The Digital Evangelicals

Contesting Authority and Authenticity After the New Media Turn

Travis Warren Cooper

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253062284
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When it comes to evangelical Christianity, the internet is both a refuge and a threat. It hosts Zoom prayer groups and pornographic videos, religious revolutions and silly cat videos. Platforms such as social media, podcasts, blogs, and digital Bibles all constitute new arenas for debate about social and religious boundaries, theological and ecclesial orthodoxy, and the internet's inherent danger and value.

In The Digital Evangelicals, Travis Warren Cooper locates evangelicalism as a media event rather than as a coherent religious tradition by focusing on the intertwined narratives of evangelical Christianity and emerging digital culture in the United States. He focuses on two dominant media traditions: media sincerity, immediate and direct interpersonal communication, and media promiscuity, communication with the primary goal of extending the Christian community regardless of physical distance. Cooper, whose work is informed by ethnographic fieldwork, traces these conflicting paradigms from the Protestant Reformation through the rise of the digital and argues that the tension is culminating in a crisis of evangelical authority. What counts as authentic interaction? Who has authority over the circulation of information?

While many studies claim that technology influences religion, The Digital Evangelicals reveals how Protestant metaphors and discourses shaped the emergence of the internet and explores what this relationship with global new media means for evangelicalism.

PART I

MEDIA AND MESSAGE

ONE

MEDIA SINCERITY AND PROMISCUITY

Origins

ON OCTOBER 31, 1517, A perturbed Augustinian monk marched to the castle church in the community of Wittenberg, in rural northeast Germany, and nailed to its doors a lengthy list of theological complaints. Commentators sometimes romanticize this event by painting a picture of a stalwart religious firebrand desecrating the physical structure of a Catholic church with a massive hammer and crucifix-worthy nails. But such was hardly the case. In fact, there were ninety-five theses, but these aphorisms were likely attached to the door among pamphlets, notifications, and academic information. As the entry to the parish church, this door served as the public bulletin board. Imagine Martin Luther’s paradigm-shifting list—nearly as famous now as the Ten Commandments—stapled amid flyers for upcoming lectures and lists of disputation theses for public presentation and defense. A world-altering text among miscellanies.

Historians argue as to how widely Luther intended his theses to circulate. As he disclosed in a personal letter, he may have only wanted the attention of local theologians and other educated men. But according to Andrew Pettegree’s Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation, over time Luther proved himself a shrewd businessman, celebrity brand, and author of popular texts who almost single-handedly drove not only the fracturing of Christendom but the European print revolution. As Pettegree (2015, 54, 73, 75) writes, “It was the printing press that made Luther’s theses a public matter and would rapidly make of their author a controversial and notorious figure.” Regardless of his initial intent, as Luther became cognizant of the untapped power of the printing press, he strove to give his work “the widest possible circulation.” The Ninety-Five Theses, once authorities beyond Wittenberg caught whiff of them, went through an unprecedented three separate reprintings. Here, at the beginning of what was to become the great Protestant Reformation, we see hints of media promiscuity beginning to stir.

Many studies of evangelicalism take for granted the communication media at the crux of the debate, but this chapter foregrounds a reading of the protoevangelical Protestant Reformation event “that is organized around its media,” to adopt one religion scholar’s apt phrasing (Ward 2014, 116). This chapter tells the curious story of the birth of the dueling impulses of media sincerity and promiscuity, which is to say, it narrates the story of the Reformation and its immediate aftermath. Out of the Reformation, in short, emerged two intertwined media paradigms that would not only engender a new religious movement but would structure the entire system of Western communication. After tracing the beginnings of this new media paradigm, the second part of this history- and theory-oriented chapter focuses in on the usefulness of the concept of media ecology for the study of evangelical publics and addresses the questions surrounding technological determinism, affordances, uptake, and media ideologies.

