And if there’s at least an interesting resemblance (if not a precise parallel) between the fate of the Protestant mainline, long a taken-for-granted pillar of the American social order, and the tribulations within legacy media, there’s also some resemblance between the growth of nondenominational religion and the flourishing of personalized, individually branded, deinstitutionalized media.
Take two representative media success stories of the internet age: Joe Rogan, the populist enthusiast who dominates the podcasting world, and Heather Cox Richardson, the liberal historian who dominates the Substack rankings. They aren’t often considered together because their fan bases couldn’t be more different, but they are both examples of what you might call the “nondenominational” trend in the commentariat: They’re like megachurch pastors who run their own start-up churches without any connection to the traditional world of Presbyterianism or Lutheranism, seminaries and general conventions and the like. And they aren’t doing a small business: Rogan is the bigger figure by far (he recently re-signed with Spotify for a reported quarter-billion dollars), but Richardson’s daily newsletter has well over a million subscribers.
Most independent media figures don’t have that reach, of course, just as most nondenominational churches aren’t especially big outside their local communities. But just as nondenominational Christianity as a whole is getting bigger than many established churches, the overall audience for “nondenominational” media content adds up to something much larger than just a few mammals skittering in the postapocalyptic landscape. Taken together, the world of newsletters and podcasts and YouTube content creation has a potentially sweeping, society-spanning reach.
But Shafer’s line about this world being “in the shadows” still seems apt, since one of the key features of the new media landscape is what you might call its illegibility — meaning the difficulty of ever knowing, via some reasonably quick survey, what kind of narratives most people are absorbing, who is really influencing public opinion, what forces and figures are shaping what Americans believe.
Big institutions are good for legibility. In my youth, you could still read a few newspapers, subscribe to a few key magazines and political journals, watch a few news programs and basically have your finger on the pulse of what both elite America and mass America thought was happening at any given moment. In a similar way, as a writer who often covers religion, I’ve always found it much easier to limn trends and important developments within my own hierarchical and centralized Catholic Church — and when I’m writing about Protestantism, it’s easier to cover debates within the Southern Baptist Convention or the Episcopal Church than to make definitive statements about the entirety of what we call Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism.
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