The Future of the Church Is Fandom

We Have to Show Up Online to Reach the Next Generation

I understand why many pastors are reticent to engage actively on the internet. They want to be a pastor to their local congregation first, and don’t want the bizarre incentives of online optics to interfere with their local work. That totally makes sense. But even if they want to remain aloof and disinterested in the internet, the internet is interested in them.

The problem is that the culture is quite willing to press on without evangelical pastors. Because of their widespread absence from the internet at large, other shepherds step in to fill the gap. Internet culture is very decentralized, but it nevertheless has hierarchies. There are influential personalities, moderators, and admins that toil every day to shape the online conversation, and they shepherd forums, comment sections, subreddits, discord servers, and various other platforms that form up the younger generation’s epistemic community — that is, the group consensus of what we ought to believe and say. In other words, they are pastoring. They are the ones teaching young people what to read, what to think about, and policing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. They are the ones scratching the itching ears of the populace. While the youth pastor drones on about servant leadership, his teenagers are paying more attention to clips of Andrew Tate and young women wiggling their buttocks in anime cosplay.

How could we expect an aging church leadership to keep pace with the frenetic energy of meme culture? Well, by showing up, for one. One can at least try to express concern about the cultural paideia of the world system, even if one doesn’t always have the time or resources to outmatch it.

Now, for your average parishioner, internet culture still might not be that big of a deal compared to any other part of popular culture. Maybe your average parishioner is in their mid-40s and still watches more television than they spend on internet feeds. Maybe they even read a book once a year! But consider the type of person who is most likely to be strongly influenced by internet platforms over and against any other media culture: young, literate, and nerdy.

In other words, the institutional future for your church.

Your future pastors, elders, teachers, church staff, writers, and theologians are not getting their primary theological formation from a seminary. They are not being persuaded by midcentury magazines to take this stance or another. They’re getting it, first and foremost, from their peer groups and chosen influences online. That’s why they’re “becoming” Orthodox, or Roman Catholic, or Marxist. (I have a friend who became all three, in that order.)

This is why the future of the church, for better or for worse, is going to take the shape of fandom.

No, I don’t mean that pastors will be turning churches into temples to Super Mario. That’s happening already. Rather, the cultural formation of church leadership will be in the context of internet communities akin to fandom.

What is a fandom? For our purposes, we will define it as a culture developed between enthusiasts of a shared media interest, usually a fictional universe or media creator. As distinct from sports fandoms or most music fandoms, which revolve around live performances, media fandoms are mainly conducted online. (Besides the occasional comic con.) By participating in this culture, the enthusiast can build a shared sense of meaning, identity, and relationships with other enthusiasts, even at vast distances.

Some of the most influential media fandoms online over the course of my youth (and during the general mainstreaming of fandom culture in the 2010s) have been Harry Potter, Pokémon, Minecraft, Five Nights at Freddie’s, Star Wars, Marvel, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Homestuck, as well as K-pop and anime fandoms without number. But we can of course see how the weird dynamics of online fan fervor in these media-oriented communities carry over into internet communities based around any other topic under the sun, including those that grow up around the profiles of internet influencers. Sometimes I think it would be best to call these ‘influencers’ fishers of men, casting wide nets and bringing in all the nations to hear their voice. Or we could just call them shepherds.

People have wondered for a while if online fandoms could become religions. They inspire so much mass cultic devotion, at least for a time, that the lines can become blurred. That’s understandable. People need to channel their idolatrous lusts somehow, and consumer brand loyalty (especially to fictional universes) is one common format our society provides. However, maybe we need to reverse the question: what if in the age of the internet, our religions end up becoming fandoms?

Internet culture structures group devotion in essentially the same way, no matter what the subject matter. The group could be fanatics of esoteric 1980s anime, or of 17th century Puritan moral theology (in some cases, these circles overlap), but either way, how they signal their habits of piety will be nearly identical. Maybe even comically so. We even have memes about this, such as the infamous orthodox iconography / funko pop comparisons that have sprouted up.

