Cyber Evangelism: Navigating the Cringe Nature of Religious Social Media Content

Words: Funmi Lijadu

Make it stand out

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. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

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 on what might be behind cybervangelism’s cringe factor. He noted that “much of this material is being produced by people who know each other” meaning that their intention is not to bring in new converts but to reach people who share similar views. Wuthnow also explained that outside the circles in which these videos are shared ironically, the simplicity of this content may be “attractive to people who are turned off by the gloom and doom scenarios of political religion”. 

Josiah Oyawale, 25, who has also been inundated with Christian evangelical context in his feed told me that the videos are “cringe because they’re disingenuous”. He continued, “Good humour is usually unpredictable but Christian humour is hyper-predictable” - Oyawale feels that these clichés and over familiarised references make a lot of the content seem stale and contrived. 

Still, whether a video makes you laugh, smile or cringe, it is clear that appealing to emotions is a timeless approach for spiritual groups in today’s attention economy. The endless and high-speed revolving doors of trends and pop culture obsessions means that the ways spiritual peddlers and evangelical people are fighting for our attention is shifting. 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?

In a sense, any attention is good attention online, especially if it translates into partnerships and audience. In this wild west of social media fame, it’s no surprise that spiritual institutions are using sensationalised videos for promotional purposes. In today’s landscape, shocking or cringe content can be a huge short-term advantage and it would be unsurprising that spiritual accounts are cashing in on the cringe that was already being attributed to them.