Wireless Provider: White Evangelical Subjectivity on the Internet

Abstract

This dissertation explores the religious subjectivities of digitally engaged white evangelical Christians in the United States. I use media analysis and digital ethnography to address the question, what does it mean to be an evangelical online? Through an examination of social networking apps created by and for evangelicals, I trace how technological infrastructure, online community, and individual users co-constitute a recognizable evangelical subjectivity. Rather than view religion and media as two self-contained and diametrically opposed forces, I explore the embedded logics and implications associated with apps produced by evangelical actors. To contextualize my inquiry within contemporary evangelicalism, I focus on apps that facilitate three enduring evangelical social formations: congregational affiliation, gender-specific fellowship, and courtship and marriage. I argue that digital evangelical subjectivity posits white evangelicals as individuals deeply engaged in projects of self-making. In this two-stranded argument I assert that (1) evangelicals undertake internally focused projects of self-transformation to authenticate their religious practices and postures. (2) I contour the technological, therapeutic, experimental, disembodied, and progressive individualism conveyed on evangelical social media platforms. Together, I suggest that these two aspects of evangelical subjectivity, self-making and individualism, both challenge and reinforce normative conceptions of whiteness, gender, the body, and sexuality among evangelicals.