THE RISE OF MEDIA PROMISCUITY

To describe the birth of media promiscuity, the first of two roots of what by the end of this chapter I will define as the evangelical media ecology, I turn initially to the example of one of the key motivators behind the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther (1483–1546). In this section I describe Luther’s textual endeavors and the aftereffects of the Reformation’s innovations on religious authority and power. Evangelical media promiscuity, it turns out, originated with the Reformation’s emphasis on mass textual production and circulation.

When Luther came on the scene, the disgruntled Catholic monk did not so much invent a new media paradigm as he commandeered developments already underway in Catholic Europe. Bibles printed in vernacular languages had begun to enter the consumer market. Cheaply produced and easily distributed small media, such as pamphlets or tracts, had grown in circulation. New visual art and image duplication techniques were on the rise. Although the task sent him into bankruptcy, Johannes Gutenberg (1394–1468) had by this time developed the movable type printing press by tinkering with Chinese designs. Ten years before Luther posted his list of theological disputes more than two hundred European cities already had presses and had put some six million monographs into the quickly growing consumer market (Horsfield 2015, 188–191).

In Germany, however, the few presses up and running were devoted largely to the labor of printing Catholic documents not intended for mass circulation or vernacular reading practices, such as indulgences or dispositions. Luther’s rapid and controversial rise to publicity owed much to the developing media currents. In fact, the production of texts and their unintended uptake by unexpected audiences played a leading role in bringing about the Reformation. In a letter to Pope Leo X, Luther claimed that he intended his theses for the community at Wittenberg only and not a wider audience. “I did not wish to have [the Ninety-Five Theses] widely circulated,” Luther (1518 [1908], 23) worried at one point because he “only intended submitting them to a few learned men for examination. . . . But now they are being spread abroad and translated everywhere.” His published complaint, he explained, “was made public in such a wise [sic] that I cannot believe it has become known to all men” (Horsfield 2015, 192; cf. Dillenberger 1962, xxi). From a media studies perspective, Luther, at least at first, intended his theses as local media, not mass media. Luther’s theses were by intention small media.¹ But his experimental texts quickly got away from him. Promiscuous media tend to be unpredictable like that. Regarding new media, Chun (2016, 102) writes, “This impoverished privacy is a habit, a possibly dangerous habit that covers over the promiscuous nature of networks, their wonderful creepiness.”

If Luther did not foresee the trouble his theses posting would cause, he would also not have anticipated how the mass dissemination of his critical message would alter the future of Christianity. Regardless of Luther’s surprise, when confronted by the authorities, he refused to recant. Finding support in the Wittenberg community (and from printers in north Germany) and aided by his penchant for vernacular preaching and writing, Luther took advantage of the burgeoning promiscuity of the print media milieu and began to seek out and create wide reading publics. He had launched his disruptive career printing in Latin, the official language of the Catholic Church, but by 1523 converted almost entirely to the German vernacular. Luther’s discursive output was impressive by any standard. At conservative estimates, publications during his lifetime alone may have exceeded some 3.1 million copies. Luther’s successes in generating large audiences meant that the printing presses of his day vied competitively for his business (Horsfield 2015, 192–193). Thick theological tomes were expensive for printers and nowhere near cost-effective. There was no economy for this type of heady work beyond the needs of the Catholic institution. Luther solved the problem of revenue by writing rapidly and frequently, publishing mostly pamphlet-sized works written in languages that people outside of the academic and monastic centers could understand. Luther’s highly lucrative status with the presses meant that between the years 1518 and 1519, he became the Continent’s most published author and a celebrity writer in his own right (Pettegree 2015, 105, 108–109). The printing press enabled the Reformation, but the Reformation fueled and financed the development of the printing press into a business that was its own veritable economy.

