Tech Won't Save Us - How Evangelicals Emulate Startup Culture w/ Corrina Laughlin

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Corrina Laughlin to discuss how evangelical Christians have adapted to modern technologies, how churches have emulated startups, the growth of the faith tech sector, and whether there’s anything that can be learned from their tech experiments.Corrina Laughlin is the author of Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture. She’s also an instructor of media studies at Loyola Marymount University. Follow Corrina on Twitter at @CKLaughlin.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Corrina wrote an article about why evangelicals are early adopters for The Atlantic.Pew estimates about 24% of US adults identify as born again or evangelical Protestants.The 1925 Scopes Trial was over the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools.Life.Church makes a ton of high production value resources available to churches looking to start up and expand what they’re doing.The prosperity gospel is a pro-capitalist theological tradition preached by some very wealth pastors, including Kenneth Copeland.Support the show

There's a real sense that they are using this technology to fulfill biblical prophecy and perhaps even hasten the return of Christ. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Karina Laughlin. Karina is the author of Redeem All, How Digital Life is Changing Evangelical Culture, and an instructor of media studies at Loyola Marymount University. I don't think we've looked at how religions have adapted to technologies, to new technologies on the show before. And I found Karina's book to be really fascinating in exploring how evangelical Christianity, which is a pretty significant force in the United States, has adopted not only to changes with digital technologies in

the present, but with changes to technologies in the past as well, whether it was radio, publishing, television, music, and things like that. And what we see is that these evangelical churches are making use of apps and online platforms and even social media to spread their message to reach more people. And this is seen as a positive thing because even if some of these technologies have their own issues, so to speak, that they need to try to grapple with or get around so as not to have some kind of negative influence on them and their work, they still see that there is a benefit to using these technologies because it will allow them to reach so many more people and obviously help to achieve their goal of spreading the word of God and getting more people to follow their

religion. So in this conversation, Karina explains how these churches are adapting to the tech industry and all of these technologies that are being made available, how they are making their own technologies, how there is even like a whole faith tech sector that is developed that is looking at developing technologies to spread, you know, Christianity and Christian teachings, and also how there's like a Christian influence or culture that not only supports, you know, the status quo of kind of Christian Protestant evangelicalism, but also allows voices that may not have otherwise received a platform to challenge some of those conservative teachings and to push back against them and to try to make

some change that is more accepting of their groups, their communities, than they would have had in the past. And, you know, I think in having this conversation, it's not just to learn more about how evangelical Christians are using technology and adapting to technology, though that is fascinating in itself, but I think that when we explore that, it also allows us on the left, as I'm sure many of the listeners of this podcast are, to think about how we are using technology, how we are adapting to technology, if there's anything that can be learned from the experiences of evangelical Christians, even though some of their views will be quite different from our own, or even if there are

things that they've done that we can see should probably be avoided in the future. So I really enjoy this conversation personally. As we discuss, I'm not an evangelical Christian, so that's not why I'm having this conversation, if you were concerned about that for any reason. But I still think it's really important to explore, and I hope that you enjoyed it as well, because I had a great time chatting with Karina. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada, and you can find out more about the other shows in the network by going to harbingermedianetwork.com.

If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is provided free to everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making it every single week. As you'll see in this conversation, some of the evangelical Christians are also really dedicated to releasing their technologies for free, making access free. So maybe that is one thing that we have in common, or at least that some of us have

in common. But I'm also not benefiting from tithing or from big donations that are being made to evangelical churches or other major organizations. So if you do enjoy the podcast, if you do want to support the work that goes into making it every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can join supporters like Stefan from Germany and Aaron by supporting the show. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Karina, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. You have this really fascinating new book, Redeem All, about how evangelical Christians are using technology and adapting to this new kind listeners a foundation in what we're talking about, I think there will be people who might not really know what an evangelical Christian is or what that actually means.

You know, up here in Canada, where I'm based, Roman Catholicism is the main Christian denomination, the main religion. In the States, I know that it's Protestantism. In the UK, I know it's Anglicanism. So I'm not really sure what differentiates a conventional Christian from an evangelical Christian. So what would be the difference there? That's a great question. And it's one that many people have written books about. In some ways, evangelicalism is kind of an overdetermined category because it's just been written about and defined in so many different ways. At its simplest, evangelical Christians in the United States are conservative Protestants.

