The Digital Evangelicals

Contesting Authority and Authenticity After the New Media Turn

Travis Warren Cooper (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

378 Seiten

2022
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-06226-0 (ISBN)

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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 Cooper locates 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.

Travis Warren Cooper is Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Media and Message
1. Media Sincerity and Promiscuity: Origins
2. Evangelical Media Ecologies from Print to the Internet
3. Evangelical Theories of the Digital
Part II: Authenticity Construction across New Media: Case Studies
4. #FareWellRobBell: Heresy Discourse and the Horizontalization of Authority
5. Feminist Publics and the Progressive Evangelical Blogosphere
6. Instagram, Authenticity, Affect
Part III: Local Technologies in a Global World
7. Emerging Midwestern Evangelicals and Digital Media
8. Media Ambivalence in Emerging Evangelicalism
Conclusion: Zoom Church, Cancel Culture, and the Exportation of Evangelical Media
Appendix
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	14.05.2022
Zusatzinfo	9 Tables, black and white; 4 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	581 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-253-06226-8 / 0253062268
ISBN-13	978-0-253-06226-0 / 9780253062260
Zustand	Neuware