The Hybrid Culture of the Faith Tech Industry and the Promise of “Redemptive Entrepreneurship”

• In Event: Entrepreneurship and Business Model Innovation in Digital Media

Abstract

Using ethnographic and qualitative methods this paper explores the hybrid culture of the faith tech industry. I focus on American Christian entrepreneurs working in the tech scene and argue that the hybrid discourses circulating in the faith tech sector reveal an evangelical social imaginary of entrepreneurship and technology influenced by the techno-Utopianism of Silicon Valley (following Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Turner, 2006; Streeter, 2011). At the same time, the negotiations taking place within faith tech also lay bare some of the problematic foundations on which these ideologies are built.

Author

• Corrina Laughlin, Annenberg School for Communication at the U of Pennsylvania