A half-autobiographical, half-cultural critique about moving forward with religious engagement in a digital world

Introduction: I’m Bad at TikTok

I’m on TikTok, and I’m not sure that’s good (if you’re interested, some of it ends up on YouTube). The first part of this post is sort of me, me, me, but I’m also wrestling with what post-institutional religious engagement may look like, so my experience may be somewhat central to the overall discussion.

If you’ve been around for a bit, you know this sort of post-initutional community building is something I have on my mind.

My online identity is in a bit of unrest. I have a lot of interests, and the thing about me is that I like to talk about my interests—publically. Maybe this is a hold-over from my lifelong dream of entering the professoriate. A dream confounded by many factors. My 2016 diagnosis with brain cancer being one of them (I have a blog about living with brain cancer if you just can’t get enough Adam!) When you’re told that you’ll only live a year and a half, a five or six year PhD program feels even less reasonable than entering the very same program with nothing but health to spare! (Mainly because the academic job market for humanities grads is a nightmare, but that’s not the point here.)

Other factors to second-guess the path to PhD study include my spouse and family and the likely requirement to relocate for doctoral study. This is merely pragmatic; our kids are in an incredible school district, my spouse has been at her job for more than 15 years, both sets of our parents live close; in short, please do not hear this as complaint, only being practical.

And let’s not overlook the most obvious factor of all, would I even qualify for a program, given my lackluster undergrad transcript (I turned it around some for master’s work) and the competitive candidate pool for relatively few PhD slots? On my first round of applications I was rejected from two and waitlisted by another. It was at this same time that I was diagnosed, so the immediate decisions were made for me.

Aaaaaanyway, the point with respect to TikTok is this, well, the dual points are these: First, I have a tough time settling on one content niche. I’ve made a name for myself on the internet through years of faithful (and successful) patient advocacy, and so, to re-build an audience from scratch on this new-to-me platform, is daunting and discouraging. Plus, I wouldn’t mind having an identity on at least one internet platform that isn’t Adam with brain cancer—that’s the major reason why I haven’t leaned into that content over there. And yet, my most popular video (no joke, with close to 100k views!) is one about patient advocacy, go figure!

And second, more importantly, I suck at TikTok. I’m long-winded, on a platform that rewards concision. I was able to overcome this obstacle on Twitter with limited character counts, but that’s owing to years of practice (I’ve been on that app for 14 years), and I’m better with written words than off-the-cuff speaking. My long-windedness notwithstanding, the second challenge with TikTok for me is that I rely heavily on nuance and the principle of charity, on a platform that rewards strong assertions and say-what-you-mean rhetoric.

Long winded, nuanced speech is not the ticket to success on TikTok! So I’ve been frustrated there. I realize that this is all to do with me and not the platform—the question really is whether I want to invest the time and frustration with retooling my content and delivery to match the design of the platform, and that’s yet to be seen. I am thankful that I’ve gained some insights from engagement on the app (and thanks to a couple of followers that I’ve converted to subscribers here), and I want to address something (or a few things) about faith, religion, theism, and sacred texts. For better or worse, that is the style of content I’ve produced (nowhere near 100k views with any of that yet!)

As I think about the future of religious engagement in an a rapidly realized post-institutional world against the backdrop of a polarized political environment and Christian Nationalism, I’m not so arrogant to suggest that my way is the way forward, but there is at least some reason to think that “Digital Ministry” is primed to “respond to 21st century problems in 21st century ways,” and this is something I’m leading in local faith discussions where I’m involved.

Let my experience help us think more about this.

My Messages about Sacred Texts

Leaders stay on message to build identity, build trust, and set expectations, and my messages echo my writing here and includes some pretty consistent main ideas. Before stating those in rough outline, let me remark on the status of 21st century religious movements.

I don’t think people are leaving institutions because churches don’t have a TikTok account. True that people will check out a church or house of worship online to get a feel for them before they will ever go in person, so online presence matters, but people are leaving institutions because the theology sucks. For one example, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is really shit theology.

I don’t want to argue that the Bible is redeemable in each of its problematic claims. The Bible condones chattel slavery, not only “debt servitude,” as apologetics likes to claim. And anyone who would align with a religious movement that holds the Bible in some esteem must sit with this reality and make sense of it. But I would say that many of the clobber texts are corrected when treated academically by an informed scholar. This is not to dismiss or give a pass to problematic Biblical passages, and it’s not to say religion isn’t culpable for real harm, but it is to say that when standing in allyship with marginalized communities, the Bible must be taken seriously, and when done so, many of the prooftexts and clobber verses can be not only defanged but shown to not be about the claim some make them out to be!