I really like the anthropologist Tanya Lerman's definition of evangelical Christianity, which kind of defines evangelical Christians by their emotional, effective relationship with God and Jesus. So that's one way we can think about evangelical Christianity. They have a tendency to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, you know, biblical literalism, although not all of them. There's different denominations that are sometimes evangelical and sometimes not. So that's somewhat confusing. The biggest evangelical organization in the United States is the Southern Baptist Convention. And I think importantly for me, beyond the biblical literalism, the effect of emotional relationship with God that comes out in prayer and worship, and the emphasis on outreach is also, they have

a really robust media culture that goes back all the way to the 1950s with Billy Graham founding the magazine Christianity Today and Worldwide Pictures, a movie studio, and continues through James Dobson and Focus on the Family, which was an evangelical organization that created evangelical media and also helped evangelicals understand how to engage with secular media, all the way through contemporary Christian music, which I'm sure you've probably heard. I'm sure I've heard some of it at some point. Yeah. And Hillsong Church, which is a huge Australian mega church that has, I think, 100,000 satellite churches, and has an emphasis on music, right? So there's all these sort of cultural markers of evangelical

Christianity, and participation in the culture is also part of what makes evangelicalism evangelicalism. It's a contested term of late within evangelical culture. People that might have once called themselves evangelicals now feel uncomfortable with the term because of the association with Trumpism. So I definitely met people like that in my journeys in evangelical culture. So that's a really long-winded way of saying it's a hard thing to define. It's a complicated assemblage of beliefs and practices and culture. Is that helpful at all? Absolutely. I think it is. I think it gives some indication of what it actually means to be evangelical and how that kind of sets it apart from, I guess, a conventional Christianity,

maybe a more secular form, maybe. I'll say on my part, maybe this is a bit obvious, but I kind of grew up in the Roman Catholic Church because that is the main Christian denomination in Canada. So that is the one I was most familiar with. And personally, I've identified as an atheist for a while. So I haven't been to a church in a while, but I've been your book was how there's not a whole lot of like the kind of deeper connection, I guess, that you're kind of describing with the evangelicals in the sense that they're like really invested in it. Like in the churches I go, people get up and like sing the song and sit back down and like, you know, that's about it.

And I noticed that during this time, like there's a little bit more technology where like pastors or priests or whatever will have their phones to like play the music. But like, that's about it. Like there's not this whole bigger engagement with media and culture that you're talking about with evangelical Christianity. So I wonder, you know, to get us started, and I feel like where it's a religious topic, I wonder if you could maybe talk about how you were coming to this research, if you were in the evangelical church yourself, or what your relationship to it was? Yeah, well, as a younger person, as a teenager, I did go to evangelical churches and evangelical youth groups. And I grew up in an area with a lot of evangelical Christians and sort of intersected

with that in my younger years and then lost that connection for a long time. And it wasn't until I was in graduate school that I started checking out these online churches, just out of curiosity. And that's what really got me into looking at this again, from a more scholarly, empirical perspective. And I kind of see myself as like an insider outsider, you know, because I've gone to evangelical churches and technically was saved as a teenager. That's what evangelicals would call sort of the conversion process is being saved. I do somewhat understand the sort of cadence of evangelical culture and the vocabulary of evangelical culture. But I've approached this project, you know, as a scholar, as an ethnographer,

who is mostly an outsider. And I did want to pick up on one thing you said, because I think there's an important distinction between Catholicism and evangelicalism that is part of the premise or the foundation of my book. And that is that Catholicism is very invested in tradition, in liturgy, and ritual. Whereas evangelical culture, especially in the United States, is a populist religious form, and has been willing to change throughout its history to adapt to popular culture, all the way back to the second great awakening at the end of the 18th century that saw preachers out in fields preaching to mass gatherings of people or evangelicals holding services in theaters when theater became popular. So there's this tendency

to adapt to popular culture that I argue know, I argue has continued throughout the digital age. So I think in contrast to Catholicism, evangelicals are much more likely to change and adapt. And indeed, I argue that they have a lot in terms of adapting to an increasingly digital culture. Yeah, that's fascinating, you know, because what immediately came to my mind was like, my grandparents telling me about like Latin masses, and how like, even that kind of switch is relatively recent, like, you know, decades back now, but even like there was resistance to that for such a long time just to like preach mass in English. So yeah, I can definitely see how it's resistant. Yeah, and that didn't happen until the 1960s. And that was with Vatican II,

