Description
Book SynopsisWhen it comes to evangelical Christianity, the internet is both a refuge and a threat. It hosts Zoom prayer groups and pornographic videos, religious revolutions and silly cat videos. Platforms such as social media, podcasts, blogs, and digital Bibles all constitute new arenas for debate about social and religious boundaries, theological and ecclesial orthodoxy, and the internet's inherent danger and value. In The Digital Evangelicals, Travis Warren Cooper locates evangelicalism as a media event rather than as a coherent religious tradition by focusing on the intertwined narratives of evangelical Christianity and emerging digital culture in the United States. He focuses on two dominant media traditions: media sincerity, immediate and direct interpersonal communication, and media promiscuity, communication with the primary goal of extending the Christian community regardless of physical distance. Cooper, whose work is informed by ethnographic fieldwork, traces these conflicting paradi
Trade ReviewShedding light on the profound phenomenon of digital evangelicalism, this book sparkles with illuminating insights on the contemporary tensions and paradoxes of religious authority, as well as the vital role of new media for religious organizing in a datafied world. The Digital Evangelicals assembles a range of multimodal data across platforms to help us think more deeply about the communicative constitution of religious authority, authenticity and community.
-- Pauline Hope Cheong, co-editor of Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture: Perspectives, Practices and Futures
The Digital Evangelicals is much-needed intervention in a field chock full of books telling you what so-called evangelicals "really are" or "really should be." Cooper's attention to the discourses that define the boundaries of evangelical identity and community offer an important corrective to the search for the best definition of evangelicalism. Drawing on a unique archive of digital sources, The Digital Evangelicals shows how claims about "authentic" evangelicalism are really battles over authority and power.
-- Michael J. Altman, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Alabama
The Digital Evangelicals is an ambitious, impressive, unprecedented work. Part cultural history, part critical textual analysis, part ethnography, it is more than the sum of these parts. Cooper's book demands a fundamental reconsideration of what it means to analyze evangelicalism as a hybrid online-offline cultural form.
-- James Bielo, author of Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity
The Digital Evangelicals is an impressive text. In addition to detailing how today's emerging evangelicals engage new media, Cooper also provides a framework for rethinking what, exactly, this thing called 'evangelicalism' even is. Through richly detailed ethnographies of Twitter debates, Instagram rituals, and Zoom church services, the book charts how communities constitute evangelicalism through media—and how social media might play a role in evangelicalism's undoing. The book is impressive both for its breadth of its analysis and the depth of its theoretical critique.
-- Christopher Cantwell, co-editor of Introduction to Digital Humanities: Research Methods in the Study of Religion
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Media and Message
1. Media Sincerity and Promiscuity: Origins
2. Evangelical Media Ecologies from Print to the Internet
3. Evangelical Theories of the Digital
Part II: Authenticity Construction across New Media: Case Studies
4. #FareWellRobBell: Heresy Discourse and the Horizontalization of Authority
5. Feminist Publics and the Progressive Evangelical Blogosphere
6. Instagram, Authenticity, Affect
Part III: Local Technologies in a Global World
7. Emerging Midwestern Evangelicals and Digital Media
8. Media Ambivalence in Emerging Evangelicalism
Conclusion: Zoom Church, Cancel Culture, and the Exportation of Evangelical Media
Appendix
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
