Social Media Comment Sections As Spaces of Religious Learning, Counseling, and Dissent

For many Christians, the internet has become an integral part of their religious lives. Believers use Bible or prayer apps, browse products in Christian online shops, or watch sermon live streams when they cannot make it to church. Many of them, moreover, turn not only to online offers by established religious authorities but additionally or exclusively to Christian influencers. These accounts, some of which reach hundreds of thousands of followers, share insights into their religious practice, give advice on Christian living, or take stances in theological discussions.

In recent years, however, research on digital religion has often centered around how the internet has enabled new actors to disrupt conventional religious authority. Christian influencers, who are more often than not laypeople, are an example of such new or unconventional authorities, whom followers turn to for advice and whom some of them perceive as more authentic or trustworthy than representatives of religious institutions. Many of those who consume religious content online are not quiet followers but actively engage with what they see. Especially on video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, comment sections are buzzing.

In my presentation, I will examine the potential of religious social media influencers’ comment sections for digital religion research. Focusing on the video platforms YouTube and TikTok, I will show how their comment sections function as spaces of, in the case of TikTok, learning, and, in the case of YouTube, counseling, but also of dissent and boundary work. I will put particular emphasis on the role of confessional or denominational identities and cleavages in these discursive spaces. Moreover, I will present suitable digital humanities methods to scrape and analyze large corpora of comments, discuss methodical differences between platforms, and point to the limitations of DH methods in research on digital phenomena on social media.