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Twitter evangelicals

Twitter evangelicals

Last updated on: June 15, 2026 at 7:00 am by Fred Clark

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Twitter evangelicals 2026-06-15T03:10:21-04:00 Fred Clark

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When the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood died last week, historian John Fea collected a sampling of the tributes posted on social media by other historians. It’s a nice collection of remarks and remembrances honoring an influential figure in academia (and an influential figure outside of it too, because that’s how ideas work).

Almost all of those remarks were from Bluesky, the no-algorithm microblogging site where some of the people who once liked Twitter fled after that site and its rigged algorithms turned it into little more than the comment section of Elon Musk’s personal blog. That’s where Fea found the tributes to a historian because that’s where most of the historians can be found now on social media. It turns out that Twitter — a bot-infested cesspool dominated by Nazis and conspiracy theorists– isn’t really what most historians want as “social media.”

That Bluesky-dominated post stood out to me because it’s so different from the usual social-media-roundup posts that Fea works hard to put together on his blog. His near-daily “Evangelical roundup” posts, collecting commentary on current events from prominent white evangelicals, are overwhelmingly made up of posts from “X” — still better-known as Twitter.

That’s just how that works. The “Evangelical roundups” are dominated by Twitter for the same reason the roundup of comments from historians is dominated by Bluesky. Because that’s where those folks are. It’s where they live and talk to (or talk past, or talk about, or shout at) one another.

These prominent white evangelicals still love Twitter. Despite all the bots, or perhaps because of them. Despite all the Nazi-amplification of the algorithm, or perhaps because of it. Despite-or-perhaps-because-of Musk’s enthusiastic white nationalism. DOPBO his pride in the eugenic mass-murder of “taking a chainsaw to USAID.” DOPBO his massive corruption and contempt for democracy. DOPBO his chatbot proclaiming itself “mechaHitler” and then rebranding itself as a machine for the manufacture of bespoke pornography.

Prominent white evangelicals are still there and they like it there.

To be fair, most of the kinds of white evangelical “leaders” appearing in these roundups — media figures, president-and-founders of “media ministries,” mega-church pastors, authors, radio-hosts, podcasters, online “prophets,” and crabs-in-a-bucket gatekeepers of various stripes — are only on Twitter in the way that Donald Trump is on Truth Social. They do not use it or think of it as “social media.” They use it and think of it as a form of broadcast mass media — a way of issuing press releases and edicts and open letters to the masses. It is, for them, a one-way tool for one-way “conversation.” That’s short-sightedly arrogant of them, but it also means that they’re always posting and never scrolling. Name-searching, maybe, and following their notifications, but not scrolling. Because why would they want to read a bunch of posts from a bunch of nobodies who they don’t care about?

That attitude and practice insulates them somewhat from the algorithm’s steady stream of white supremacy, pornography, and conspiracy theories. If you never stop talking and you imagine that you are always the center of attention, you won’t be quick to notice that most of the other people in the room are Nazis, pedophiles, LaRouchies, and/or sock puppets.

So it may not so much be that these prominent evangelicals are “still on Twitter” as that they are always at a press-conference podium in their minds, and they still think of Twitter as that press conference, and their 100,000 followers as 100,000 screaming fans. (That social-media term, “follower,” lends itself to misinterpretation by the sort of vain person who thinks of themself as a “leader” or an “influencer.”)

Other social media sites just won’t work for what these folks need Twitter to be for them. Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm you can game or any way to buy or to bot your way to a bigger “platform.” And that lack of an algorithm, coupled with its nuclear block, makes it hostile territory for professional trolls who quickly find that what usually worked to gin up “engagement” on Twitter will only leave them shouting into the void on a platform that gives people the option of not getting trolled.

They may be dimly aware that Musk’s “Grok” is a source of endless misinformation and virtual CSAM, but this isn’t going to bother these white evangelical leaders as much as one might think because Grok’s hallucinations and “pornification” devices are, for this crowd, right-coded and therefore exempt from criticism. Musk’s megaphone exemplifies the Wilhoit’s Law-conservative view of “free speech” these folks all adored in the campus crackdowns and the Harper’s letter and in Bari Weiss’s Correspondence School in Austin. Plus — bonus! — feminists hate it. So while “A.I.” porn may violate their longstanding public opposition to anything and everything “sexual,” it also appears to be a powerful tool for reinforcing the power arrangement of traditional gender hierarchies. Anything that silences and shames women and reduces them to sex objects can be a weapon for their side.