which was this council, and it was a huge deal, right? With evangelicals, because there isn't this sort of more hierarchical structure that you find in Catholicism, there's a lot more room for adaptation and play. And whatever works, tends to be privileged, right? So if you have a megachurch, if you're a televangelist and you're reaching millions of people, evangelicals will say, okay, cool, you know, let's do that, right? So it isn't the same kind of hierarchical structure, Baroque structure of Catholicism in terms of the authority and how it flows in evangelical culture. It's very different than that. It makes a ton of sense too, especially thinking about, you know, the discussions that are happening here around like declining church attendance and like the lower number of people identifying as like Roman Catholic and stuff and ongoing discussions about adaptation that I think they don't follow through on very well. But I think that history of adaptation to culture

and to new technologies in the evangelical church, I guess, that you're talking about is really interesting. And before we get to what's happening now, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that history, because you discuss how the evangelical Christians have adapted to radio and publishing and television and music in the past. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, how that has worked and how they have used those mediums to continue kind of, I guess, preaching their message and reaching more people? Again, as a particularly populist religion, they've been more likely to adapt and more quick to adapt to changes in popular culture, changes in media, more likely to be early adopters of media, such as radio, and radio especially, than other religious groups. And one of the inflection points we could identify would be the Scopes Trial. So fundamentalists in Tennessee were against the teaching of evolution in public schools, right? The famous orator William Jennings Bryant came down to Tennessee to argue for the fundamentalists against teaching evolution in schools. And interestingly for him, he was worried that teaching evolution would lead to

social Darwinism, would lead to this idea of the survival of the fittest becoming more mainstreamed in culture. So that was what was at stake for him in this. And on the other side, we have Clarence Darrow, who actually lost the case. William Jennings Bryan won the case. But even though they kind of won, they were just like lambasted in public opinion. And everybody said these fundamentalists are backwards, they're anti everything. They're anti-progress. They're holding us back. So they kind of retreated a little bit and ended up sort of like regrouping in the 1940s. And that's when they became evangelicals officially, started to call themselves neo-evangelicals, established the National Association of Evangelicals. And so those fundamentalists decided they wanted to sort of rebrand as

active participants in American popular culture. And one of the ways that they did that was by sort of promoting more engagement with radio and with media. And so that's kind of one place where we can think of how it started. And then it continued with Billy Graham, who some people call the Pope of evangelicalism, right? He was an incredibly powerful, important figure in evangelical culture who was buddies with all of the presidents. And he started the magazine Christianity Today. He started Worldwide Pictures, which was a film studio. And he really promoted this idea that evangelicals should be engaging with and spreading their messages through media and really getting in there. Evangelicals sometimes think of this as the sort of cultural imperative to be in but not of the world. So to be actively there, to be

on TV, to be on the apps, but not to be tainted by them, right? So this is like really interesting to me as a scholar of media, if you're in but not of media, how are you actually setting yourself apart from it? How are you actually tainted by it? And so that to me has has been just a recurring theme that has interested me in the evangelical engagement with media. What you're discussing, it makes me think of like, you know, how you're discussing that some of these people who are engaged in kind of making these technologies are not so interested in profit, but in reaching more people and spreading the word of God. But then on the other hand, that these larger kind of forces like in the tech industry are still affecting the attempts

to create technology that are faith oriented, I guess, Christian oriented, and you can't fully escape from those things. So I think that's a really interesting dynamic. Yeah, I think it's difficult in that evangelicals who start faith based apps, for example, or faith based startups, they want to do well, they're in both worlds, right. And so one of the ways they prove that they're doing well is by making a lot of money, right. But that can't be the only reason why they're doing what they're doing, because a lot of them believe that their apps have like a deeper purpose or are there to try to spread the word of God or try and build community in various ways.

So yeah, it's an interesting sort of line to walk, but in some ways it's not so different than the idea in Silicon Valley of social entrepreneurship, right? That technology can be the way to sort of create more community and create more equity and equality, right? And especially over the decade in which I studied this, that was the really popular thing. I feel like in some ways it's been somewhat abandoned over the past few years, but it used to be that social entrepreneurship was the way to frame any project that you were doing. It wasn't just going to make a bunch of money. It was also going to save the world. Yeah, you can make money and do good as well, right? Not be evil, as Google would say.

