From Tweets to Tiktoks: Reimagining Religious Influence through Women’s Social Media Use

In the 2010s, Twitter rose in popularity as a digital space for theological dialogue, debate, and grandstanding. For feminist Christians, Twitter activism was a vital form of activism with real-world consequences that was motivated by theological ideas about God’s ethical expectations. I argue that social media platforms were spaces in which evangelical women who were marginalized based on their gender and who grew up with an emphasis on evangelism could “inverse evangelize” conservative evangelicals with progressive theologies and progressive politics. By focusing on one well-known Twitter user, Rachel Held Evans, in her posts relating to two famous men, John Piper and Mark Driscoll, I examine the way that feminist women used Twitter posts to push against the logic of patriarchal theology. This paper shows how Evans, a woman who had less institutional power than either Piper or Driscoll, used Twitter to contradict their viewpoints in view of an evangelical and post-evangelical public.

When the “these are for girls only” meme went viral on TikTok in 2021, many Muslim women in North America used the meme to create content that comically addresses the commentary they receive about their Islamic practice and the boundaries they’ve established around it. This paper focuses on the concept of naṣīḥa, understood to be a discursive mode of communal regulation in accordance with constructed ideals, in digital contexts. It examines several TikTok videos in which Muslim women address their audience about who is or is not authorized to offer social commentary on their Islamic practice on the basis of shared experience. I explore these videos as sites of contestation surrounding authority, arguing that these women use their videos to counter hegemonic conceptions of who has the authority to determine proper practice. How might focusing on the concept of naṣīḥa, or social commentary, complicate scholarly understandings of top-down models of Islamic authority? This paper attempts to address this question.

Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in popular culture on the modern-day witch. To contest the erasure of Afro-Indigenous spiritual perspectives, this paper looks at how digital sacredness the Instagram accounts of self-identified brujas of Afro-Caribbean descent. By creating digital sacred spaces that become the basis for their activism, the bruja’s social media presence acts against larger hegemonic structures, such as white supremacy, colonialism/imperialism, racism, and homophobia. By enabling the divine via social media the brujas are able to have a voice in the world that would seek to silence them. Their social platforms allow their voices to be easily amplified (read: go viral) in ways that did not exist before. Ultimately, this paper seeks to begin conversations on how digital media has transformed newer generations to engage with the cosmologies of Afro-Indigenous religiosity.

This paper examines the Roman Catholic sisters known as the Daughters of Saint Paul and their use of social media as part of their mission to use the media to evangelize. Through using modern forms, the Daughters of St. Paul emerge as leaders in Catholic media use. While their content challenges some stereotypes about Catholic nuns, their efforts seem primarily to serve recruitment goals, and their young millennial sisters are leading the efforts in making the nun life appear attractive to prospective future sisters that exist among their following. Through analyzing the Daughters of St. Paul’s use of Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube, this paper explores themes related to technology and religious traditions, technology and communal formation, virtual belonging, and politics and technology. Ultimately, while the Daughters of St. Paul are committed to using “new media,” they do so while preserving traditional aesthetics and messaging for the Catholic Church in America.

Philosophical approaches to Black aesthetics have included how Black human beings make meaning and see value in their everyday lives. The theorization of this cultural and social production has been essential to a philosophy of aesthetics, as shown through the work of Lewis R. Gordon and Paul C. Taylor. These philosophers have provided historical trajectories of Western philosophy and Black expressive culture to define blackness and racialization’s impact on how people show up in this world. Therefore, this paper seeks to come alongside Gordon and Taylor and explore the role of ancestor veneration in the project of Black value and meaning-making within technology. By drawing from womanist reflections on aesthetic interiority, I will examine the diasporic tradition of Southern Hoodoo on social media as a site for understanding how ancestors assist in the inner cultivation, transformation, and construction of individuals and communities.