Today and tomorrow at the Arena, I am pleased to welcome Zachary Sheldon, a lecturer in the Department of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University. Zachary received his BA from Geneva College, an MA from Baylor, and a PhD from Texas A&M University. His first book, Christian Influence: The Subcultural Narratives of Evangelical Celebrities on Instagram, comes out on July 15th with Routledge. In today’s portion of the interview, we talk about Zachary’s journey into film studies as a Christian, while tomorrow, the focus will be more specifically on his book.
Nadya Williams: You’re a recent PhD–congratulations! If you don’t mind, I’d like to start with a massively complicated question. Could you tell us a little bit about your academic, intellectual, and spiritual journeys? How have they all intersected and led you to where you are right now?
Zachary Sheldon: Thank you! It’s definitely been a fantastic journey, and one that I’m grateful to have finally completed. Everyone tells you that it’s going to be a lot of work, and you always keep that in the back of your head the whole time, but sheesh, it really does turn out to be a whole lot of work!
Originally, I wanted to make movies. From an early age, I was completely enamored with storytelling and especially film, and really aspired to work in film or television in some way, whether that was in narrative or even just advertising.
That was a little bit of a strange aspiration to have, growing up in a generally conservative church culture in the late 90s. I wasn’t aware of the “Culture Wars” such as they were, and even in retrospect I don’t have any specific memory of ways that they impacted me or my family’s media consumption, but there was certainly a skepticism of Hollywood and its related industries in the air at the time. This occurred, of course, at roughly the same time that the Christian media industry was rapidly expanding and adventuring into new areas.
I don’t remember anyone in my church actively pushing the Left Behind books, but I certainly knew of them and read a bunch sometime in middle school. My friends and I loved VeggieTales, of course; and I remember our church hosting screenings of new Christian movies like End of the Spear and the like. So, I was aware that there was Christian media out there, especially film. At the same time, even as a kid I knew that…well, those movies were not always especially great. I still wanted to be involved in film in some way and cared to some degree about what that meant for me as a Christian, but I also knew that I really didn’t want to make those kinds of movies, either.
***
I carried this with me when I went away to school at Geneva College, where I majored in Communication with an emphasis on Integrated Media, basically as close to a film degree as I could pursue there. And for most of the four years I was there, I was completely motivated and obsessed with making things.
I worked for a number of offices and departments on campus making official advertisements and small promotional videos, filming plays for the theatre department, and making short films with friends, too. By the end of four years, I had a lot of work to show for my time there…and was also a little burnt out on lugging equipment, being on set, and doing all of the “making” that I’d been so enthusiastic about at the outset.
This worked out, though, honestly. One of the best parts of being at such a small school was the opportunity that I had to get to know my professors so well and so personally. And even as so many enthusiastically supported my artistic aspirations, they were also incredible mentors in always also pushing me to ask broader, deeper questions about what I was making and why, and why I wanted to make things in the first place. The tensions between faith and film and art were something I had been conscious of in a background way growing up, but here I was encouraged to actively explore those questions and views.
One particular episode stands out, in this regard. Two incredible professors—Jeffrey Schindel and Joel Ward—introduced me to the thinking of Jacques Ellul and his book on propaganda, which includes a remarkable little section on propaganda and the church.
Ellul’s view is that leaning on the methods and tools of technique to communicate to the masses is effective for propagandistic purposes, but the second those same processes are turned towards spreading or communicating the Gospel, they destroy that message, turning it into an ideology rather than a living, personal, powerful relationship with God. Reading this honestly shook me.
Ellul’s exploration of propaganda and technique were, to me, powerful and convincing, and remain so. But I’d spent almost four years at that point actively studying, well, techniques: elements of filmmaking and aesthetics and visual communication, all intended to help make me an efficient, effective artist who could use filmmaking techniques to tell powerful stories. And here was Ellul saying that maybe it was wrong and problematic to do such things in connection with the church.
I wasn’t entirely sure where this left me. I believed, and still do, that God wants me to use my interests, skills, and talents in His service. I’d grown up volunteering on the tech team at my church, and even in college sometimes helped with the broadcast team for a bigger church in the Pittsburgh area. Was I wrong to have done all of that?
I didn’t entirely think so then, and I don’t entirely think so now. But this reading was immensely formative in another way, namely prompting me more seriously than ever before to think about matters of faith, film, and media more broadly. Somewhere in my sophomore/junior year I’d already decided that I probably wasn’t going to pursue the film industry directly and would instead pursue graduate school. I still wanted to study and think about film and got especially interested in some specific questions about intersections between film and philosophy.
***
This led me to Baylor University, where I did my MA. My thesis there was on a specific field of philosophy and digital characters in film, and so the specifics there aren’t important for this narrative, but what is important is the environment I encountered in Baylor’s film department. Here I was actively surrounded by faithful filmmakers and theorists who had felt the same kinds of artistic and faith-based tensions I’d felt, and who had worked through so many of the same questions I was asking.
Even though my program of study didn’t specifically see me engaging or exploring these questions in coursework or papers, the general environment encouraged that preoccupation and invited me to do more with it. In deciding where to pursue my doctorate and what to pursue it in, there was a brief time where I wanted to continue pursuing film studies or film philosophy, specifically, but questions of media and faith had continued to press on my mind. In the end, I decided staying in the field of Communication was the best choice, and one that would let me more deeply study matters of faith and media.
During my doctoral work at Texas A&M University, I wasn’t quite sure what I really wanted to write about. Part of this was that there were too many things I was interested in, a problem that continues to plague me. But part of it, too, was that I wasn’t sure what problem I really felt compelled to address. Frankly, my initial thoughts on Christian film and media growing up had always lingered with me. I’d basically actively avoided most explicitly Christian, subcultural media for my entire life. I’d seen some movies here and there (always in groups and almost never by my specific choice), but the poor quality and overall cheesiness of most Christian media output was just too off-putting. And here I was, ostensibly trying to become an expert in this stuff. Or, at least, some aspect of it.
***
Eventually it was some offhanded comment from my wife that led me down a path that resulted in me writing my dissertation about evangelical social media influencers, specifically. But always in the back of my studies at Texas A&M and my reading on evangelical Christianity and religious media was the questions and tensions that I’d been introduced to through Jacques Ellul. His perspective on the deployment of media techniques in the service of Christian faith continued to haunt me, for lack of a better term. I wondered why so many others—peers, churches, pastors, and all manner of Christian celebrities—didn’t seem to be bothered by how they were using social media, or at how bad Christian movies seemed to be, or the predominance of cameras and screens and videos in church, and so on.
It didn’t bother me that people might disagree with him, or me, but it also often seemed that too many people I encountered weren’t even thinking to question the use of technology or other media in connection with their faith, and that was something I wanted to think and read about, and to continue interrogating. And I still do, of course.
That’s a very long, probably too-detailed, excessively rambling answer, I know. But the more I spend time thinking and writing about my current research interests, the more I see just how intimately linked all these various stages of the journey really were. To some extent, I think my current academic and spiritual interests are just the natural progression of the exact same tensions that animated my interest in faith and film as a teenager. I think I’ve got more answers now, thankfully, but also maybe more questions, too.
Wow! The book is expensive, but I’m hooked. I got the Kindle version.