They used to say. Yeah, good point. Yeah, they've dropped that. They're fine with evil now. Maybe they always were, but now they're implicitly fine with it. But one of the examples that I think really illustrates a lot of what you're discussing is the Life Church, which forms a big piece of at least one of the chapters in the book, and kind of its desire to adapt to modern times to kind of embrace a startup culture for a certain degree, but other forms, I guess, of American capitalism that it kind of emulates. Can you talk a bit about the Life Church and what it kind of shows about the adaptability of evangelical Christianity? Life Church is such an interesting organization. And over the 10 years that I talked to people in evangelical culture who were

interested in technology and visited people all over the country, almost without fail, people would say, oh, Life Church is the place, right? And you've got to go there. And I did go there. And it is pretty remarkable how much it looks like a startup or even like the campus of a larger tech company. They have futurists there. They have like a big board where they show how the adoption of YouVersion, their Bible app. And YouVersion is really the killer app in evangelicalism. I think it's been downloaded 400 million times. It's used all over evangelical influencer culture. You see it everywhere. It's used in churches, right? It's completely free, obviously, and open. I shouldn't say obviously, but for the most part, giving away Bibles free has been a big outreach strategy.

So, yeah, and they take pride in the fact that they've drawn people from the corporate world, including Jerry Hurley from Target, Bobby Grunewald, who I was told by people he walked away from all of this money working in the tech industry to work at Life.Church. They invested millions and millions of dollars in creating this app and attracting technologists from all over the country who really believe in Life.Church's vision for somewhat saving the world with this powerful technology of especially YouVersion, but they've also created all sorts of other things. They created a platform for online church. They were the first people to do online church in 2006. So they're kind of the sort of leaders in this. It was really fascinating to read about, you know, there are a few elements of it that really stood out to me, but I'll start with like the tech

piece. Hey, you were talking about in the back rooms, I guess, like, you know, the, the offices, I guess, of the church, like it looked kind of like a startup, there were people, you know, developing these technologies, you have the Bible app, which is really huge. And, you know, they're focused on translating that into many different languages, even really small languages that not a whole lot of people would speak. But then they also have these tools that are almost like Facebook Live for online church that people are using and where they can discuss and how that is different from in-person church, but how they also have other means of using their main church as a place to broadcast their services to smaller churches and branches of the church, I guess, elsewhere. So they're really using technology in these really innovative ways.

Yeah, they absolutely are. And it's also part of how they fundraise is actually through their churches, their physical and online churches. And that whole idea that they are investing in technology that will save the world, bring the Bible to what evangelicals call unreached people, unreached people groups, unreached meaning who haven't read the Bible. You know, when I went to the church before the service, they're talking about through YouVersion, we were able to spread the good news to this far-flung place. They have these very high production value videos of people in far-flung places reading the Bible because of you version. And there's a real sense that they are perhaps, and that they voice this explicitly, that they are using this technology

to fulfill biblical prophecy and perhaps even hasten the return of Christ. So the technology is extremely powerful and it's exciting for the people who go to the church. They say, you know, we're participating in a revival, right? We're participating in something bigger than ourselves, right? And this is Oklahoma. These are just sort of like normal people. When I talk to them, you know, after the church services, they're just bubbling with excitement that they're, you know, on the cutting edge of technology and on the cutting edge of this

like sort of Bible technology that's going to save the world, right? And they're willing to fund that. They're willing to tithe and give money towards this operation from the back offices all the way to worship. It's everywhere, this idea of the redemptive power of technology at Life.Church. And I think, you know, Life.Church is one of the most prominent places to see that, but I think you can see that in a lot of different areas in evangelical culture. I found that really fascinating. You quoted a Lyft driver who you said you were talking to, who just told you that it was so relevant because they were using these technologies and able to spread their message through these technologies in a way that was kind of unprecedented in a way,

or was able to reach a lot more people with a lot less resources. You know, when you think of missionaries or people actually going out to physically like spread the message, you can reach a lot more people with these technologies. But then I think you can also kind of see like naturally, if you think of like a tech startup, they would also be kind of tracking the degree to which there's like adoption of their app or their service across many different markets and whatnot. And so you can see like this kind of emulation of these practices, I guess, by the church as well, and taking advantage of these new technologies and these new ways of spreading their information in the same way that