Consider the way that evangelicals online will commonly geek out about Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and their favorite theologian all in the same breath. Just as there are a million ways for a fan to share their enthusiasm about a fictional universe, there are a million ways for religious people to show off how ethical they are.

Now, we have added narcissistic social media posting to that repertoire, as Cal Crucis recently enumerated on his private, yet influential X feed: “Reading hagiography before a jog, ranking best denominations, rehashing which side was right in the controversy, showing your beads & books for prayer, sharing spicy takes on doctrine, threatening damnation (so everyone knows you’re serious), lamenting the existence of porn —”

This is simply what casual posting and social signaling looks like when you’re in an internet community. But now the slots have been filled with religious totems. It’s not bad to read or pray or jog. It’s just that it is now easier than ever before to do those things publicly for instantaneous social validation, rather than toiling patiently and without acknowledgment for the sake of a higher end.

This social media signaling is not inherently evil. It is simply the most recent mechanism how you make yourself known in society. Not all of us can be like John the Baptist, going out into the wilderness and demanding society come to us. Some of us have ministries more like Christ, participating in public discourse. Wisdom is justified by her children (Luke 7:24-35).

Operating in an online community, you learn to social signal in a particular way. As Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul J. d’Ambrosio talk about in their recent book You And Your Profile, we use social media profiles as a way to curate our public identity and validate our efforts. Young people express their identity online through signals very different from how previous generations did in primarily physical social spaces.

Following after Lionel Trilling, the authors argue that previous eras prioritized modes of socialization based on ‘sincerity’ — sincere role enactment, often within the family or village — and ‘authenticity’ — pursuing the desires of your supposed deepest inner self. These processes of socialization are how we come to know who we are in relation to the group, how we display what our purpose and values are. They influence how we dress, what work we do, where we are in the group hierarchy, and how we get recognition. They influence what we think is the right thing to do.

Along these lines, a Chinese woman of yore who sincerely embraced her role in traditional Confucian society may have come to perceive mutilating her feet with foot-binding as not only socially obligatory but as morally good. After all, that was the role society had assigned to her, and she may never even have considered that things ought not be that way, no matter how uncomfortable.

However, with the advent of modernity, society became more fluid. Increased individual choice and mobility meant that people could more easily cross over into other social roles, or become aware of more lifestyle alternatives. We have more liberties now than a medieval peasant did, but also more things to covet. This meant that social obligations in modernity were more often perceived as a mask or a restraint holding back an individual’s true, “authentic” self. We see the flower of this thinking in Romantic and Modern narratives about pursuing one’s individual dream, about casting off one’s social obligations and pursuing passion, even if, say, one’s dream is adultery. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to deny your (supposed) “true self.”

Moeller and d’Ambrosio argue that sincerity and authenticity have faded away in light of a new mode of social identity construction that they call profilicity.

That is, we no longer evaluate things based on our own opinions but rather by the group consensus, or by comparing the consensus of various groups against one another. Likewise, when we display ourselves on internet profiles, we don’t do so in order to win affirmation from particular people, but rather to get attention from a generally distributed anonymous audience who are comparing us with other profiles. “By looking at [our profiles], others can see how we like to be seen as being seen.”

This is how we build up social prestige in the new order, as we not only present ourselves before the general audience, but participate in response chains of particular people presenting themselves in curated ways. It doesn’t always matter if the person is being sincere, true to expectations, or authentic, true to themselves. In fact, they might win extra attention for wildly and ironically transgressing those values. We get social validation as other profiles publicly engage with us over how we curate and display ourselves.

In a sincerity-based society, such as the traditional family or traditional churches, we prove that we’re good to those near to us by enthusiastically fulfilling the roles assigned to us, and casting dispersion on those who don’t. In an authenticity-based society, we receive recognition by proving how original and creative we are. But in a profilitic society, we are seeking to prove our worth to anonymous crowds, by the ever shifting standards that anonymous crowd may hold. Day after day, we constantly offer up self-portraits and autobiographies in the hope of something catching and our social worth being proven. Networks of interdependent validation emerge where groups continually show honor to each other based on some shared trait or interest, even if vilified by the mainstream. This is where fandom starts to become important. Whether the unifying force is furry fandom, foot fetishism, or fundamentalism, the different values, symbols, and ideas associated with that culture of enthusiasts circulate throughout the profiles and communities flying that banner, allowing millions of people to coordinate across the globe with one another, with at least a little bit of mutual understanding.

