Insta-theology

The novelist-poet-memoirist Leigh Stein had a Times op-ed the other day about what is arguably a New Religious Movement: the “Instavangelists.” The portmanteau refers to social media influencers, mainly women, who serve up their followers with a stream of guidance inflected by the vocabularies, concerns, and “values” of the internet-addled millennial generation. As she puts it:

Many millennials who have turned their backs on religious tradition because it isn’t sufficiently diverse or inclusive have found alternative scripture online. Our new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.

Let’s set aside for the moment that, in spite of the use of the first person plural, Stein is clearly critical of this “belief system,” a fact which will probably be lost on many readers. (The column serves as promotion for her new novel Self Care, a satire of the whole milieu.) This notion of ersatz religion has been a long-standing interest of mine, and the column touches on many strands of the academic discourse about the relationship between modernity and religion.

When I started reading the column, I expected that the accounts Stein was discussing at least had some vaguely Christian tendencies, especially because she positions them as the successors to the televangelists of the 20th century. But as she explains, what they borrow from Oral Roberts et al is more along the lines of the Prosperity Gospel than the Greek ones. The shared idea is that positive thinking will “manifest abundance,” although in this case the set of doctrines center on social justice politics and “the rebranding of diet and beauty culture as wellness.” There is, of course, something more than just narcissism at work in both movements, as they both enjoin the individual to give a little bit of themselves to the wider world before they can expect earthly rewards — this can take the form of tithing to a church, uplifting marginalized voices, or various other salutary deeds, depending on the context.

The central thrust of Stein’s argument — besides the obvious, unflattering implication that like the televangelists before them, influencers are grifting — is that these influencers mimic religion by offering their followers meaning and a direction for their hopes, energies, and outrage. In a word, purpose. But they cannot offer answers to perennial questions about the meaning of life, existence, and in particular, suffering. What’s more, because they are located on the internet, with its harsh hierarchies of attention, they cannot offer the sense of community and mutual obligation that have sustained traditional religions — indeed, as Stein points out, these aspects of religious life are a large factor in their decline among millennials, insofar as for many young people “community” and “mutual obligation” are little more than codewords for sexism, bigotry, “power imbalances,” etc.

In short, the Church of Self Care cannot replace traditional religion because on the one hand it does not demand that its adherents give themselves wholly, in the spirit of humility, to something greater than themselves (this “something greater” can be either transcendent or immanent), and on the other hand cannot offer the reciprocity that serves as a reward of religious life, neither immanently from the community nor transcendently from God (i.e. communion).

So, the Instragram ideology, which is a syncretic mixture of social justice politics and wellness culture, is a simulacrum of the traditional religion. This echoes academic debates from the early-to-middle 20th century, mainly involving German intellectuals, about the relationship between modern, secular thought and theology. The debate centered on political philosophy, with many suggesting that by imitating the truth claims and sociological role of religion without a connection to God, secular thought was not only deficient but actively sinister. Carl Schmitt, a National Socialist jurist, offered the famous formulation that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” The most straightforward illustration of this is that the sovereign is a secularized God — just as He can suspend the natural laws that govern His creation and perform miracles, the sovereign can declare a “state of exception” and suspend the constitutional order. Eric Voegelin, an Austrian critic of Nazism who later emigrated to America and became a conservative, argued in The Political Religions that modern ideologies paralleled religious systems of thought in that their totalizing attempts to give ultimate meaning to individuals through reference to the political and cosmic orders. However, modern politics, which he would later criticize as examples of a gnostic corruption endemic to Western Civilization, found their ground in inner-worldly or immanent elements of the cosmos (i.e. race, or class), rather than basing themselves on transcendent grounds. Hans Blumenberg, a half-Jewish philosopher, would later defend secularism by arguing that, while the perennial questions of philosophy remained the same, modern concepts had filled in answer positions vacated by theology as a result of the nominalist revolution of the late Middle Ages. The debate has continued to the present, with recent interventions by figures like Mark Lilla and Michael Gillespie.

My point in linking all these threads, I suppose, is to illustrate that we ought to be taking seriously the role of religion, ersatz or otherwise, in directing social energies. Even while I was writing this, a conversation broke out over Twitter about whether wokeness is a replacement religion — I would say it may replicate certain impulses about denouncing heresy that have historically found expression through religion, but that is not enough. What Stein has identified is a system of thought that offers both a comprehensive vision of the world/creation (this is a “woke” vision) with a set of practices that can help ameliorate the aspirations and torments of being alive in an imperfect world. I think in a way the better parallel than American evangelism is liberal, mainline Protestantism. What they both offer are beliefs that are meant to provide comfort alongside suggestions — not commandments — oriented toward self-improvement. They make you feel a little better, and they make you a better citizen of the modern world, without being too demanding. For many, this is not enough, particularly as our world (politically, ecologically, existentially) seems to require some sterner stuff.

Where people will turn when all this proves insufficient — and surely, many find it plenty fulfilling — is anyone’s guess. Arguably, you can see the results of this process all around us already, but in a fragmentary and inchoate way. I think that what will be key is that whatever replaces the replacement religions must both demand more of their adherents while offering a reciprocity that is missing in people’s lives, religious or secular.