like a tech company would. Absolutely. And they are taking cues directly from the tech world. I talk about in my tour of the Life.Church offices, how the engineers have their Myers-Briggs scores out and then they have all these practices that come directly from tech startups. They have, you know, two guys in a room just doing future casting, right? Like, so as I already already said, kind of just really does look like a tech startup in the in the back, even if it's a megachurch in the front. Yeah, and there's another element of that, like, it's not just the emulation of Silicon Valley and startup culture and seeing what they can learn from that and take from that to help, you know, spread the word of God. But then there's also kind of the emulation of the chain store, and the kind of franchise aspect of American capitalism, suburban capitalism in particular, you know, what the suburbs look like, what looks attractive to people. You talked about how, you know, like a traditional church with a steeple that, you know,

is still very common in Roman Catholicism, I'll tell you, is not as attractive or bringing people in, in the same way as a store that looks more like a chain restaurant or a theater or a big box store or something that, you know, has this form that they're used to from so many other elements of their lives. culture, and what's known as the church growth movement. And I quote Rick Warren, who wrote The Purpose Driven Church, really saying, you know, to other evangelicals, we've got to think about television, we've got to think about how television entertains people, because that's what people are into. Like, how are we going to entertain people? You know, we've got to get screens in there, we've got to do all these things. And a big part of it was the idea of an audience for evangelicalism, places where evangelicalism could grow. And that was often white suburbia, right?

And so a lot of these strategies that became widespread and very popular in evangelical culture, including technology, of emulating corporate culture, of making churches look like big box stores in suburbia. It had to do with an understanding of the audience, what Rick Warren called spiritual seekers, or the unchurched. And so I do think there's a piece there that I also try and draw out where it's like this focus on this white suburban audience is, of course, also exclusionary in a lot of ways, too, right? And the focus on technology ends up being that way, too. So I think that's the other piece of this. You also mentioned that Life.Church was one of the first, if not the first churches to do

online church back in 2006. Obviously, we are two years into a pandemic now where a lot of churches went online and a lot of churches would have done online for the first time. And we know that, you know, the tech companies have benefited immensely from the move to doing more things online during the pandemic. Do you have any indication if, you know, Life Church or evangelical churches who have adapted to these technologies before the pandemic have been benefiting in particular from this move to online during the pandemic? That's a great question. I don't have any hard data on that. I mean, I know that Life.Church's

platform for online church, they give away freely and they give away all of the resources that you would need to run an online church freely through open. I don't have numbers tracking how much that was adopted during COVID, although I should look that up because that's a really interesting question. But yeah, absolutely. That infrastructure was already kind of there when COVID happened. And just like in other sectors, you know, in education, in other sectors, you know, it's like we sort of used all those technologies that were already there. And it was sort of a point where we just had to adopt them sort of in mass all at once. And so that absolutely did happen in evangelicalism as well.

And I can imagine it potentially opened them up to people far beyond where they would usually reach as more people were going online, like more Christians and looking for, you know, some sort of church service because they couldn't go to their local church. Like I know my great grandmother started watching like churches and she's originally from France. And so like watching church in France and stuff like that, that she had never had access to before, just because it was not something that she knew was possible. And who knows, maybe it wasn't even broadcasting pre-pandemic, but yeah, so it's really interesting to see. I mean, I think it is really interesting.

And I wonder about that because when Church Online was first introduced way back in 2006, when it started to get popular about five years after that, a lot of churches didn't see the excitement for it that they thought they were going to see. And that was something that people told me. You know, at first, they were like, we can evangelize the world with this. And we can get people all over the world coming to our church. But well, I mean, Life.Church does claim that that happened, you know, a lot. I do think that it wasn't taken up or adopted as much as they thought it would be by the millennial audience that they were trying to target with that. Because another piece of this story is the growth of the millennial nuns,

the millennials who have no religion or who've left religion, many of them who have left evangelicalism. I talked about, you know, my friends that I grew up with that we all went to church together. None of them are evangelicals now, right? And that's just, you know, my sort of anecdotal evidence for this. But there's also real evidence for the fact that millennials and Gen Z are becoming what evangelicals would call less churched. So, you know, when they started to take up this technology of online church, they thought it would really excite those folks. And it didn't exactly do that. It became kind of an add-on. It became the kind of thing where, oh, I'm not feeling well today. I'll watch church

online, right? I went to a conference where evangelicals were talking about how they bought iPads for older parishioners who had difficulty with mobility and couldn't come to church. And they found that the older folks didn't really like that. Right. So I think that there was a disconnect and remains a disconnect. Maybe it goes back to like the covered dishes full of food that people, you know, hand you, right? Like there's, there's something that you can't get going to an online church that you do get in a physical church. But I think, you know, a lot of people do find online church somewhat lacking or somewhat a shadow of physical church. Yeah, it makes sense too, because going to the physical church, especially at an evangelical