Through social media profiles and networks of internet communities, we are able to give instantaneous uninterrupted global feedback to one another, enthusiastic or critical. As such, we naturally become incentivized to display ourselves behaving in a way we know will get either response.

This behavior is everywhere. But I don’t see people talking about how deeply these habits will shape the culture of 21st century church institutions. Will our theological loyalties — whether to Roman Catholicism, or Presbyterianism, or Lutheranism — slowly sink to the level of loyalty that we show a particular fandom? Maybe they already have. Maybe we hold our entertainment to be as sacred as our church, or more so.

I would argue communities of theological formation—that is, different denominations and their schools of thought—will take on more and more of the characteristics of media fandoms as younger leaders replace the aging boomer leadership. Boomers and their values, notoriously, were also formed by mass media, but this was the mass media of televangelists, of Cold War propaganda, of the postwar university system, of Christianity Today and Zondervan and InterVarsity and Crossway.

These institutions are what set the aggregate parameters, the tone and basic learning habits of social piety in that generation. Do we even know what evangelical culture would look like apart from these things? Is there even an evangelical culture apart from these things? The next generation will have even more fragmented media influences in a microcelebrity ecosystem that will be much harder to trace, in blogs and forums whose archives may be easily lost forever; in private group chats, mailing lists, and in Twitter feeds.

While worship services in American religion may continue to possess characteristics common with sporting events and rock concerts, the formation of theological opinion specifically will operate like a media fandom, in that both are concerned with forming the group consensus around, and instilling appreciation and understanding of, a shared set of authoritative source texts. These texts offer the ground for an expansive system of symbols and ideas that inspire promulgation, as well as policing. In the case of churches, the source text is not just scripture, but what works of theology are approved by the community as reliable and wholesome. (Arguably, political ideologies, no matter how extreme, are even more blatantly taking on the characteristics of fandoms.)

So, what sort of behavior can we expect to see more of?

Firstly, like many American congregations, internet communities are pretty much totally voluntary. You are not born into them. Presumably there are as of now few discord servers that are dynastic and intergenerational. You stumble across them according to your media interests. No matter how big or how niche your interest is—a video game, an author, a religion, a fetish—there are communities for you. There are 19,000,000 active discord servers. There are over 80,000 subreddits with over 1000 subscribers. Three of them are Reformed. In most of them, discussions of the Christian faith or related values would be unwelcome.

You can also start another internet platform with the greatest ease, as long as people are listening to you. This suggests to me a future in which internal church factions as well as denominational splinters will multiply even more than they have in the previous era of Protestant denominational acceleration and nondenominational megachurch franchising. Paradoxically, it will also allow people to more easily find kindred spirits across denominational lines and form paradenominational associations aligned along certain shared values and friendships. Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say.

However, with the ease of adopting new communities comes shifting and mercurial loyalties. All it takes is to find oneself algorithmically connected into a new, different circle of influencers who might easily enculturate you into one radically different from the previous one you were attached to, or the culture of your own upbringing, as long as you find the new circle personally compelling and form strong enough connections with them. Ask around online, and it will not be hard to find people who identify with having gone through the most absurd sequence of belief systems, from libertarianism to fascism to Maoism and atheism to Judaism to Catholicism and so forth, or still hold to some combination of all of them.

Secondly, fandoms, and the vast nebulae of communities and platforms that they appear in, disseminate niche information and trivia very effectively, since they are run by enthusiastic nerds. On the fringes, this means that it’s easier for small scrappy teams of friends to gather intelligence on the periphery, wage information warfare, disseminate detailed agitprop, etc. But this universalizing interconnectivity in the mainstream means that the average internet community can be moderated and thought policed a lot more than you would think, especially by the standards of comfort enforced by women, and so many such communities quickly homogenize their values around progressive and egalitarian stances. Alastair Roberts has written about this at length. So if you thought our aging church leadership was effeminate already, just buckle down.

