Rhetoric and Networked Religious Identity: Raised-Evangelical Social Media Users Writing Back in 2020

Abstract

This qualitative and ethnographic study examines the social media writing of American millennial raised-evangelicals who were active on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram in “long 2020.” All of these writers considered some or all of their social media activity to be “writing back”–posts, comments, and engagement that in some way pushed back on, raised questions about, or presented alternatives to the political and religious orthodoxies of their white evangelical communities of origin. Focusing on thirteen writers, sampled to maximize demographic range, I bring together scholarship from digital studies, religious studies, and writing studies to consider how raised-evangelicals used social media writing to reconfigure their religious identities during the period December 2019 to January 2021, which comprises two presidential impeachments, COVID-19 lockdowns, a presidential election, widespread protests against police brutality, and an insurrection at the U.S. capitol. It advances from the premise that “writing back” to white evangelical communities and connections is itself a religious practice.

Data collection for this study consisted of a survey with more than 230+ complete responses, 26 interviews with 13 participants, and social media observation, including the collection of 870+ posts across three platforms. Analysis of the data led to several conclusions. First, I intervene in debates about the nature of white evangelicalism to contend that for raised-evangelicals, any definition of the term tells a story about the past; the terminology of white evangelicalism offers its raised-evangelical users a shorthand to name the world of their childhood and their distance from it as adults. Second, I argue that writers drew on the resources of their evangelical childhoods to navigate algorithm-mediated social media writing. “Witness,” in particular, operates as a flexible decision-making frame for negotiating tensions between the twin beliefs that social media is both a danger and a tool for growth, as well as a synthesis for the rhetorical work of speaking about one’s convictions in an environment where audience reception is necessarily uncertain. Third, I describe two patterns in participant writing: empathy, or the practice of public self-reflection and self-disclosure around position changes, struggle, and difficult emotions, a phenomenon I turn to the work of Kenneth Burke and Lisa Blankenship to understand; and endorsement, a simultaneously algorithm-aware and algorithm-agnostic practice in which participants shared the rhetorical work of others in order to advance their questions, concerns, or critiques about white evangelicalism and the wider web of conservative religiosity, right-wing politics, and conspiracy thinking.

Finally, this dissertation posits that in a digital-first, post-2016 and -2020 landscape wherein denominations and the category of “evangelical” itself are losing purchase, American religious identity–particularly for those entangled with white American Protestantism–can be usefully understood as networked. I introduce two principles by which participants curated the religious leaders, writers, thinkers, meme pages, and collectives, active and long-dead, that populated their networks: engagement and discernment. In an era wherein political polarization and religious extremism stress American institutions, from churches to democratic mainstays, this dissertation’s findings suggest that a number of raised-evangelicals in the United States have used social media to forecast and try out alternative religious identities. Their ability to sustain, resource, and institutionalize those experiments may have a substantial impact on the nation’s public life in the decades to come.