(I’m guessing a non-zero number of these prominent white evangelical pundits have also spent a little time with Grok’s NSFW image-editing tools themselves, but set that aside for now.)

But the main reason all of these white evangelical pundits, pastors, and professors are still on Twitter, even now, is because they are required to be.

As white evangelicals, they are routinely required to affirm and perform adherence to an ever-changing set of Proper Christian Stances on whatever hot-button issue arises next in their closed news/epistemic ecosystem. They are required and expected to post those affirmations on Twitter the way that certain legal announcements are still required to be published in newspapers.

This ritual significance, this pledging of allegiance to the Proper Christian Stance that affirms their otherwise-contested white evangelical identity, is always the most interesting aspect of these “Evangelical roundup” posts that I’m grateful to Dr. Fea for wading into the horror-show of 2026 Twitter to aggregate for us.

The specific commentary from specific commentators is never as important as the ritual itself — the spectacle of all of these folks lining up to register their agreement with whatever flashpoint du jour has been assigned to the tribe by Fox News or whichever podcast is currently trending in their inner circle.

For them it functions as a way to register their continued belonging in the tribe and their continued identity as “evangelicals.” For us it functions as a way to track the ever-changing, ever-evolving status of what does and does not matter to them as a litmus test of evangelical identity.

The fact that these evangelical leaders are almost always lined up on the wrong side of any given topic is revealing, but not as revealing as the dismal selection of topics itself. The hot-button issue of any given day is rarely a matter of any priority from the standpoint of their purported religion. But it’s almost always exactly the topic that the MAGA Party of white nationalist billionaires wants everyone to be discussing and one-sidedly “debating” that day.*

As much as Fea dislikes and disagrees with Matthew Avery Sutton’s description of white evangelicalism as “a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics,” the strongest case for Sutton’s argument is found in his own “Evangelical roundups,” wherein all of these prominent white evangelicals jostle one another out of the way for their chance at the Twitter microphone where they can ritually register their allegiance to exactly that and somehow also tie it all in to that days’ chyrons on Fox News.

Dr. Fea sees that, which is why he takes pains to clarify that these roundup posts are narrowly focused on only rounding up evangelical views “at the intersection of faith and politics,” and often asks us to remember that this one point of intersection is not the whole of evangelicalism.

That’s true. Everything is politics, but politics is not everything. It would be sorely unfair to double Dr. Fea’s workload by also asking him to compile roundups of evangelical commentary that was not related to the intersection of faith and Fox News politics.

It is possible to imagine regular round-ups of such commentary, but it’s difficult to imagine they’d be terribly interesting. I don’t mean because they’d be full of platitudes and pablum — although that would also likely be the case — but because they would not be fraught with the ritual necessity of affirmation of contested identity.

Contested identity would occasionally surface outside of the narrow intersection of faith and politics. Kirk Cameron’s recent questioning of the [extrabiblical, folkloric] “doctrine” of eternal conscious torment in Hell prompted scores of professional white evangelicals to rush to Twitter to chastise the former Growing Pains star and to reaffirm that God loves torturing sinners for eternity. Or, rather, to reaffirm that they personally reaffirm that, and that they are therefore good and legitimate evangelicals, unlike that now-suspect Kirk Cameron fellow. The same sort of contested identity ritual follows every time some prominent member of the evangelical tribe suggests that maybe they’d be open, maybe, somewhat, to the possibility that somehow, maybe, God might have created the universe billions of years ago and not just thousands of years ago.

The policing of evangelical boundaries around the “doctrine” of Hell or the “doctrine” of young-earth creationism is something that could, hypothetically occur as something distinct from the intersection of faith and politics.

In reality, though, that’s almost never the case. The ferocious retaliation against divergent views on these “non-political” and “doctrinal” matters always turns out to be due to the fear that these forbidden views might undermine the doctrines and hermeneutical ideologies that uphold the prior political commitments. It’s always the other way around.

