“For people whose exposure to Christianity was a certain kind of Protestantism - bare bones, Kool-Aid for communion - you encounter the ‘smells and bells’ of a Catholic church and you might gravitate toward it,” he says. One of the latter group is Chris Stedman, a writer and professor of religion at Augsburg University, who’s also noticed a renewed interest in Catholic aesthetics among young folks, both in the “edgy, grungy” expressions of meme accounts or the “trad cath” (Latin masses, veils, etc.) aesthetics of fairy tales, angels, and royalty. Today, the account receives daily orders from its merch store, making enough money for Hide to cover their has found devotees of all types, from extremely online millennials and zoomers to, as Hide describes, “Christian dads with, like, Ezekiel 35 in their bios,” to religious academics. “Being home alone without your routine makes you confront your faith, or other deeper things that society isn’t dealing with,” they say. Now at 63,000, Hide attributes the growth in part to quarantine. “What motivates me is an awareness of God, or a provocation to make people think about their beliefs and a higher power.”īefore the pandemic, Hide says, the account only had a few thousand followers, made up mostly of the founders’ extended social networks. They now practice astrology and identify as a cultural Catholic, but in terms of spiritual belief, describe themselves as “more of a nothing in particular.” “I was trying to separate what I didn’t like about Catholicism from what is fun about it,” they tell me over coffee. Hide was raised Catholic, even serving as a cantor in the choir. (Recent posts: a Dall-E AI-created image of Patrick Star being crucified, a plea for “an American Girl doll who saw Joan of Arc burned at the stake.”) Along with three friends they met on Twitter in the mid-2010s, Hide compiles bizarre imagery mixing internet culture with the divine, the sincerity of which their followers can never quite agree on.Ī post shared by I NEED GOD truth is somewhere in between irony and earnestness, but leans toward the latter. They’re a co-founder of the popular Instagram account which documents surreal, absurdist memes about God, often with a Catholic bent. Kyle Hide, a 31-year-old in Brooklyn, thinks about all of these things, all the time. Then last month, Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker - both former (?) members of Hillsong - held one of their three nuptials in what the New York Times called “a Gothic altar that looked as if it came from the set of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet” at a castle on the Italian coast. All this coincided with a larger aesthetic shift, a pendulum swing toward magpie “grandmillennial” home decor after a decade of post-2008 minimalism. This was also during the unfortunate resurgence of the Satanic Panic and the fortunate rise of Lil Nas X grinding on the devil, and the TikTok generation’s embrace of Old World fixtures like piano bars and red sauce joints. Around the same time came a buzzy fashion brand whose signature piece is a bikini top with the words “Father” and “Son” on each of the boobs and “Holy Spirit” on the bottom. It is in fact very sinister, but it is the kind of sinister that Catholicism represents that makes it easy to argue that, at least aesthetically and culturally, Catholicism pairs well with this precise moment.Ī post shared by Kourtney Kardashian Barker ❤️ year or two ago, I started seeing a bizarre trend on TikTok in which people argued the superiority of Catholicism with videos that juxtaposed Evangelical preachers and modernist churches with old, gilded Latin Masses. It is impossible to argue that the Catholic Church is any less sinister than anything Hillsong or its ilk have done. Within the last year, Hillsong, the most influential of the bunch, has suffered a series of scandals stemming from its founder’s inappropriate actions toward women, as well as a Discovery+ documentary aimed at exposing its toxicity. A-listers like Justin Bieber, Chris Pratt, and the Kardashians have touted their affiliations with Protestant megachurches like Hillsong, Zoe, and Churchome that preach an Instagram-ready approach to traditional evangelism. Sign up here.īelonging to a “cool church,” however, is no longer the status symbol it might have been a few years ago. Each week we’ll send you the very best from the Vox Culture team, plus a special internet culture edition by Rebecca Jennings on Wednesdays.
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