Promiscuous media, as defined here, are media that have the potential to spread widely and indiscriminately, transgressing old boundaries and redefining new ones. Luther’s equivocating about to whom he intended his early provocations is the paradigmatic illustration of this impulse. Promiscuous media, whether evangelical or not, are evangelizing media. Media of this sort clamor for the gaze of the viewer, constructing readership collectives simply due to the fact of the media’s ease and speed of textual production, circulation, and uptake.² Sociality forms around ideas, and mass-produced texts became a medium for spreading and sharing ideas widely. Circulation intends for the mass exposure of the media’s message. Yet, promiscuity often produces unanticipated results. Again, consider Luther’s case. Because of the potential for promiscuous media to travel widely beyond immediate contexts of production and intended audiences, they tend to breed controversy. They are helpful yet unpredictable, productive yet dangerous. If we take Luther at his word, he did not originally plan on going to trial as a heretic before church magistrates. Sometimes new media transgress old communicative orders; sometimes they support and extend them. Promiscuous media may aid social powers, but they may also challenge them by forcing authorities into defensive strategies of containment. It is no wonder that when faced with the eruption of heretical Protestant textual media, the Catholic hierarchy resorted to a concerted program of defense that involved a very literal method for silencing audience-soliciting texts: book burning.³ But how does one stop the spread of a viral, dangerous public? By reducing the textual media circulation to ash and smoke. But even extreme measures of this sort did little to quell the burgeoning Protestant public.

THE RISE OF MEDIA SINCERITY

Promiscuity was not the only impulse during this tumultuous period. Media ideologies are always partial and contested (Gershon 2010a and 2010b), so it follows that other influential paradigms were likewise at play during this era of religious upheaval. A second impulse, what I identify here as media sincerity, tethered to and challenged promiscuity from the very beginning. These two ideologies of communication overlapped and diverged in complex ways. In the case of the Reformation, neither impulse existed without the other.

Is it anachronistic to think of Luther as a sixteenth-century social media influencer? Print text is, after all, inevitably social as a media form. Perhaps this analogy is too much, but our task as scholars of religion, as theorist Jonathan Z. Smith (1982; 1990) suggests, is to tinker in the humanistic laboratory of comparison and contrast, bringing similar and disparate things together for the sake of elucidation and understanding. Luther understood the ability of sincere media to sway hearts and minds and create new communities based on the consumption of shared texts. He capitalized on the power of promiscuous media to solicit audiences and call out theological opponents. Like the transcontinental itinerant revivalists and the televangelists who would follow centuries later (chap. 2), not to mention the theoblogians, Twitter pastors, and Instagram influencers after them (chaps. 4, 5, and 6), Luther theologized print technology as a divinely ordained tool of communication. He circulated vast numbers of booklets and pamphlets because of their efficiency in production, transportation, and audience building. Whatever else he was, Luther was an influencer.

So far, the concept of promiscuity describes much of what happened. But what about sincerity? Luther’s booklets were radically different than existing works of theology, often less than forty pages in length that could be read quickly. In addition to shorter writings, the reformer also published sermons and aids for biblical teaching and exposition. His early works, as Pettegree (2015, 5, 81) describes, were “honest,” “unassuming,” and reflected his “intuitive genius” as a vernacular authorial brand. “Luther in effect invented a new form of theological writing: short, clear, and direct, speaking not only to his professional peers but to the wider Christian people.” This new form of writing, in a word, was sincere. Luther was a skilled orator as much as a writer, but even mediated through his texts, he embodied sincerity. His sentences, again, were “short and direct.” Making the most of the affordances of promiscuous media, Luther carried out a fruitful mass propaganda campaign, literally moving the battle out of religious institutional bounds and into the growing marketplace of print texts and discourse. Luther bridged the oral and written divide, cultivating publics by entreating literate audiences to read his texts aloud to those who lacked the skill (Horsfield 2015, 193–194; Hillerbrand 1968, xxv–xxvi). Sincerity and promiscuity from the outset were two sides of the same coin.

To move beyond Luther and speak in terms of communication, theology, and authority, the reformed impulse of sincerity totally reconfigured the Christian lifeworld. Another way to put this is that Protestantism is not simply a theological tradition birthed during the Reformation’s upheavals. Protestantism is an entire semiotic system that influences all life domains, interpersonal communication rituals included. Protestantism as a religious, political, social, cultural, economic, and communicative system aimed “to embed itself in everyday practices” (Keane 2002, 67). Responding to the directness of Luther and others, the mode of communication shifted into what anthropologist Webb Keane has described as the sincere speaker paradigm. I refer to this paradigm throughout the book in shorthand as media sincerity.

