Influence, Authority, & Trust: Protestant Megachurches on Twitter* during COVID-19

• In Event: 41021 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 20: Critical Media Studies

Abstract

The onset of COVID-19 disrupted how many institutions function, especially those that rely on face to face interactions to operate normally. As a result, online communication during this period became essential. In this work, we examine how Protestant Christian megachurches in the United States communicated on social media during this period. We ask: How did the heads of Protestant megachurches restructure their online communications in light of COVID-19 shutdowns? We theorize COVID-19 as a cultural period of unsettled times (Swidler 1986) during which the disruption of everyday life leads members of society to use ideology rather than established practices in decision making and communication. To test the related changes from unsettled times on megachurch communication, we analyze posts made by their organizational and pastoral accounts on the social media website Twitter from 2018-2022. We use LDA topic models to train a model on two years prior to COVID-19 to estimate changes in what type of communication megachurches used during the first two years of the pandemic. We identified 1588 megachurches from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research database of U.S. megachurches. 1290 of these megachurches (81.2%) held at least one Twitter account during the study period; we identified 1182 (74%) organizational accounts and 808 pastoral accounts (51%). Our preliminary findings indicate broad changes in the topics pastors and churches are communicating since COVID-19. There is evidence in line with logistical changes: drop off in prevalence of scheduling information. There is a rise in pastors using Twitter to continue their work: increase in inspirational posting and Bible quotes. These general changes vary by pastor gender, denomination, and church size.

Authors

• Ryan DeCarsky, University of Washington

• Breon Haskett, University of Georgia