Influencers, both Christian and otherwise, are making us unserious. More than that, they are making us dumb. Social media is designed to keep us engaged and the algorithms privilege fear, outrage, and simple to remember sound bites. The influencers who bubble to the top are adept at harnessing the algorithmic trends and they profit off of those clicks, likes, and shares. But if we see these influencers as authoritative we can end up a very unserious people.
One of the most dangerous aspects of our influencer led culture is that simple binaries are the setup and ultimate result of this simplistic sound bite content. Add to that the flooding of our feeds with AI driven content that is usually false or at least misrepresented and we end up with confusion. Human beings are not created to be simplistic false binary creatures. We are complex and, according to the Abrahamic religions, created in the very image of God (imago Dei). There is no scripture I know that describes a simple God. If there were, religion itself would be less diverse and compelling.
Why is this dangerous? False binaries allow us to create ever shrinking in groups and ever expanding out groups. We turn disagreement into evil. We allow the algorithms and unserious people to label human beings as evil, demonic, or worse simply based upon ideas. Now, I will be the first to say that some ideas are evil, but just disagreeing on monetary policy is not necessarily evil. But neither is disagreement on most ideas. Yet, that is what we are allowing to happen to our own thoughts. We allow influencers and politicians to tell us that those who disagree with us or are different are evil.
I cannot tell you how many times clergy in my denomination have made comments like “you can’t be a Democrat and be a Christian.” Yes, some also make that claim about Republicans so lean into the complexity. That mindset is one in which we can easily dismiss criticism about “our” team and only see the bad in the “other” team. But sometimes I just want to scream because the absence of hyperbole means someone means it. Right now, I feel that the twin political parties in the U.S. are failing us as a species, but maybe that’s because they are also buying into false binaries. Voting for a Democrat does not make you evil or unChristian; neither does voting for a Republican. Both major parties have failures and policies which can be anti-Christ in the broad sense. This is one of those subjects that just makes us look dumb. It gets so bad that some claim you can’t be all sort of things and be Christian. One example is Socialism. There are countless Christians throughout the world who are socialist and that fits within faith just fine. But, that doesn’t stop those who would divide from trying to make a different claim. Here’s an example:
Jim Garlow was a pastor. Now he is a political activist and influencer who left Wesleyanism for the New Apostolic Reformation’s embrace of Christian Nationalism. This clip was prior to that, but he was already following a path that led to a false binary. Plus, the claim is just downright false. Scripture and Socialism are not in conflict any more than Capitalism and scripture. The comment is also ridiculous because it ignores reality. But it riled up the audience because their binary world agrees with him. But life and faith are so much more complex than this performative crap. Human beings are more complex and our brains are capable of holding multiple ideas at the same time without being inconsistent. But the influencers don’t profit off of human complexity. As a new Green Day line states “nonsense is [our] heroin.”*
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