The Digital Evangelicals

Contesting Authority and Authenticity After the New Media Turn

Travis Warren Cooper author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:2nd Aug '22

Should be back in stock very soon

This hardback is available in another edition too:

The Digital Evangelicals cover

When it comes to evangelical Christianity, the internet is both a refuge and a threat. It hosts Zoom prayer groups and pornographic videos, religious revolutions and silly cat videos. Platforms such as social media, podcasts, blogs, and digital Bibles all constitute new arenas for debate about social and religious boundaries, theological and ecclesial orthodoxy, and the internet's inherent danger and value.

In The Digital Evangelicals, Travis Warren Cooperlocates evangelicalism as a media event rather than as a coherent religious tradition by focusing on the intertwined narratives of evangelical Christianity and emerging digital culture in the United States. He focuses on two dominant media traditions: media sincerity, immediate and direct interpersonal communication, and media promiscuity, communication with the primary goal of extending the Christian community regardless of physical distance. Cooper, whose work is informed by ethnographic fieldwork, traces these conflicting paradigms from the Protestant Reformation through the rise of the digital and argues that the tension is culminating in a crisis of evangelical authority. What counts as authentic interaction? Who has authority over the circulation of information?

While many studies claim that technology influences religion, The Digital Evangelicals reveals how Protestant metaphors and discourses shaped the emergence of the internet and explores what this relationship with global new media means for evangelicalism.

Shedding light on the profound phenomenon of digital evangelicalism, this book sparkles with illuminating insights on the contemporary tensions and paradoxes of religious authority, as well as the vital role of new media for religious organizing in a datafied world. The Digital Evangelicals assembles a range of multimodal data across platforms to help us think more deeply about the communicative constitution of religious authority, authenticity and community.

-- Pauline Hope Cheong, co-editor of Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture: Perspectives, Practices and Futures

The Digital Evangelicals is much-needed intervention in a field chock full of books telling you what so-called evangelicals "really are" or "really should be." Cooper's attention to the discourses that define the boundaries of evangelical identity and community offer an important corrective to the search for the best definition of evangelicalism. Drawing on a unique archive of digital sources, The Digital Evangelicals shows how claims about "authentic" evangelicalism are really battles over authority and power.

-- Michael J. Altman, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Alabama

The Digital Evangelicals is an ambitious, impressive, unprecedented work. Part cultural history, part critical textual analysis, part ethnography, it is more than the sum of these parts. Cooper's book demands a fundamental reconsideration of what it means to analyze evangelicalism as a hybrid online-offline cultural form.

-- James Bielo, author of Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity

The Digital Evangelicals is an impressive text. In addition to detailing how today's emerging evangelicals engage new media, Cooper also provides a framework for rethinking what, exactly, this thing called 'evangelicalism' even is. Through richly detailed ethnographies of Twitter debates, Instagram rituals, and Zoom church services, the book charts how communities constitute evangelicalism through media—and how social media might play a role in evangelicalism's undoing. The book is impressive both for its breadth of its analysis and the depth of its theoretical critique.

-- Christopher Cantwell, co-editor of Introduction to Digital Humanities: Research Methods in the Study of Reli

ISBN: 9780253062253

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 757g

378 pages