My point here is that interpretation requires the application of consistent and reasonable principles and sound methodology.

Because the Bible is so often used as a cudgel to bludgeon others, I have shaped a lot of my content around biblical interpretation. I think my intent is not so much to argue for my interpretation, moreso, to simply show that different interpretations exist! Nobody needs to get on board with my views, but you also don’t need to get on board with anyone else’s! If I introduce skepticism to chip away even a little in dogmatically held views that harm others, that’s a job well done. I don’t see how anyone could take 3,000 years of literature and come out with settled dogma that cannot be questioned. I’ve noted elsewhere that the Jewish form of Torah study, chevrusa, serves us well, where study occurs in groups of two or more to ensure no one’s single view goes unquestioned.

The real lesson to hold onto here is that disagreement with the text and disagreement with God has biblical precedent! God’s talked out of a lot of stuff in the Bible. God changes God’s mind a lot in the Bible. Why should humans hold their doctrine at a level more sacred than the God the doctrine seeks to describe?

Let me share these main ideas that I’ve tacked on the corkboard of my thinking about the Bible. I note that these are each controversial, or can be. I’ll state the plea here that if (when?) the following ideas conflict with your own that you’ll remain engaged through the end!

These main ideas include composition, authority, authorship, divinity, multivocality, reception, and value. This is how I’ve structured a lot of my content.

• Composition. The Bible is composed over a 1,000 year period, including an oral tradition that we cannot fully recapitulate and multiple human-authored source documents that have undergone editing, redaction, selection, and omission to conform with political and theological aims

• Authority. The Bible has no inherent authority on its own; the authority of the Bible is conferred by interpretive communities and how they employ the text

• Authorship. Contemporary readers can learn about ancient Biblical communities (through Biblical and extra-Biblical evidence), but we can never embody their lives to understand their cultural, cultic, and political lifeworlds—what we think the Bible means—or what it meant in context—is always mediated by our own biases and theoretical presuppositions

• Divinity. The Bible is not divine. If it were, who’s to say which version? Let alone considering the sacred texts from multiple faiths, ecumenically, there is not a single, agreed upon canonical version of the Bible across Christian traditions

• Multivocality. Given the preceding claims, especially involving composition and authorship, the Bible speaks with multiple voices, from multiple perspectives, throughout multiple historical periods. The text, in other words, is multi-vocal. The Bible does not speak with one voice. The same narrator does not guide the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. A paradigmatic example of the fallacy of univocality is when someone pulls texts from Leviticus (a book from Torah) and Romans (a Pauline epistle) to argue that homosexuality is a sin. Not only does the Bible not say this, using the Bible in this way assumes that the Bible has a single voice or perspective

• Reception. Reception Theory is a broad topic, but what I mean to say here is that the Bible does not tell you how it is to be read. You cannot turn to page 27 to hear instructions on how to read the Bible. Psalms, ostensibly, serve a very different rhetorical purpose than, say, a Pauline epistle. Related to multivocality, there is no easy answer to the question, “How should you read the Bible?” While we may be able to account for the rhetorical purpose behind individual books or individual block of Psalms used for this or that, there is no one way that the Bible tells its readers how it is to be used.

• Value. I’ve saved, what I think, is the best for last. The Bible is extremely valuable! The literature of the Bible is worthy of study, even if not studied within a confessional setting. The Western World, especially, is culturally shaped by the Bible in untold ways. I value the Bible deeply, and I am engaged in some sort of engagement daily, whether that’s reading a Torah Parsha, a gospel reading, commentary about particular passages, reading secondary academic lit about its authorship or history, or *ahem* writing a blog post! I hold the Bible in deep reverence and high regard, even if I don’t think it’s divine!

I want to pause briefly on this final bullet about the value of the Bible. This goes for Jesus’s purported death and resurrection, too. I have received this comment to videos about both topics. It goes like this, “If the Bible isn’t divine (If Jesus isn’t really God), then why even read it (follow him)?”

I don’t mean to straw characterize anyone. This truly is a complaint I’ve heard: If it’s not divine, why follow it? And I think it’s just really too bad! I am not sure how to articulate this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m taking potshots. Here’s the thing. I’m not a faith leader. I’m not paid by any religious institution. My livelihood does not depend on anything having to do with religion. (Trust me my 11 paid subscribers here aren’t paying the mortgage! But you could upgrade to paid today. LOL)

What’s more, I don’t hold any sort of theology where I think I may end up in a hell of eternal conscious torment. There is zero motivation for me to take the Bible seriously other than I love study of it, it’s been the family business, and I think its ancient wisdom and rituals connects me to my ancestors. The external motivation is that I hope I can make religion a little less toxic while helping to rudder a way forward for communities of meaning-making in the 21st century.

