Clickbait Christianity

engagement farming for the kingdom of God?

Whether armchair theologians or evangelical tradwife influencers, something about the invitation to consume sanctification (the principle itself or one’s own) as content (with all of the familiar trappings of the regular, secular content machine) makes me recoil. Even considering people whose content is otherwise substantial, I have to confess: I am losing patience for faith-based clickbait.

Let’s call it “faithfluencing:” garden variety social media influencing, but the product or lifestyle being promoted is Christianity. The implied mission is to promote the faith. Methods of promotion are beginning to converge into a recognizable pattern of engagement farming, to include:

• Reducing complex theology to meme-friendly soundbites

• Ignoring the fallout of lost nuance once those memes spread

• Using those memes as a blunt tool for personal detraction

• Hooking engagement with political drama (usually to do with sex wars stuff)

• Positioning personal lifestyle choices as universal Christian mandates

• Policing ideological purity along those lines and casting dissenters as unfaithful

Sure, it gives me the ick, but the rise of faithfluencing raises deeper concerns than just personal taste or aesthetic preference. How does the internet itself shape and distort religious discourse? What are the theological and moral implications of adapting evangelization to a system that rewards spectacle over subtlety? And most importantly—is it possible to engage in digital evangelization without sacrificing integrity to the perceived demands of consumers? To answer these questions, we must first understand the nature of the space in which faithfluencers operate—the so-called "new public square."

Race to the Bottom Dollar: The Nature of the New Public Square

Though we may think of the internet as our new public square, it’s not a perfect comparison. Historically public squares were true “third places” — central locations in cities and towns, open to all, where people could gather and participate in the political process or simply engage in passive social connection. While citizens could voluntarily engage in commerce in the public square, the logic of commerce did not dominate the public square; there was no fee for entry.

The “new” public square is not a civic forum but an attention marketplace: a system in which human attention itself is monetized. Businesses, platforms, and individuals compete not for money directly, but for engagement—clicks, views, likes, shares, and time spent on a platform.

What follows the commodification of civic communication is a perverse incentive: virality thrives on spectacle, and creators must adapt to what performs in order to be seen at all, so even creators of high quality content feel the pressure to promote their work in effective ways —shelving ethical considerations more easily than they might otherwise since their consumer base is faceless. In other words, the invisible hand has become a ventriloquist for voices that would have historically operated outside of the logic of the market.

This leads to a feedback loop: influencers perceive that the majority of consumers crave provocation → they meet the demand → narrowing options for higher quality material in the future.

Today’s internet also intensifies the problem of oversocialization. The perception of the popularity of ideas and figures, evidenced by engagement, influences everyones’ willingness to dissent. This is true enough in physical space, too, but the unvarnished and depersonalized nature of virtual world both disrupts the natural vetting process for influence (losers can easily pretend to be winners) and magnifies the punishment for making the wrong call (we get ritual public humiliation that exists permanently and in view of the whole world, rather than a passing moment of awkwardness between members of a mutually obligated community).

Faithfluencers as Pharisees?

Driving down the general quality of civic communication by uncritically submitting to the logic of the attention economy—catering to the lowest denominator—is one thing. Doing this under the pretense of promoting the faith is another. When the Church’s message is mediated through the same mechanisms that elevate cheap provocateurs, it almost inevitably picks up those traits.