The Powerful Minority That Was Twitter

If you’re still using Twitter, bless your heart.

There are four kinds of people: 1) People who have never used twitter; 2) People who have left twitter; 3) People who refuse to give up on twitter for the sake of the community they’ve cultivated there; 4) Musk worshipers who think twitter is better now.

I bring this up because what’s going on with twitter is a really great picture of what has happened over the course of a much longer history (obviously) in the church.

People who have never used twitter (or who rarely use it) are in the vast majority. The site boasts about 400 million users in a world of about 8 billion people. According to this site with a ton of twitter statistics, only 7% of Internet users and just 8.5% of social media users actually use twitter even on a monthly basis. Twitter as a user base is a fringe group of humanity.

But, and I’m making that but as big as I can conceptually make it, most people (especially Americans) who have never so much as surfed their way onto twitter.com have very much used twitter. If you haven’t used it from within the site, you have used twitter as a fish bowl. You’ve seen the content generated within that Petri dish when media outlets publish it as news in every medium known to humankind. Even if you’ve never been on twitter, you probably have an opinion on or an impression of it.

That’s because twitter separated itself from other social media contemporaries because of its usefulness to more popular news media juggernauts. While the content of an individual tweet might take weeks to verify factually, the fact of a tweet’s existence is instantly verifiable. In a world where only the headlines matter, a social media service that (initially, at least) published only headlines was a godsend for the 24/7 news cycle.

So how is this at all like evangelical Christianity or religion in general? First of all, any such religious group you may focus on is typically in the minority. About 24% of Americans in 2021 considered themselves born-again or evangelical. About 31% of American adults attend church at least once a week. It’s obviously a bigger share of the population than twitter users, but we’re still talking a ton of influence that comes from the organized power of a minority.

If you’ve never been on twitter or you’ve never been a Christian, you probably still have a decent understanding of what those communities are like . . . or you think you do. But until you’ve been on the inside, you don’t really know. It’s just different. A whole different way of life.

And when you’re on the outside, what is really difficult to understand is why someone would stay for so long when things get so bad.

That’s when you look to the constructs.

This is a really helpful idea for understanding what deconstruction is all about: looking to the constructs draws your eye to the systems and communities that have been set up that seem to the people on the inside like they are relatively safe, convenient, and essential.

I say relatively safe, because in the church and on twitter, people come under all sorts of attacks and threats within those constructs. But inside of those social structures, you develop this mentality that the threat of being separated from the group is a far more dangerous consequence than the perils of staying. You get comfortable with the familiarity of the constructs you dwell in, even when they would seem unbearable to the average Josephine on the outside.

That’s the other big similarity I see between twitter and the church. Since the advent of Trump even in his initial candidacy, it’s all just gotten so bad. Twitter with and after Trump (and twitter with Musk) has been really gross. The evangelical church has largely been the same, especially in those areas where Trumpism fully replaced any desire to genuinely imitate Jesus.

Irrespective of how you might feel about Christianity, what happened to people, families, and communities who got suckered (and continue to be hypnotized) by that campaign of ruthless, hateful greed and selfishness is one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed.

But in both worlds—twitter and evangelical Christianity—some people will never leave unless the construct itself is gone. There’s too much community. There’s too much tradition. Too much habit or addiction or familiarity or whatever. Those worlds are their homes, and they’ve got permanent squatter’s rights.