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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I am Emily Tankin, and this week we will be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today I am speaking with Ryan Burge. He is an assistant professor of political science and is the co-author, along with Miles Williams of the University of Illinois, of an article called Is Social Media a Digital Public?
How evangelical leaders use Twitter to encourage the faithful and publicize their work. It is in the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture. Ryan, thank you so much for taking some time to speak with me today. Thanks Emily, glad to be here.
So, you know, just to start out, it's a clever phrase, but beyond that, just for our listeners, how do you define the concept of a digital pulpit? What does that mean for the purposes of your research and writing? Yeah, so we're looking at evangelicals specifically, and one of the things that defines evangelicals is evangelicalization. I mean, that's sort of their name comes from, they want to spread the gospel, tell me as many people as they can about Jesus Christ, and they do that from a pulpit on Sunday morning during a church service, but we are interested in how they can use the medium of Twitter specifically to sort of preach the message about Jesus to a larger audience who maybe would never come to their church, would never have anything to do with church, or probably turn off to religion.
Do they use Twitter as basically an extension of the Sunday morning pulpit, or has Twitter become something else entirely for them? It's become a way to publicize their work, or a way to talk about where they're going to be, or a way to steer the conversation. So, we want to see if Twitter basically became an extension of who they already were, or if they're using it with sort of a different strategy and a different approach to try to reach a different group of people. So, this is my next question for you, which is, you know, as you say, there is sort of an idea that comes to mind, at least in my mind, when you think of any leader of faith, but particularly evangelical leaders, right?
There's a person who's giving and person who's receiving. Did you see that same pattern on Twitter? Do you know, are evangelical leaders still, is it still one way street, or are they engaging with followers on social media in a different way? Does that change the relationship between a leader and the follower?
Yeah, so that's actually, I think one of the most interesting things that we come out of this whole thing with is understanding that the most popular Twitter accounts, we looked at over 90 evangelical Twitter accounts, and scraped us, 3,200 tweets. We were trying to look at what made people popular, what got people more followers, more retweets, more favorites, all those things. And we thought that accounts that engage with the audience, had a conversation and direct message people, would have higher levels of popularity, there's retweets and follows and all those kind of things. But in reality, that's not true at all.
The most popular evangelical Twitter account during our sampling period was Jolo Oste, pastor of Liquid Church in Houston, Texas, it's a mega church, but his Twitter account is entirely in one direction. He never directly mentioned someone, never responds to a comment. It's always just, here's a little cute message about the gospel or about Jesus, about where I'm going to be or about my new book. And then when people respond to him, he never responds back.
So it seems like it's not a necessity for a Twitter account to actually be a conversation to be well-followed and popular. However, there's an interesting case that it sort of popped up, a woman named Joyce Myers, who's a pastor of a church in suburban St. Louis. For a long time, her Twitter account was very much one direction.
She would just say where she was going to go, where she was going to preach at. And then somewhere, I think in the beginning of 2017, she hired someone to man her Twitter account full time to respond to people. And so we saw this weird switchover where engagement went through the roof, and almost everyone who mentioned Joyce Meyer got a response from the Joyce Meyer team. But they also had to tag the tweet at the end that had the initials of the person responding to tweet.
So people would know that that's not Joyce Meyer specifically. I think it's a really fascinating line of future research is, if you have a social media team, how do you make sure that people know that they're not responding directly to Joyce Meyer, but someone who's on Joyce Meyer's team, and that Joyce Meyer can't be held 100% responsible for whatever that person says. So I think that whole conversation about how to use social media going forward, especially when Christian leaders is going to be involved in conversation. Right, and how you separate your responding to the leader, but you're getting back to your getting feedback from their team.
And just what I said is that, are you engaging with a leader that, right? If it's somebody else running social media? Yeah, it almost feels like you're running a fan mail and you get to respond to it by a secretary. You're not really getting to where you want to go.