And so even these seemingly non-political theological disagreements wind up mapped onto the pre-existing political disputes and become matters of contested identity according to how they are perceived politically. Thus even the “non-political” topics on which these prominent evangelicals are compelled to re-pledge their allegiance and re-confirm their evangelical identity are perceived and portrayed (by them) as matters of political allegiance.

Reading these “Evangelical roundups” always reminds me of Betty.

Betty was the overnight security guard at the paper back when I was the overnight guy on the paper’s copy desk. I saw her once an hour. Her job was to make sure the building didn’t burn down while it was mostly empty. This was a property insurance thing. Betty had to make her rounds every hour, circling the building to check in at every panel for its fire alarm system, carrying a little wand-like thing that she had to wave next to each panel to record both that it was working properly and that she had physically checked it, in person. That was her job — checking in regularly to confirm that nothing was out of line.

This is also the job of white evangelical “leaders.” They are likewise required to make the rounds and to check-in regularly to confirm that the machine is running the way it’s designed to do. And Twitter is where they do that. It’s their version of Betty’s little wand.

I abandoned Twitter several years ago, shortly after Elon Musk purchased the site and began reshaping it in his own white-supremacist image. The last thing I posted there was Tonio K.’s song “You Don’t Belong Here“** — my diagonal way of urging others to make like Matthew 10:14 and shake the dust of that place off their feet.

But Twitter is still there, even if it’s not called that anymore, and most Twitter users are still there, even if they’re now outnumbered by bots. Most people didn’t leave Twitter because they felt like they had no choice but to stay. It had become for them an essential tool — the fastest, easiest way to release a public statement on whatever it was that they or their company or agency or entity needed to respond to with a public statement.

Thirty years ago, such statements had to be printed out and then faxed as press releases to news agencies that you hoped would spread them through their communications networks. Twenty years ago, such statements would have been posted on the company website, or the agency website or church website. But “social media” and apps eclipsed websites a long time ago — by design, by algorithm, and for profit. And these days it seems like if it’s not being said on an app on people’s phones, then it’s not being said at all. So Twitter remains an essential platform. It’s where all these companies and agencies and entities and pundits have to go to broadcast their statements and responses and pronouncements if they want anybody to read them.

This function of Twitter has little to do with what we expect “social media” to mean.*** Broadcasting — top-down, mostly one-way mass-communication is the antithesis of “social” media. It’s not a town square, or the city gates, or a water cooler, or a Parisian salon, or the Algonquin Round Table. It’s where “leaders” go to imagine they are collecting “followers,” while also ritually checking in to show that they are, themselves, faithful followers whose allegiance and identity to the required Proper Christian Stance is always whatever they’re told it must be.

* The flashpoints for contested identity within evangelicalism mainly come from outside of it — from that day’s talking points on Fox News or from the feverish “trending” topics elevated by Twitter’s Muskified algorithm. These are not timeless truths of doctrine or “biblical” concerns, just a steady stream of manufactured grievances thrown at the wall in the hopes that some will stick or that the endless barrage of such stories — We found a brown-skinned criminal! We found an annoying hippie! We found a 12-year-old trans girl who enjoys field hockey and surely this must threaten you somehow! — will keep the audience for such things miserably focused on grievance and thus be incapable of dangerous gratitude, joy, faith, hope, or love.

** Here’s Charlie Sexton’s version of that song. Some lyrics:

Ain’t this some congregation
Ain’t this some kind of crowd
They spit in the eye of creation
So educated and proud
Their plans are outrageous
And the tales are so tall
The conversation’s contagious

But the talk is so small

The sidewalks and the streets are overflowing with dread
And every night down here’s the night of the living dead

You don’t belong here
You know it’s true
You look all wrong here
You don’t know how to act or what to do
But you know sometimes I think I don’t belong here too

*** I recently spent a couple of glorious hours enjoying the replies and quotes of this post on Blue Sky, about moments in songs that make you stop everything you’re doing to just listen. This is social media as social media — not as a broadcast medium for reach or clout or clicks or (one-way) “engagement.” It was just a bunch of people, most of whom have never met off-line, enthusiastically gushing over music they love, saying to one another “Ooh, ooh — you’ve got to hear this!” That’s the internet as a third space, as a gathering space. It’s friendly and neighborly and it’s a beautiful thing.

That can and still does sometimes happen on the ginormous corporate “social media” sites too, even though their algorithms discourage it as something less capable of being monetized.

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