Evangelical Celebrity: Rhetorics of Authenticity, Legitimacy, and Authority

Abstract

Studies of social media influencers often focus on their ability to convey authenticity to their audiences. Influencer studies focused on individual influencers without acknowledging their belonging to larger collectives or how influencers are “legitimized” as belonging to that collective. This dissertation argues that studying religious influencers is one way of exploring legitimacy on social media as distinct from authenticity; religious influencers implicitly belong to religious collectives that must legitimize these influencers as representatives of the collective. Using evangelical Christian celebrity influencers on Instagram, this dissertation explores the heuristic of legitimacy and identifies specific rhetorical strategies these figures discursively and rhetorically employ to legitimize themselves within the collective. These are “overt clarification,” the “intensification of values,” acts of “worldview interpretation,” and the testimony of “tribal production.” These rhetorical strategies show how influencers understand the culture of evangelicalism to perform their competency within evangelical culture and model the processes by which they interpret and embody that culture. Combining strategies of authenticity and legitimacy, influencers thus accrue for themselves authority within evangelical subculture. Consequently, influencers model performances that comprise evangelicalism’s contemporary rhetorical culture. These are named as a “Neoliberal Performance,” a “Family Performance,” the “Paradigmatic Evangelical Performance,” and the “Role-Based Performance.” Such performances provide a normative model that helps identify an “evangelical third persona,” or an audience that is negated in discourse, and an “evangelical second persona,” or the ideal audience that evangelical celebrity influencers seek to reach and construct via discourse. The “evangelical third persona” is here found to refer to individuals who push back on adopting new technologies within religious contexts, and who adhere to classic, even traditional views of church structure, hierarchy, and theology. The “evangelical second persona” conversely thrives in new media environments and is characterized by a strong sense of individualism and independence regarding spiritual interpretation and engagement. Though influencers have at times been seen as a threat to established religious authority in evangelical culture, this dissertation ultimately argues that celebrity influencers are a conservative force that largely maintains the status quo of evangelical culture, even as they push its implicit media ideology to its natural extremes.