Redeem All

How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture

Corrina Laughlin

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520976856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Redeem All examines the surprising intersection of American evangelicalism and tech innovation. Corrina Laughlin looks at the evangelical Christians who are invested in imagining, using, hacking, adapting, and creating new media technologies for religious purposes. She finds that entrepreneurs, pastors, missionaries, and social media celebrities interpret the promises born in Silicon Valley through the framework of evangelical culture and believe that digital media can help them (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) put their own dent in the universe. Laughlin introduces readers to "startup churches" hoping to reach a global population, entrepreneurs coding for a deeper purpose, digital missionaries networking with mobile phones, and Christian influencers and podcasters seeking new forms of community engagement. Redeem All reveals how evangelicalism has changed as it eagerly adopts the norms of the digital age.

1

The Church

FROM THE MEGACHURCH TO THE START-UP CHURCH

I’m sitting in the airy lobby of a Baptist church outside of Nashville, Tennessee, where I have been told that it is a minor scandal when the pastor does not to wear a tie on a Sunday. I’m enjoying a cookie from the in-house coffee shop and talking to the church’s digital strategy director, whom I will call John. John tells me that he fears for the long-term viability of evangelicalism. Church leaders just are not keeping up with advances in American culture, he tells me. The church is getting grayer, and the people in charge are not paying enough attention to the interests of younger generations. “I’m going to tell you that God’s Word is relevant for your life,” he begins, explaining how young people experience church. “I’m going to tell you what He has pertains to what’s going on right now—but everything I surround you with in that room you walk into is not relevant to your life. At home you experience five screens while you’re watching TV. We’re not doing that at church.” For John and others the problem with church and with evangelicalism as a whole is that it is not attracting a younger generation attuned to media technologies and the entertainment value and social engagement they offer.

John has worked in Christian institutions most of his adult life, and although he voices his concern more forcefully than others, most of the people I spoke with for this book expressed some version of this same sentiment: the church is not keeping up with popular culture, and if it continues to be oblivious to the technological changes happening in the world around it, the digital habitus that has come to define the American middle-class experience, it will disappear. There is some statistical evidence that this is true. The growth of the millennial “nones”—those who claim no religious affiliation—is often cited by Christians as a particularly troubling problem.¹ For many evangelicals the way to attract these younger people is by paying attention to changes in the technological landscape. Their message, as they see it, is timeless, and if the right tools are employed to express that message, the church will thrive. If evangelicals can harness the power of the smartphone, the VR headset, the Apple Watch, perhaps they can reenergize evangelical culture and generate revival. But, if they can’t, some evangelicals fear evangelicalism might fade into history. For many, this means churches must embrace technology within their walls, and that they should learn from the workings of those tech companies that clearly have a hold on the popular imagination.

As my conversation with John continues, he explains that the problem is not just that church is not entertaining people. It is that church no longer understands how people think and operate in the contemporary world. He believes churches should think about their parishioners in the way that companies like Google and Facebook think about their customers. “People have a deep desire to be known,” John tells me, “and if people are giving over these massive amounts of data on Facebook and on other platforms, churches should coalesce that data. . . . We have to think in such a way that we really individualize stuff for people.” For John, the path forward should be moving the church into the present by understanding the digital habitus of young people conditioned by new media companies who use individualized targeting strategies to serve them content. He wants churches to integrate these practices into church services and church outreach. His concern, however, is that the church as a whole is not up to the task.

Adapting church services to changes in popular culture has been a central preoccupation in evangelical church leadership since the “church growth” movement of the 1970s. This strategy relied on catering to the habitus of the American middle-class suburbanite, and it proved successful in establishing a network of megachurches that came to define evangelicalism for a generation. Although there are myriad versions of evangelical church, there is also a normative model for how successful churches should look in evangelical culture. For years the megachurch has provided that model. This chapter charts how churches are beginning to cater to digital habitus and in so doing are generating new aesthetics and new liturgical modes. I argue that Life.Church² represents the apotheosis of a large, dispersed network of churches that have attempted to integrate technology and digital habitus into the spaces of their churches and the strategies that define their outreach. For many evangelicals this has become the normative model of how successful churches should look.³

Life.Church calls itself a “start-up church,” and that moniker has been reinforced by their very successful app, the YouVersion Bible App. In 2012 the New York Times reported that YouVersion was the result of a multimillion-dollar investment that the church made in technology. In 2013 alone, Life.Church reportedly spent $20 million on the app (see O’Leary, 2013). Beyond the Bible App, however, Life.Church has provided resources and guidance for churches that want to move into the digital age, and their success and growth indicates that many evangelicals do. This chapter discusses how and why enthusiasm for new media technologies has taken hold in evangelical churches. I argue that this is a continuation of the “church growth movement” focus on the habitus of the American middle-class consumer. But even as the proponents of technological modernization in the church argue that their work is moving evangelicalism into the future, they are still refusing to face the inequities around race and class that their focus on digital habitus both reflects and generates.