church, I guess there is that kind of something about the presence of being there that is really important. Or my understanding from reading your book is that's kind of what it's like. And I'll just add to your anecdote as well that a lot of my friends as well who would have gone to church, you know, millennials as kids and stuff, you know, do not go to church anymore. A lot wouldn't identify as religious. So I think that's certainly a broader trend that we see up here as well. But now we've been talking about Life.Church and what it's been doing, but you also talk about kind of a broader faith tech community, I guess, or business sector

that is bringing together the ideology of Silicon Valley with Christianity in particular and using that for Christian means or to spread those sorts of messages. But at the same time, by emulating Silicon Valley, it's also bringing in some of those problems that are endemic to the larger tech industry. Can you talk a little bit about that faith tech space? I think it goes back to this evangelical idea of being in but not of the world. So yeah, there are all sorts of faith-based startups. Literally in Silicon Valley, I talked to people who were working at big tech companies, but then had their own smaller app that they were trying

to get off the ground that was faith-based. I talked to people who had left jobs in tech and were still living in the area, right? But then also there's this kind of faith-based tech culture in other regions of the country as well, in New York and in Texas, in Nashville, Atlanta. So there's these entrepreneurs who are trying to create, for example, Bible apps, tithing apps, all sorts of digital tools. It's not as clear cut necessarily as the church example. I don't want to say that they're all doing it to, in fact, save the world, because some of them do really want to make money, right? And some of them really see this as an opportunity to reach a Christian audience. And they sell their apps that

way, right, to venture capitalists and others. But there were others that told me like, this is my life purpose. This is I was called by God to create this app for Christians. And as you mentioned, in my book, I talk a lot about the sort of lines that they have to walk between trying to be successful tech startups, sometimes in Silicon Valley in that milieu, and trying to also remain true to their principles and remain authentic to their Christian audience, right? And I also, of course, I live in LA, you know, talk to people in LA, and I quote, you know, one of the founders that I talked to of course, I live in LA, you know, talk to people in LA and I quote, you know, one of the founders that I talked to was saying, I think people would think I was much cooler if I was founding like a porn startup, you know, instead of a Christian startup, like,

you know, so there's a sort of bias against this kind of thing in tech culture sometimes. But at the same time, I think a lot of VCs and other people realize that this is just like any other audience, right? And there's money to my mind. Is the prosperity gospel part of evangelical Christianity? And if so, like, would there be some kind of connection to like, you know, if I'm doing really well, making a startup, making a lot of money, that is God telling me I'm doing the right thing as well? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, prosperity gospel is absolutely part of evangelical Christianity. And yes, I think so.

And there's a lot of other books about the connection between evangelical Christianity. And yes, I think so. And there's a lot of other books about the connection between evangelical Christianity and business ideology, Kevin Cruz, To Save God and Walmart, those are just two that come to mind. But there's a lot of this idea that successful, and then this goes back to Max Weber, right? Like it goes all the way back to the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, which I've been thinking about a lot lately. This idea that you will be known by the sort of like fruits of your labor, right? Which is the biblical idea is easily transformed and you will be known as a godly good person because you do really well in business, right? So that's definitely one stream of this and a part of this. It's not something that I heard a lot of people express when I was doing interviews and ethnographic work with faith tech startups.

I didn't necessarily hear that voiced explicitly, but it's absolutely there. Obviously, we've talked about how a church is using technology and how a broader faith tech industry is potentially approaching technology. But you also talk about influencer culture, which is obviously something that has arisen and grown a lot over the past decade or so, and how a range of Christian influencers are taking advantage of these social media tools also in order to spread a Christian message. But at the same time, some people are using that to push back against the more conservative leanings of a lot of evangelical Christianity. So can you talk about that kind of Christian influencer space and how that is being used and how that grants some people an authority that they might not have otherwise had in the church? There's a big Christian influencer culture.

