Digital Creatives and the Rethinking of Religious Authority - Chapter 6

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 6: Digital Strategists

Digital strategists are a third type of religious digital creatives (RDCs), who draw their authority from a hybrid positioning between institutional and techno- logical expertise. These are individuals who have an affiliation with a specific religious institution or community. They often hold a position of leadership as part of these affiliations, such as being a priest, religious educator, seminary student or other ministry leader. Yet what makes them different from digital spokes- persons is that their primary position does not require them to use technology or perform media-focused tasks. While digital spokespersons are employed to do media work and curate the official media and digital presences of their church or denomination, digital strategists choose to develop digital expertise for strategic purposes. They embrace digital media in an effort to innovate their ministries and extend their work into new areas. It is through this digital experimentation and their creative leveraging of already available digital resources for religious ends that they gain notoriety and public attention, rather than from their official roles.

The idea of a digital strategist is drawn from Anderson’s (1999) discussion of the “reformer-critics” who appear online as individuals seeking to interpret and speak for their religious tradition through religiously focused engagement in various internet platforms. He stated these reformer-critics are often motivated by distinctive religious convictions or a self-imposed agenda that seeks to change or promote new understandings of community religious practices and/or beliefs and demonstrate alternative discourses or models of interaction online. Through their online work, they hope to gain access to a wider audience for their religious message, or recruit others to their viewpoint. Anderson described them as typic- ally self-appointed, seeing themselves as serving their religious community through their online presence. They draw on a mixture of online and offline sources to build their position and credibility. Anderson also suggested these reformers often seek to take on the role of exemplar representative of their religious community, where digital engagement allows for religious innovation and new expressions of religious practice to emerge that can invigorate traditional communities. Their innovation and vocal work online, however, can frame them as potential competitors with other official institutional leaders and spokespersons.

Here I spotlight and describe three types of digital strategists: (1) media- driven missionaries, (2) theologians who blog and (3) online ministers. Each type embraces and integrates digital media into their work, not because this is required, but because they see digital media offer them added benefits, helping them fulfill their work in creative and more efficient ways.

One example of these digital strategists are those who work as media-driven missionaries. Over the last 200 years, Christian denominations in the West have been training and sending out individuals to foreign countries to proselytize those of different nationalities and religious backgrounds with the Christian message. In the last 100 years, many of these groups have developed sophisticated training programs to help equip future missionaries with skills in religious teaching, language translation and cross-cultural adaptation to the new environments they will find themselves in. In the twenty-first century, many Christian missionary organizations still focus their attention on training up individuals as church planters, pastors, bible teachers or itinerate evangelists, preparing them to share their faith in a new culture within established religious institutions and contexts. Yet there is a growing awareness among some mission-focused denominational and parachurch organizations of the role digital media can play, not only in training new missionaries but also in changing the ways missions outreach work is actually done.

Here we look at a parallel group, “theologians who blog.” These are professional theologians, and Biblical Studies scholars, also referred to as bibliobloggers, who are typically not known for their digital fluency or having a tech background. They often work with ancient texts and set methods of interpretation to produce in-print articles and books on focused areas of scriptural teaching. The central role they play in church institutions as religious educators and trainers is one that has been developed literally over centuries. While the church has indeed had adapt to new expressions of culture over time, and their role within these, the main task of the theologian has charge changed little—to prepare students for leadership roles in their given denomination or religious organization. Yet the age of digital media and communication has prompted a growing number of these professional theologians to experiment with public exegesis, or biblical interpretation shared online, especially via blogs.
A third type of digital strategists are those who work for a church and whose main role is to facilitate some form of ministry in the offline context, such as religious education or teaching or care ministry to underserved populations. These RDCs come to recognize that embracing digital technologies can enable them to do their job in more efficient and creative ways. They may even hold a leadership position, such as serving as a priest or pastor, and they choose to use digital media in creative ways to facilitate new forms of engagement with their members. This can lead to the creation of new hybrid positions within some church contexts, where the main tasks they are charged with are quite traditional, such as pastoral care and counseling, but these tasks are done in new ways in mediated, networked spaces.

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...