Thirdly, internet circles develop a complex ecosystem of influential personalities who can become well-regarded within their niche for their contributions— or notorious for their failings, as the case may be. But there’s no official way to totally ban a voice unless you own the platform or run the server. Rarely can you successfully excommunicate somebody; instead, you can only try to discredit and devalue their profile. (I reflect on the curiosity that, being neither a Lutheran nor a supporter of Hitler, the opinions from an LCMS-affiliated figure that I come across most often is Corey Mahler. But maybe that reveals too much about my algorithms.) The path to ascent in influence is not linear but can happen in any number of ways, as long as the end result is that you have significant community of followers in your profiles or under your administration on a platform. You can get followers by having a podcast, or creating art, or telling a life story that goes viral, or just by being funny. But above all, signaling your loyalty to shared fandoms. Influence accumulates according to a wildly informal mix of charisma, engagement, and myriad algorithmic connections rather than, usually, any formal system of gatekeeping.

In the future, basic literacy will require knowledge of internet culture, fandoms, and history all at once, knowledge equally devoted to twitter personalities, Japanese video game characters and 16th century theologians. Okay, that is mostly a joke. But the point is, each ‘fandom’ or subcultural circle (neo-denomination?) will have its own anarchic mix of cultural symbols, based on the personalities of those involved, and it will likely accelerate to the point that only the most cosmopolitan (and autistic) Very Online will be able to easily navigate most of them, at the expense of other studies.

Perhaps no one exemplifies the trend of the fusion of church and fandom at this present moment more than Richard Ackerman, the Redeemed Zoomer, a Presbyterian YouTuber in his early twenties whose meteoric rise (by the standards of Christian internet figures) this past year has been powered by a strange hybrid of Minecraft videos and viral church history discussions. Though it seems absurd, it’s not inconceivable now that the future of entire national denominations, and certainly individual congregations, will be shaped by how their leadership reacts to movements like the kind he is pushing for. It’s not that rhetoric from leading personalities like Ackerman will have some permanent cultic sway over diehard fans, but that the networking opportunities and opinions formed on the platforms developed in the wake of such big debuts of personality will form increasingly crucial parts of average people’s identities.

At the very least, the inevitable challenges the Zoomer Reconquista or any analogous internet based churchwide movement will face over the following years, internally or externally, will reveal just how many limitations there are in attempting to transfer online energy to real world action. What was once laughable now seems eerily within reach. There’s beginning to be a glimmer of possibility as boomer leadership slowly fades away, the possibility of institutional revolution, and young people are hungry for influence. Even if any one particular personality platform or movement dissolves, the future of the visible church will be hashed out in private group chats and comment sections long before it becomes official policy at a presbytery or synod. It already is this way.

This lack of gatekeeping is actually a bad thing when it comes to quality. Writers and speakers benefit from editorial oversight and formal training. Expect discourse to get even more petty and stupid, even as we grow in our potential to learn so much more, because they will revolve increasingly around the drama of personalities feuding over tiny little patchwork fiefdoms of influence.

As such, I imagine the future having a lot more heresies and division over basic Christian doctrine that can’t be easily tamped down or shushed away. It’s only by the grace of God that we haven’t seen more of this divisiveness already— only in narrow and currently trendy ways, such as deconstructing exvangelicals. Perhaps this is because the standards of public rhetoric by official leadership are currently so cautious, homogenizing, and feminine in its attributes. But if the growing backlash of anonymous, disagreeable, reckless, and masculinized discourse continues to swell on the periphery of the internet, I fear the church will be hit by a wave of more metaphysically penetrating, serious, and influential heresiarchs eventually. All in God’s good timing.

How should church leadership respond to all of this?

First, be present. We need to come to an agreement that public rhetoric and internet ministry is a legitimate calling, even as we debate over the proper methods and how to best represent the Lord in it. The internet is not the only way to reach people, or even the best way, but right now it’s where people’s eyes are.

