Digital Devotion: The Tensions of Authenticity and Consumerism Among Religious and Spiritual Social Media Influencers

• In Event: 30280 - Consuming Authenticity: Blurring Distinctions across Work and Play

Abstract

Social media influencers (SMI) are often associated with consumerism and entrepreneurship. Religious and spiritual social media influencers provide a useful lens for understanding how consumerism and religious or spiritual devotion look in digital religion. Through interviews with forty-two religious and spiritual social media influencers on YouTube and TikTok, we find that religious and spiritual influencers are caught in a paradox of consumerism and devotion. While they frame the origins of their content creation in highly personalized stories of their religious and spiritual growth and distance themselves from the term “social media influencer,” they also engage in the practice of branding and following trends to widen their reach and obtain an audience. Our findings have implications for how religion is understood in a digital age and how religious and spiritual social media influencers differ from those who are engaged with for-profit work.

Authors

• Esther Chan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• Di Di, Santa Clara University