It's especially women, right? A sort of Christian mom, Instagram culture. There's some purity influencers as well, and then things like that, that come from the sort of purity culture strain of evangelicalism. What's interesting about it is that in a lot of evangelicalism, not totally, not all the way across the board, but for example, in the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest evangelical organization, women are not allowed to preach, right? So they're not allowed to be preachers, or sometimes they're not even allowed to like come up on the stage. That is somewhat changing and somewhat contested. But there are women on Instagram who have grown in popularity and sort of created their own following on Instagram, not just on Instagram who have grown in popularity and sort of created their own

following on Instagram, not just on Instagram, also through books, through podcasts, through sort of media empires like that of Jen Hatmaker. She's incredibly popular, but also like incredibly hated in evangelical culture because she has a huge audience, a huge following, but she came out first against Trump, then for the inclusion of gay Christians. Her daughter is gay. She's trying to push for the inclusion of trans people in evangelical culture. And so these are ideas that really challenge a lot of the sort of loose authority structure of evangelicalism. And without the platforms, the technology that allows, for example, Jen Hatmaker, but also others to sort of grow their audience, they might have been ideas that would have been completely squashed, you know, in previous generations. So it is interesting to see how that has happened. And then that has also grown into the popularity that these women have. I talk about Beth Moore, who was part of the Southern Baptist Convention recently left last year. She became very popular as a media celebrity on social media. And she kind of led the Me Too charge in evangelical culture

that rocked the power structure in Hollywood and other industries. And it did the same in evangelical culture, and especially in the Southern Baptist Convention, but also outside of it in evangelical culture more broadly. Bill Hybels, who was an incredibly popular preacher at Willow Creek Community Church, a very famous preacher whose sexual misconduct was being covered up for years, was eventually taken down as the sort of Me Too and Church Too social movement kind of erupted online. So I think there's been a sea change in evangelical culture that has not been comfortable for evangelical power structure represented by, you know, the people who are preaching, represented by the people who run Bible colleges and Christian seminaries and all these

things, right? They tend to be sort of white male patriarchal dudes. So I think there's been a big challenge that has been put up by these evangelical influencers. I mean, interestingly, they become influencers by being usually cute and perfect and sort of expressing and displaying the norms of evangelical femininity. But, you know, then they've also challenged some of the norms of evangelical culture in interesting ways. What that is illustrating is that social media is providing an opportunity to push back against some of these ideas that I guess are more conservative than a lot of people would feel are acceptable, I guess, in the modern day. And you also talk about that with podcasting, you know, it's not just these women that are able to express their views and reach a broader audience through that. But black Christian podcasters, also left evangelicals, are able to provide a message in a different kind of way. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, but also do you get an idea of like, are the traditional Christian evangelicals also

using social media and podcasting for the same sort of thing? Or is this kind of, I guess, more oppositional strain, getting more attention than they would through social media, podcasting, things like that? There are competing spheres of influence in evangelical culture that have really come to a head because of social media, right? Jen Hatmaker represents one, certainly. And the sort of more mainstream evangelicals, a lot of them really, really hate her. And, you know, they've somewhat tried to excommunicate her, a lot of them have, but they can't because she's so popular, right? And so it makes it really hard to sort of completely disavow her when there's all these

women, especially, who really love her. I was fascinated and it was really interesting to talk to Black Christian podcasters during the uprisings in 2020, who were really trying to speak back to the same evangelical power structure I was talking about that tends to be overwhelmingly white and male, and trying to challenge and change the conversation around race that has been pretty stayed since forever, right? This sort of what Anthea Butler calls evangelical gentility, right? Like, we're not going to talk about race. Everything's good and everyone can sit here together and we're colorblind, right?

The colorblind gospel, which has been preached for a long time in evangelicalism. And this idea that if you, for example, are a Black Christian who feels uncomfortable in church, like you bringing it up is a form of violence, right? So Black podcasters trying to create community with other Black Christians who may have been oppressed in white evangelical institutions, not just churches, but also not-for-profit organizations, schools, seminaries, Bible colleges, places like that, are really trying to change the conversation within evangelicalism. So again, there's this sort of like spheres of influence. I use the language of counterpublics, and I think that's really

useful. The counterpublics are trying to change the sort of broader conversation in the evangelical public. And there's a somewhat evangelical feminist counterpublic. There's this Black Christian counterpublic. There's Black Christian feminists who have become really popular through podcasting and also online. And so there's been a lot of challenge to that evangelical power structure. At the same time, there are also people within that power structure who represent that power structure who also are really popular media figures on social media, right? And I often think of Madison Cawthorn, right, who is sort of an expert evangelical troll somewhat or uses the sort of evangelical lexicon and semiotics of evangelicalism to sort of promote himself and promote this sort