CHURCH CREATIVES, CHURCH GEEKS

Vintage video games are set up in a large, loftlike room with exposed beams and industrial-style fans. Bearded men wearing stylish T-shirts and jeans cradle iPads as they wait for their turn at the nearest console. This building and its inhabitants look like they could be in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the epicenter of hipsterdom, but they are standing in the lobby of Watermark Community Church, an evangelical megachurch in Dallas, Texas. This is the scene at Echo,⁴ a yearly conference that promises to be the meeting place for “artists, geeks and storytellers who serve the church” (EchoHub, 2018).

The theme of the 2013 conference I attended was “8-bit”—an early form of computer animation, so named because it only allowed for 8 bits per pixel. This animation was developed in the late 1980s and used in video games like Space Invaders and Super Mario World. The conference organizers used 8-bit in all of their promotional materials and created Nintendo-style 8-bit animations that were accompanied by bass-heavy electronic music to introduce each of their main speakers. The Echo organizers chose this theme because, as one explained in his introductory remarks, his generation of Christians came of age spiritually at the same time as video games were coming of age technologically. Thus a generation of millennial evangelicals share a collective memory rife with coexisting Christian and technological narratives, which was externalized in Echo’s promotional materials and conference stylings. The 8-bit imagery that pervaded the event signified the personal engagement with media that members of this group overwhelmingly had in common. At this conference those who identified as “church creatives” or “church geeks” (both of these terms were used at the conference but are also used in broader circles) hailed each other and reinforced their social bonds. Many people who had followed each other on Twitter for years shook hands for the first time at Echo. As the conference organizers posted on their website: “Echo has created a tribe . . . and one that we love. We love connecting with hundreds of like-minded creative types in the Church. Echo has become an annual reunion of sorts for us and many others. We deeply cherish this reunion and the friends we get to see” (EchoHub, 2018).

So what is this tribe whose solidarity was on display at the Echo conference?⁵ Who are these church creatives and church geeks? The people who came together at Echo are the vanguards of a new generation of evangelical church professionals that hope to push the church into the digital era. As churches have evolved into the high-tech, multimedia spaces that have come to define evangelical worship, these new careers and cultural figures whose authority rests on their ability to understand digital habitus have emerged as central to church leadership. But even though they are young and hip, the ideals that drive them are the same ones that have guided evangelical churches since the 1970s and the founding of the church growth movement.

MAKING THE MEGACHURCH

Although the earliest evangelical churches in the United States emulated the style of European cathedrals, as American evangelicalism’s democratic, populist leanings began to dominate, evangelicals experimented with different forms of church. Church services in theaters became popular (see Kilde, 2002), and the Second Great Awakening saw preachers using outdoor spaces to energize mass gatherings. And as evangelicals adapted to an audience of American Christians who seemed to crave a flexible form of liturgy, they were rewarded with congregants. In this way, through continual iteration, evangelicalism in America evolved as a populist religion with a strong bias toward shaping its culture and liturgy based on what proved popular in secular culture.

This willingness to adapt formal structures to the preferences of parishioners and potential parishioners reached an apex with the church growth movement, which began in the late 1970s and saw megachurches pop up in suburbs across the country. Megachurches have been defined as those churches that house two thousand or more parishioners per weekend (typically churches offer several services between Saturday and Sunday). In their “Megachurch Report” (2020) Warren Bird and Scott Thumma surmised that the median megachurch had twelve hundred seats in its auditorium. Megachurches also host many “small groups” in which more manageable groups of parishioners come together to do Bible study or otherwise create small community spaces—such as men’s groups or couples’ groups—that are meant to counterbalance the largeness of church worship.

