Yesterday and today at the Arena, I am pleased to welcome Zachary Sheldon, a lecturer in the Department of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University. His book, Christian Influence: The Subcultural Narratives of Evangelical Celebrities on Instagram, comes out July 15th with Routledge. In yesterday’s portion of the interview, we talked about Zachary’s journey into film studies as a Christian. Today, we delve more deeply into his book.
Nadya Williams: What are the big questions that you are investigating and the main story that you are telling in this book?
Zachary Sheldon: This book is called Christian Influence: The Subcultural Narratives of Evangelical Celebrities on Instagram. It grew out of some material excised from my dissertation and focuses on the often-distinct ways that different kinds of evangelical celebrities represent and portray evangelical values and aspects of evangelical culture via Instagram.
Social media is, of course, an important part of contemporary culture. There’s a ton of research and reporting and consistent news about the industry of social media influencers and celebrities, recognizing their obvious economic and even ideological importance in today’s society.
This project notes that similar celebrity and influencer dynamics exist in the ways that famous evangelicals operate on social media, especially Instagram. I tease out some of the important ways that famous Christians operating on social media are presenting and representing the faith to the faithful.
Specifically, my book looks at four categories of evangelical celebrity: Celebrity Pastors, Women’s Ministry Leaders, Christian-Media Celebrities (those celebrities famous specifically within the Christian media sphere), and Secular-Media Celebrity Christians (mainstream celebrities who have expressed a connection to evangelical faith and culture and have made their Christian faith a significant part of their public presence and identity).
Looking at the Instagram profiles and posts from the last couple of years of a handful of celebrities in each of these categories, I was interested in understanding how distinct kinds of Christian media celebrities were using Instagram, and what, if any, differences there were in the ways they performed their identity and role via their public posts. And, in turn, what those differences mean for evangelical culture today and could mean for evangelical culture going forward.
What this project ultimately yielded was a set of distinct “subcultural narratives” that these different kinds of evangelical celebrities portray through their use of Instagram. Most of these evangelical celebrities post about similar topics relating to Christianity—they post Bible verses, talk about family and ministry, pitch products of various kinds, and so on. But figures in these different categories of Christian celebrity tend to post about these same topics in actually very distinct ways. In examining each of the four categories of evangelical celebrity, the book names and describes the unique narratives that these celebrities are conveying to their audiences and examines how different evangelical celebrities are emphasizing different aspects and values of the faith in how they are using and engaging Instagram and their audience.
As a culture, we seem to recognize that social media can be far more than a frivolous activity. The ways that people use Instagram and other platforms have real consequences for how they and their followers see and act in the world. I argue in this book that this is just as true in religious cultures as anywhere else but has to this point remained somewhat understudied. My hope is that my examination of evangelical celebrities on Instagram and naming of these specific subcultural narratives can prompt further analysis of other evangelical influencers and cultural figures and can spur further discussion around just how distinct groups within evangelicalism are influencing its culture through their use of social media, ultimately impacting the direction and growth of the subculture over time.
N.W.: Can you give us a taste of something surprising or unexpected that you have found in your work on this project?
Z. S.: I think the thing that surprised me the most was the ways that different kinds of Christian celebrities behaved in ways that varied significantly from what I expected based mostly on my experiences growing up in the religious culture that I did.
Even as a kid, the religious circles we ran in had different celebrities. Mostly these were pastors, but gradually as the evangelical media sphere expanded, this circle of Christian celebrity figures did too, encompassing different actors, writers, and so on. And I’m certainly not going to say that these figures were overtly idolized or anything, but there was a particular kind of regard for the way that specific Christians who were producing Christian music, films, radio, and so on were modeling how to live one’s faith and providing a template of values and behaviors for others to emulate.
So, going into my research, I really expected the Christian-Media Celebrities that I was studying to have the most overt content about living out one’s faith and modeling Christian values, beliefs, and so on. And actually, what I found was that these particular celebrities posted more about commerce and promoting their faith-based products than almost anything else, and proportionally they posted more about those kinds of things than any of the other celebrity categories that I studied.
This is not to say that they didn’t post anything about Christian values or beliefs or that they didn’t provide a model for others to emulate in living a Christian life…it’s just that their posts were far more commercially-oriented than I had expected. In most regards, these Christian-Media Celebrities who I thought were going to exemplify a highly specific kind of celebrity values based on their immersion in the Christian media culture actually ended up posting and behaving the most like what we think of when we think about typical influencers or celebrities.
Ironically, the group that I found presented the most holistic, well-rounded, and at times even explicit articulation of what it means to be a Christian in contemporary culture were the Secular-Media Celebrity Christians. Despite their role and presence as celebrities involved in mainstream media and culture, they were often the most explicit in preaching to their followers, or highlighting Bible verses, or just generally modeling the most typical evangelical values in the kinds of posts they made and things they said.
My background and intuition gave me the expectation that these “normal” celebrities would have been the most secular or commercially oriented in nature, given the skepticism towards Hollywood and popular culture that various evangelical circles convey and the proximity of these celebrities to the mainstream of popular and influencer culture. But I was very much taken aback at how open these figures were about their faith and the specificity of their articulations of their faith, particularly when contrasted with the evangelical celebrities whose fame rests on the evangelical culture industry, but who seemed more interested in promoting their wares than communicating extensively about their beliefs.
N.W.: What are the broader questions that fascinate you in your reading, thinking, and writing?
Z. S.: Well, as I noted yesterday in discussing my educational background, the influence of professors at Geneva College and reading the skeptical media theory of Jacques Ellul was profoundly influential. I didn’t know it at the time, but all of this was addressing concerns and questions about the relationship of Christianity to culture and technology that had been stewing in my background for quite some time. And, perhaps strangely and perhaps not, it feels like all this time later those questions and issues are just as prominent for me.
Lots of people across time and history have written about the relationship of Christianity to culture and have addressed that relationship and their concerns about it in connection to a whole host of different media. But it’s telling to me that those questions never seem to go out of vogue. My students are often just as fascinated by these ideas as I am and are continually asking them in specific connection to their current cultural moment and the technologies they encounter and use in everyday life. I think these kinds of enduring issues of faith, technology, culture, and life are as relevant now as they have ever been, and certainly aren’t going to go away anytime soon.
And so, I’m continually interested in how scholars from across disciplines and eras have thought about these ideas in media as diverse as film, cell phones, even cities and transportation. I try to read as broadly as I can about the weird, fascinating world that we live in, because it’s all a part of thinking through and addressing these same kinds of questions, often in unexpected, curious, and even frustrating ways.
At this point, I’m not sure exactly what that means as far as writing goes. Exploring the world of Christian celebrities and influencers was a fascinating thing that sort of helped me work through some specific questions that I had about that world and the contemporary culture of evangelical media, but I’m not sure that I have the constitution to stay in that world long-term.
There are some bright spots of hope and interesting work being done by both scholars and practitioners in that world, but there are also some very stressful aspects of the way that evangelicals use and engage media for different ends within culture right now. I’ll be teaching a new course (for my department, anyways) in Religion and Film this fall, and I am interested in exploring a bit more about the history and current trends of Christianity and cinema with students, and I could certainly see that turning into some new projects in the not-too-distant future.