Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority - Chapter 7

Dr. Campbell, director of the Network, explores the interactions between digital innovators and religious organization and institutions, in her latest book: Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority (Routledge 2020). Here we provide a glimpse into her insights shared in the book on how digital creatives with religious motivations and digital media experts working the churches are challenging traditional notions of what it means to have religious authority in a digital age. The following blog post is an edited excerpt from a chapter appearing in Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority give our readers a unique insights into her arguments and findings shared in the book.

Chapter 7: How Christian Digital Creatives Understand and Perform Authority
Each category of RDCs draws on a different view of how authority is situated in notions of how authority is traditionally understood relative to established religious institutional and/or chosen community affiliations.

Digital entrepreneurs describe themselves in relation to traditional or religious institutional authority in terms of power, where Foucault’s work on power as a social dynamic and Hofstede’s idea of power distancing are applied. Here authority is understood as based on RDCs’ ability to navigate their social position and agenda within digital and religious spaces, and rhetorically and tangibly establishing their position as a visionary tech influencers in these contexts. They align with the idea of being a media influencer in that they privilege digital expertise and their technical/social impact as giving them religious influence in their media-making narrative, and downplay their lack of institutional authority or position.

Digital spokespersons’ media-making narratives describe authority as primarily role based, and so present a Weberian understanding of authority wherein certain actors have the legitimate right to oversee and govern specific contexts. Here authority is defined in terms of specific roles performed in a set environment, namely leaders being acknowledged as legitimate authorities by their followers or audiences. Digital spokespersons emphasize the fact that the work they perform is commissioned by and in the context of a specific religious institution. This means they see their digital work as bound by organizational accountability structures and protocols. As media professionals working within a religious institution, they see their media work as needing to be officially branded and representing not themselves but the groups they work for.

Finally, digital strategists enact a relational understanding of authority in descriptions of their work, where Lincoln becomes a useful discussion partner to explain the relationship negotiation they undertake as part of their digital labor. Here authority is a social and cultural interdependence between RDCs and the religious community members they serve. Digital strategists describe their conception of authority in their media-making narratives by emphasizing how they navigate between their allegiance to traditional institutional commitments and the remit of their jobs and the call to and personal conviction of the need to engage media to do this work in the technology-infused world of the twenty-first century. As missional media negotiators, they recognize the fact that algorithmic culture is in tension with the structures of their institutional affiliation. Rather than privilege digital culture like digital entrepreneurs, or downplay its influence like digital spokespersons, they choose to live and work within this tension between the religious and algorithmic cultures. They understand their work gives them influence in both spheres.

While authority is understood and enacted in different ways by these three groups of RDCs, each of them draws on some similar assumptions. First, their understanding of authority is strongly influenced by how and where they see themselves in relation to the traditional religious institutions and communities with which they seek to affiliate or connect in some way. Perceptions of being institutional outsiders, insiders or some hybrid combination shape their assumptions of whether authority resides in their actions or begins within their institutional affiliations. Second, each group of RDCs enacts a distinct positioning of themselves to digital culture and algorithmic authority. This is partially based on the level of sway and importance each gives to digital expertise and fluency, and the social position these allow them to achieve. This points to the need to pay attention to whether RDCs privilege digital expertise over institutional affiliation or vice versa, as this can dictate the amount of credence they give to algorithmic authority in dictating power structures in a digital age.

Third, RDCs’ understanding of authority can be seen as a performance, a balancing act they undertake between multiple sectors of impact upon religious culture. Goffman’s approach to authority, as laid out in this study, draws attention to the fact that RDCs must negotiate their work and investments in digital and religious contexts simultaneously. They must decide how to prioritize and to relate these cultural contexts, and then how to best articulate these intentions. By doing so they map out a distinct prioritization of how they see other religious actors and communities in relation to technology structures and environments. These negotiations are connected to their front-stage and back-stage performance of religious identity as digital creatives, as well. We must pay close attention to RDCs’ self-reports about their digital activities—how they link these to religious desires or convictions, then frame them in relation to official religious institutions. Outlining the intentions behind these media-making narratives is only one part of understanding RDCs’ negotiations with authority; it forms the basis for a detailed investigation of their rationale and framing of religious community and institutions revealed through the technological apologetic.

Excerpt taken from Campbell, H.A. (2020). Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority. Routledge. This book can be purchased through the publisher at: https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Creatives-and-the-Rethinking-of-Religi...