of very aggressive, masculine evangelical culture and Trumpist kind of strain of evangelicalism as well. So there's a lot going on. But I think even just the fact that there is a lot of contestation, that there is a lot of mess, and it's public, and it's out there is a big change, right? From the days of the 1960s and Billy Graham and that kind of thing, or even from the 1990s. So I think that those counterpublics having a public face and challenging the conversation is already a big change in evangelical culture and is driving real material changes as well. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. And naturally, you would expect that it's not just going to be all oppositional, that there's going to be really popular people who are supporting the status quo and pushing out those messages as well. That's, you know, I think completely to be expected, especially on social media. We're coming to the

end of our conversation, there is a ton more that I could have asked you, because I think your book is really fascinating. And like, there's just so many elements that you explore in it that are really interesting. But I wanted to ask this question about what we could learn. You know, we talked about how Life.Church is adapting to these new technologies, making Bible apps and other online church platforms and things like that,

that it can use to promote the word of God and I'm sure its own brand as well in the process, how there's a larger faith tech sector, I guess, that is developed around those technologies as well, how individuals are using these technologies to promote these messages through social media and stuff like that. I wonder, looking at this from a left-wing perspective, which is the podcast, do you see anything that can be learned from the way that evangelical Christians are using technology that might be able to be applicable to groups trying to spread an alternative message or a message that is just not religious? Yeah, it again goes back to this idea

of being in but not of the world, in but not of tech, right? So consumer media, consumer technologies are shiny and exciting, but we have to be careful with what we're accepting when we use them. Right. And so I think the corporate dominance of technology is something that the left has done a good job of critiquing and talking about. At the same time, it's something that's really hard to get away from. Right? We still have to live in this world that is controlled by Facebook and Twitter and all these paragons of capitalism, right? So I think that is one thing. I do think that the connective power of technology, and in this way, I'm an optimist, it can't be denied, right? That connective power of media and technology can be harnessed to create really powerful social movements. And it

has, right? And when I started graduate school, when I started my PhD program, it was in 2012, right? So it was one year after the Arab Spring, which at that point, people were still calling the Facebook revolution, right? So the connective power of technology can't be denied, but we also have to make sure that we're not just accepting the norms and practices that are handed down to us by our corporate overlords. Maybe I'm being a little too dramatic here. excitement surrounding Web3 now. It's becoming even more important that we're really critical of who's controlling the land that Web3 is being built on and how they're exercising that control and how they're constraining what can and can't be done. In general, maybe the left has done a better job of organizing online than evangelical Christians have in a lot of ways. So I don't know that they do need to necessarily learn from evangelicals,

but you can also learn from some of the mistakes and missteps. Absolutely. You know, I think one of the things that stood out to me when I was reading it, like, as you say, I think that the left has done a good job of organizing, especially we've seen in recent years with, you know, Bernie and Corbyn campaigns, also DSA, things like that, organizing online, absolutely. But looking at what the evangelical Christians are doing, and how they're also like, building technologies, I guess, in service of those ends, that seemed really fascinating to me, especially being inspired in some ways by like, free and open source movements of the past, you know, that are obviously challenged at the moment with the

capitalist dominance that you're talking about. And that was one thing that really interested me is there's a lot of people within the movements that I looked at that were really inspired by more open source, and sort of earlier visions of the power of technology before it kind of became more corporatized, and are really thinking about like, well, okay, if our goal is really just to reach out to people, if our goal is really just to connect people, let's go back further. Let's think about Howard Reingold, like forget about Facebook and try and create our own thing. So I do think in that way that there is a need for that. I don't know. I think people have been talking about this for a long time, right?

Creating more of like a not-for-profit social media platform that wouldn't harvest data, that wouldn't run in the same way as Facebook or YouTube, where it's constantly sort of feeding us what we want to see, that would be more devoted to ideals.

But of course, it's really hard to do that and expensive, right? So it's a challenge, but a worthy one. Absolutely. A challenge, but a worthy challenge. I think that's a good point. Karina, I have really appreciated this discussion. I've really appreciated learning more about your research into evangelical Christianity, their adaptation to the moment and how they are using technologies to help their cause. Thank you so much. Thank you. It was so fun to talk to you.

And thank you for reading the book and for having me on. It's been a joy. Karina Laughlin is the author of Redeem All, How Digital Life is Changing Evangelical Culture. It was published by the University of California Press, and you can find a link in the show notes to find out more. She's also an instructor of media studies at Loyola Marymount University and you can follow her on Twitter at CK Laughlin. You can follow me at at Paris Marks

and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making this show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter.

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