As megachurches began to spring up in the 1970s, “church growth consults” proliferated and a suite of books were (and continue to be) written on the subject. The Christian publisher Zondervan has a “church growth section” on its website that contains more than a hundred titles. At its core the church growth strategy focuses its outreach on “seekers”; seeker-churches want to grow their church by converting previously unaffiliated or otherwise affiliated people. As sociologists of religion have asserted, after the 1950s patterns of American religious affiliation changed (see Wuthnow, 1998). It was no longer assumed that one would follow the religious traditions of their family or community. Instead, the popular focus shifted to individual notions of spiritual progress and reward. Wade Clark Roof (1999) has called this America’s “spiritual marketplace,”⁶ a field in which religious producers use various strategies to attract spiritual “seekers.”⁷

Rick Warren’s 1995 classic evangelical church growth manual The Purpose Driven Church, which has sold more than a million copies, maps out how churches can attract these American seekers. Warren’s strategy relies on catering to specific demographic and cultural norms that he gleans, as a business would, using survey research and census data. Warren’s initial goal was to plant a church that appealed to middle-class suburbanites in southern California. He wrote about and diagrammed a composite figure that would fit into his imagined church. This was “Saddleback Sam.” In his book Warren explains that Saddleback Sam (named for Saddleback, the community in Orange County, California, where Warren wanted to plant his church) was a hard-working, well-educated, professional person who had some apprehension about organized religion. To reach a person like this, Warren thought, churches had to cater to their needs and develop spaces where they would feel comfortable.

As Warren saw it, Saddleback Sam liked the strip malls and big-box stores peppered around his neighborhood, so churches should think about the aesthetics of those stores when they crafted their spaces. “When my friend Larry DeWitt was called to pastor a church in southern California,” Warren explained, “he found a small clapboard church building in a high-tech suburban area. Larry recognized that the age and style of the building were a barrier to reaching that community. He told the church leaders he’d accept the pastorate if they’d move out of the building and start holding services in a Hungry Tiger restaurant. The members agreed” (Warren, 1995, p. 269). For Warren, the traditional style of the central steepled church did not appeal to those suburbanites who saw it as anachronistic. Instead, they cast the familiar environs of a corporate chain restaurant as a more appropriate setting for a church. Warren’s story illustrates one of the tenets of church growth: to grow, a church must tap into the style and culture of a community. “To penetrate any culture,” Warren wrote, “you must be willing to make small concessions in matters of style in order to gain a hearing” (1995, p. 196). For Saddleback Sam, old church buildings carried the baggage of what many viewed as an oppressive religious past, while malls, theaters, and restaurants spoke to the consumer-driven present of the American suburbs. In this way, Warren was urging pastors to use the aesthetics and class habitus of the suburbs to attract parishioners. But notably, Saddleback Sam, as pictured in Warren’s book, is white. The imaginary of suburban life, what Donald Trump once called “the suburban lifestyle dream,” has presented a vision of respite from the city that expressed a (typically) unspoken racial vision.⁸ As white populations abandoned cities and moved into the suburbs in the 1950s, evangelicals isolated themselves from other races in metaphorically closed communities. So the church growth movement catered to a suburban habitus that was assumed to be white.

Writing about the practice of photography in the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu described how “the most trivial photograph expresses, apart from the explicit intentions of the photographer, the system of schemes of perception, thought and appreciation common to a whole group” (1965/1990, p. 6). The aesthetics of photography are established by social groups and understood within them. So too with church styles that became common and popular in the suburbs. In attempting to remain “relevant”—a term evangelicals often use to describe an ideal vision of an engaged church culture that can communicate with a modern population of churchgoers—evangelicals created spaces that attracted a certain type of person. Megachurches thus became classed and raced spaces, communicating cultural norms through their aesthetics. This is one of the central reasons that American evangelical churches have remained largely segregated spaces (see chapter 5 for a deeper dive into this subject).

Evangelicals have tried to port their central church growth strategies to other contexts, for example to big cities, but they tend to face a host of problems. As one Black Christian has written, “There are plenty of great books about urban or diverse church planting, but they are mostly written from a cultural and privileged bias. They write about the complexities of planting churches in cities, but they ignore the complexities of contextualization in specific ethnic communities. They often exclude certain minority groups. So even our progress made in church planting in urban cities results in white churches being produced in ethnic and economically diverse cities and cultures” (Holmes, 2016). In general, the popular aesthetics of the church growth movement attract the Saddleback Sams of the world, and they create comfortable spaces for him. Christian author Latasha Morrison (2019) has written about the alienating experience of being a Black woman in a primarily white evangelical church, explaining that “some of my white friends thought color shouldn’t matter in the body of Christ, an easy thing for them to say. I’d ask them to imagine themselves in an ...