Secondly, study it. Don’t just be swept up into the whirlwind of controversy and drama (Jeremiah 22:22). Continue to analyze the intricacies of online fandom dynamics and profilicity, public and private fora. They need good shepherds. The battlefield has shifted, and the sheep are wandering into the line of fire.

Thirdly, speak with authority (Matthew 7:29). A relativist can only offer his opinion, trying to seduce people to one thing or another. Christians can speak on behalf of the Lord. That doesn’t mean heaping up pious words for everyone to admire but outdoing one another in showing honor to God and to each other.

Christ warned us about lengthy prayers and overt displays of religiosity, especially among the influential class of scribes (Luke 20:46). We will be judged for everything we have said. But like Christ, we must be willing to publicly criticize present ethical dogmas and the hypocritical religious authorities who enforce them, even if we suffer for taking a stand.

People are hungry for validation. Go out and praise what is good. Criticize what is evil. We can influence the crowds, if we are confident we know what is good and what is evil.

It’s a sick and twisted culture out there. People are trying to curate their identity out of the smoking ruins and scrap heap of a once mighty civilization. Offer something better: the words of Christ, fellowship with his people, a spirit of truth.

As the average pastor spends fifteen hours a week preparing his forty-minute sermon, the young people in his church are spending an average of forty hours a week on their phones. And the more they’re spending time on their digital devices, the more likely they are going to get swept up into some idolatrous fandom or even more extreme ideologies. A generation of studious young folk who could have become pastors, teachers, and scholars—scribes of the kingdom! —are now becoming homosexuals and communists, because the homosexuals and communists were there for them. I look out on my generation and weep. Now, everyone is neurotic and everyone is gay.

Missionaries and ministers need to be studying how internet communities actually work and participating in them if they want to find a way to reach the next generation. You can’t street preach anymore. Everyone’s wearing air pods. Their eyes are on their feed. They’re following shepherds that you can’t see.

Before you shrug all this off, consider that fandom culture is what mainlined wokeness into the bloodstream of our society. The collective social pressure of thousands of overlapping fandom circuits moderated according to a spectrum of leftist values is what formed the parameters of the average young millennial’s brain, even if they themselves are not deep in the fandom culture themselves. I was there as an adolescent watching it all happen, not realizing the long-term significance. All of my peer age internet friends joined Tumblr around 2011 to participate in various fandoms and, after a year or two of decentralized catechism, eventually embraced transsexual identities and vaguely leftist politics. A few became furries or polyamorous. They had to be taught how to do this. They wouldn’t have figured this out on their own. They had to be enculturated; or, as some would say, groomed. I just wish there had been someone there to enculturate them into a good life instead.

Conversely, just as erotic Tumblr fandoms turned all the young women into queer communists, cataclysmic events in video game fandom like Gamergate turned all the young men into Nazis. Well, I exaggerate, but it is widely regarded (almost jokingly) in internet culture as a key domino factor for the mass adoption of identity politics by anonymous young men, in turn a catalyst for the election of Donald Trump. That’s what fandom networks can do to a nation. Just what will they do to the church?

So, to sum it all up, I believe that due to the influence of the internet, the modes by which we express religious identity and fandom identity are blending into one.

I see fragmented futures for the American church being war gamed out in my peer groups online right now. Looking out on my feeds I see anime fans, video game fans, movie fans, literature fans. I see communists, homosexuals, traditionalists, evangelicals—sometimes all these identities claimed by the same person at once. And many of them are interested in steering the church in a particular direction. Many of these inchoate identity markers will no doubt quickly flare out, or prove entirely unscalable. Some of these circles will quickly dissolve as different personalities move on to do better things with their lives. But I am convinced some of these conversations will take root, and grow, and grow, until they are at the very center of our entire culture, like a tree that all the beasts of the earth find shade under, and all the birds of the heaven rest in its branches (Daniel 4:11). Everyone else will be left wondering, “Where did this come from?” But we’ll know. Because we were paying attention.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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