Simply put, the nascent Protestant paradigm rejected mediated Catholic rituals and materiality as false and ungodly, and in its corrective strategies of purification produced new communicative values (Keane 2007, 76–82; Latour 1993). Notwithstanding the promiscuity paradox, sincerity in speech became the most idealized value in the reformers’ resistance to what they saw as the inauthentically mediated texture of Catholic ritual. Sincerity as a virtue emerged out of a specific Euro-Christian context but engineered the trifecta of global, modern ideals that (1) privileges the agency of the autonomous individual, (2) places importance on freedom and self-creation by people across the spectrum of socioreligious hierarchy, and in light of these reconfigurations, (3) devalues tradition for tradition’s sake (Keane 2002, 68).

Luther’s disenchantment with church tradition and his reifying of the importance of the individual, authentically interior relationship of each person directly with God (Pettegree 2015, 96) helped initiate the Reformation. Almost single-handedly shaping the early modern era’s new doctrine of the agential, individual person, the sincere-speech paradigm rejected tradition and ritual in its emphasis on the inward sovereignty and authenticity of the modern individual. Sincerity, to summarize, was in its earliest forms a discourse that sought to transcend the ritual carnality and materiality of the Catholic cosmos by severing authenticity and authority from the physical bodies of the penitents and the priests. For the reformers, authenticity did not lie in embodied rituals. Instead, the result was that the nonmaterial, spiritual, authentic interior took on religious value (Bialecki 2017, 123).

Sincerity had massive practical ramifications for both institutionally religious and everyday interpersonal communication. Sincere words were powerful words. In a matter of speaking, writes Keane, to be sincere as a communicator was to “utter words that can be taken primarily to express underlying beliefs or intentions” (Keane 2002, 74). Words existed as transparent indications of the speaker’s interior state. Sincerity signified the mechanisms by which words map onto thoughts in close correspondence. Thoughts were not more ambiguous than the words that convey their meaning, and speakers operated in a self-aware, authoritative state to put words to work in accurate manners (Keane 2006a, 317).

Several practical examples from contemporary life illustrate how the paradigm of the sincere speaker works. Consider, briefly, marriage rites, prayer, and the proclamation of belief. One of the clearest examples of a sincere speaker paradigm is the model of Western marital rites in which the exchange of sincere speech acts—that is, the reciprocal “I do”—constitutes the marriage bond between two persons rather than an exclusive exchange of material goods, as practiced in, say, Melanesian culture (Robbins 2012, 41n1). And how exactly do prayer rituals embody sincerity’s ideals? “Protestant prayers should come from the heart, spontaneous and truly felt,” Keane explains. Prayers “should be sincere” and not memorized or recited (Keane 2002, 77; cf. 2006b, 443). Later in the evangelical time line, John Wesley’s widely discussed claim to have felt his “heart strangely warmed” (Barbeau 2019, 14) offers further evidence of this paradigm’s powerful ontology at work. The sincere-speaker model also relates to other types of speech and communication. Anthropologist James Bielo (2015, 70) summarizes, writing that sincerity “places a prime value on truth-telling, personal intention, individualism, and speech as a direct reflection of moral character, and favors spontaneity over rote formula.” This ideology also maps onto select biblical texts, such as the Gospel admonition that “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45, New King James Version).

Ultimately, sincerity embedded itself in and expressed itself through Protestant denominational fracturing across centuries and spanning continents. Sincerity had a key role in structuring the very texture of modern and Western linguistic systems and communication forms. In this post-Protestant language ideology, meaning resides in the intention of speakers. Communication is contractual and transparent (Robbins 2012, 31). Speakers should mean what they say, and under ideal circumstances, listeners will successfully and accurately interpret speech acts. Even quintessentially American religious expression, what Winnifred Sullivan (2005, 8) describes as “private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed,” has its origins in the sincerity paradigm.

THE AFTERMATH

During the Reformat...