continued social media engagement, but in ways that seem to run counter to the internal logics of the platforms. I argue that in these spaces we can see evangelical influencers attempting to articulate new theological justifications and standards for proper self-regulation and engagement with technology for themselves and their followers.
[1] “Calling all believers! Christian Influencer Convention 2023!” wearecic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwOtu4idXLI&list=TLGGBtd5sp2pxPQxMTA4MjAyMw.
[2] “The Influencer.” He Gets Us. April 14, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1IJFJwexus.
[3] Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[4] Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020).
[5] Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 231.
[6] Michele Rosenthal and Rivka Ribak, “On Pomegranates and Etrogs: Internet Filters as Practices of Media Ambivalence among National Religious Jews in Israel,” in Digital Judaism, ed. Heidi Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2015).
This paper investigates internal debates within the U.S. evangelical community about how Christians should best relate to social media technologies and social media influencers. While some argue that influencing is as old as Christianity itself and that Jesus was the first influencer, others critique the gathering of followers and likes as distracting and even idolatrous. I show that in these spaces we can see evangelical influencers attempting to articulate new theological justifications and standards for proper self-regulation and engagement for themselves and their followers.