The fact that so many people of faith complain that if the text is not divinely authored than it’s not worth reading is the same tired argument that there can be no morality without God. One time a guy told me that he had been to my dad’s church, but my dad doesn’t preach about hell enough. “I need something to keep me behaving,” he said. OK, sociopath. What about human decency?! In fact, it’s in the Bible that each person has a little bit of the divine breathed into them. Hell or no hell, we should “behave” because each and every person, everywhere, for all time, is created in the divine image—we ought to hold ourselves to the magnitude of that responsibility.

Objections to My Messages

Maybe you aren’t shocked to hear that I’ve managed to piss off everybody!

I should temper that remark. Not really everybody! But I am surprised that the source of the critical remarks are not from the obvious groups.

Conservative faith practitioners, as you may expect, take deep issue with my remarks about authorship and authority, but, more surprisingly, stalwart atheists criticize me for even discussing the Bible, even when discussing its fully human status! As though to even speak of the Bible is to be complicit in some of the harms that religion has caused. Conservative Christians have blocked me and sent me to hell, but atheists have called me fascist for bringing up religion and the Bible. Accused me of silliness, foolishness, studying a fantasy book. It’s all so strange because we have entire university programs for narrow niches of literary analysis (as we should!)

Dr. Laura Robinson, PhD at Duke (who also has a Substack), had a great Twitter thread about this recently. The example is worth taking a closer look: The set up is this: a person from an academic background in a STEM field stumbled their way through a bad-faith tweet thread to complain that “No archeological evidence supports the Bible,” misquoting scholars and doubling down on misinformed takes. Dr. Robinson exposes this for what it is: anti-intellectualism. Yes, even “intellectuals” can be anti-intellectual. The original tweeter employed poorly motivated arguments and a poor grasp of the academic literature. It continues to be striking to me how little respect or awareness there is for academic Biblical scholarship and the history of Southwest Asia.

Now I do not hold a PhD (see my earlier remarks! I do have an MA in philosophy), but this sort of pigheaded anti-intellectualism is prevalent in my TikTok comments. Recently someone told me that “all religion is fascist.” When I pointed out that there isn’t one monolithic category called religion and that it is difficult to pin down even a small set of features that would apply to each and every religion. I was met with the reply, “pick any characteristic of fascism and its in religion.”

That, my friends, is anti-intellectualism.

Maybe it’s my philosophy training speaking, but good old fashioned concept analysis demands a set of necessary and sufficient conditions be identified and argued for! You can’t bald assert yourself to a convincing objection—well, I guess you can, but to do so is to abandon reasonable discourse.

To address the central thrust of the objection: “All religion is fascist.” Or, “The Bible is a fantasy book.” Or, and this was another good one, someone asked me in good faith why the Abrahamic religions don’t agree with each other (a terrific question!), and in my video reply, someone commented, “The major religions: Superman, Spiderman, and Hulk.” These commenters think they are making critiques, when really they’re telling on themselves and their lazy anti-intellectualism.

I talk about the Bible and religion so often because it’s application has been, and continues to be, very toxic. I shared some of those stories in my post about Open and Affirming Covenants. Religious people need to come to terms with the history of harm in religion. Like the Bible and its problematic material, we must sit with it and reconcile ourselves to it and it to ourselves. Just like America, baby! High ideals and a whole lotta toxic and problematic history. But we don’t (shouldn’t) resign ourselves to it! The legacy of civil rights continues, and we join that struggle to hold America accountable to her highest ideals. This same work is required of anyone who follows the Bible seriously.

The aspirational work of Christian communities in the 21st century is to commit ourselves to the struggle of peace, justice, nonviolence, and reparatory justice. To dismantle toxic dogma and to join the prophetic legacy to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.

Here is where I’ll make my final call. People of progressive faith and secular humanists are positioned to join this work together. Sacred rituals and secular rituals are not distinct—they are each social bonding activities built around shared values, cooperation, affirming the humanity in the other, striving to repair the world, and, to quote from an article I cited in a previous post, “Get shit done in your community.”

I don’t know what the post-institutional religious world looks like, but I think it will look a whole lot better if we start treating each other as community partners, and to do that, institutional religion needs to stop inviting people in and instead, moving outward beyond the four-walls.