But then you see on Twitter, people respond to people, you'll see people respond to people 30 or 40 times over the course of a week or two, and it's like, they're not reading that. They don't look at their missions or they do. They don't act like it. So I wonder what drives people to continue to respond to people on Twitter, knowing that they're not going to get that person to respond back to them.
I wonder what goes on. I think some people just don't know how to work and works and don't know the unwritten rules of communication, but it seems like these celebrities, these people have hundreds of thousands of followers can't respond to everybody. So I think they do respond to something. Well, then they have to come up with something for a scheme in their head about what's a good thing to respond to.
And if I respond to some, then is that going to make other people mad that I didn't respond to others? So as you were speaking about this, the thing that kind of, the phenomenon that it reminds me of is politicians' accounts, right? Like normally, not to burst anyone's bubble, but normally those are not responded to. If you tweet at a very famous politician, you get a reply that replies probably not from, I don't know, go by it in a really Clinton or whoever.
And it brings me to my last question for you, which is that I personally can see some similarity between these evangelical leaders and people who are solely in the political arena and not don't necessarily consider themselves to be primarily in a religious one. And you say the piece that some, but not all of these faith leaders are using the pulpit for politics. And thinking about how in this particular era and this political moment, do you, did you and your co-author kind of conceptually separate the political from the religious? So that's a really interesting finding and something that I wanted to emphasize is that almost none of the evangelical leaders that we scrape their tweets from talk about politics at all.
I mean, they avoided it like the play. I mean, not even things like peace and war or, I mean, voting, like they would encourage people to vote. Like that's as far as it went. But definitely not just part of this activity in terms of vote for this candidate or this policy or things like that.
Instead, what we saw was the most pastors who are known for being pastors, who are religious leaders first, avoid politics at all costs. However, there's a small subset of our sample that were evangelical, prominent evangelicals, but they got into that space, they got famous for being political evangelicals. And amongst that group, you saw a lot more political activity because that was sort of their brand. I think that's where it's sort of become like, a classic in American life.
And it seems very vacuous sometimes like, what's your brand? But I think these leaders are painfully aware of what their brand is and want to play to that brand. So a guy like Joel Osteen, who does his very best to be as bland and vanilla as possible, he preaches. He's also pretty bland and vanilla on Twitter.
He's like the Christian Confucius. His tweets are very much like bite-sized. You can put him on a bumper sticker or put him on something you put on your refrigerator. It's very just kind of generic and kind of encouraging and inspiring.
But it doesn't rile anybody up. It doesn't make anyone look bad. But then he got other people like Jay Sekulah, who was President Trump's personal attorney, who talks about politics all the time. But because that's how he got famous was by talking about politics all the time.
So I think these leaders are smart enough to know how the public views them. And then they use that, the medium of Twitter, just to sort of enhance or play into the brand they already created. It's very, very rare for a religious evangelical, known for being a preacher. To talk about politics, because he or she knows that if they do, they're going to be divisive.
And they're going to turn off a big part of their audience. If you're a political evangelical, you know the people who follow you already like what you're doing. They like what you're saying. And they want more of it.
So give them what they want. And so that seems to me like, if I would think like what the motto of Twitter is, give people what they want. And these leaders have figured out what their brand is, what people want from them. It's not exactly the stuff of high spirituality, but or like, but maybe in a way it is.
You know, maybe maybe this is a new expression of faith, your own brand. Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see like a set like an evangelical get popular on Twitter first in two years, you know, like becoming a social media evangelical, like that's their brain. All here we follow got famous in the real world and then Twitter became an extension of who they already are. There's going to be a situation in the future.
I'm sure people get famous for Facebook or for Twitter or for Instagram as evangelicals. And then they have to become a person in real life that matches their Twitter persona, which is something we've never seen before. Well, we're the listeners to prepare for that future moment that future social media evangelicals are. I highly encourage you to read Ryan, Berger, and Miles, Williams, and paper, the social media, a digital public how evangelical leaders use Twitter to encourage the faithful and publicize their work.
Again, it's in the journal of religion media and digital culture. Ryan, thank you really for speaking with me today about your fascinating piece. Thanks, Emily. Appreciate it very much.