End Runs

I’ve been fascinated for a long time with social media, especially in how it is enabling legions of  people to personalize their faith.

Granted, a deep-seated penchant for personalized faith has always been hardwired  into the American psyche – an inevitable byproduct of our anticlerical heritage and certainly of the various expressions of evangelical fervor that have followed over the last quarter millennium.  But social media is allowing people to  express it in ways previously unimagined – and, often in the process, to make end runs around their church’s ecclesiastical establishment.

This youtube piece, posted by a Mormon wife and mother who has been threatened with the loss of her temple recommend by LDS church authorities for her stand on same-sex unions, is only one example among thousands of faith practitioners, liberal and conservative alike, who are using social media to personalize their faith, often in sharp variance with their church’s leadership.

It’s a fascinting development, and, needless to say, a social phenomenon that almost inevitably will leave a deep and lasting imprint on the American religious landscape.

I read an account a few weeks ago in which a United Methodist convert to Catholicism – a former minister as it turns out – described Methodists as having a well-developed theology, liturgy and episcopacy but one that went largely ignored by its parishioners.

True, perhaps, but in this social media age, couldn’t the same thing be said about every religious institution in America?

Advertisement