Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In Dawkins formulation, a meme was the idea analogue of a gene. In these sense of the word, the dictionary now defines a meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.”
Today, the word meme is more likely to refer to those (supposedly) funny captioned pictures your friends post on Facebook, like this one:
In this sense, the word meme is defined as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.” There’s an entire site called Know Your Meme dedicated to explaining popular memes.
Memetics (note, not imitation or mimesis) is increasingly important in public and cultural narratives in the social media age. That this works is evidenced by the legitimate concern many have that hostile foreign actors from Russia or China might use social media interfere in US elections, which they have already started to do on a small scale.
A recent book even predicts that, as Foreign Policy magazine puts it, “Narrative war has become far more important than physical war.” Narrative today is heavily shaped by social media in addition to traditional media like books or advertising. I think of memetic persuasion as incorporating all of these image and narrative shaping techniques, though with a digital emphasis.
Memetics and Persuasion
Memetics in the broad sense of the term is integral to persuasion. Aristotle identified three modes or components of persuasion: ethos, pathos, logos. Ethos is the character of the person doing the persuading. Pathos is an emotional appeal. Logos is a logical appeal.
We tend to emphasize persuasion as being about logical appeal. But human beings aren’t very logical and don’t make decisions using facts and logic. Instead, we are heavily influenced by emotion and other factors.
Memetics operates at the level of ether pathos or ethos. In a narrow sense, memes can have an emotional influence, even if just by making us laugh or raising the morale of supporters of a particular candidate.
But in a broader sense, memetics operates at the level of ethos. Ethos is more than just personal character. Ethos is also our “brand,” our reputation, or how others perceive us. A celebrity might be a person of low character, yet have a status or aesthetic appeal that makes him very persuasive. Hence celebrities are often sought out for product endorsements.
When we post things about ourselves on Facebook or Instagram, we are engaging in memetic persuasion, trying to put forth a particular image about ourselves. This is often seen as a false front, but the fact is every person and organization is always sending off memetic signals. The only question is whether we are as intentional about these memetics as we are about our words and logical arguments. This is true for the church as well as individuals.
The Church and Memetics
In Masculinist #13 I laid out the three cultural worlds Christianity has faced in America over the last few decades:
- Positive World (Pre-1994). To be seen as a religious person and one who exemplifies traditional Christian norms is a social positive. Christianity is a status enhancer. In some cases failure to embrace those norms hurt you.
- Neutral World (1994-2014). Christianity is seen as a socially neutral attribute. It no longer had dominant status in society, but to be seen as a religious person is not a knock either. It’s more like a personal affectation or hobby. Traditional norms of behavior retain residual force.
- Negative World (2014-). In this world, being a Christian is a social negative, especially in high status positions. Christianity in many ways as seen as undermining the social good. Traditional norms are expressly repudiated.
Today’s church is divided between a legacy positive world contingent; and a neutral world contingent of mostly urban based cultural engagement types. Each has its own characteristic memetic style. There are positive worlders out there, but their time is passing, and I will not say much more about them.
Neutral World Memetics – Hillsong
Regarding the neutral worlders, I said, “[The neutral world church] tries to avoid highlighting areas where Christianity is in conflict with the world. Instead of being antagonistic towards the culture, it is explicitly positive towards culture. In fact, you could sum up much of the model under the heading ‘cultural engagement.’ They want to meet the culture on its own terms, and reach people as participants in a pluralistic public square.”
The neutral worlders resultantly have a very low conflict and highly assimilationist memetic. I’ll give a couple of examples. One of them is Hillsong Church. Hillsong positions itself as the “cool Jesus” hipster church. Justin Bieber and other celebrities attend. The pastoral staff is known for wearing designer clothing. The attendee base skews very young (at least in NYC, which is the source of my first hand knowledge). Hillsong is known for its music, which is ubiquitous in Christian churches. … Even secular people pump their firsts in the air during a high-energy set.
There’s a documentary about the making of a Hillsong United live album that you can watch on Amazon that gives you a feel for them. There is a large crowd, exciting rock-and-roll on stage, spotlights, and a young crowd.
In short, Hillsong presents church as a hip, cool, urban thing to do.
Neutral World Memetics – Redeemer
The second style I’ll highlight is Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Redeemer’s memetics are culturally much more high end than Hillsong’s. Redeemer also has excellent production values and musicians, but you’re more likely to hear a classical quartet or jazz ensemble than Christian pop. Its aura is much more intellectual and fine arts oriented. Reverend Tim Keller is more likely to be featured in the New Yorker or the Atlantic than pop culture outlets.
Redeemer almost exudes a self-consciously anti-hip vibe. Keller himself has a professorial demeanor. Note the memetics of the picture Pastor Tim Keller uses on his own personal page. Keller is sitting on a park bench with his hands clasped, wearing a tweed suit coat, looking at the viewer.
This is much stronger body language that it might appear at first glance, but is also very nonthreatening. Keller is known for his preaching and apologetics rather than personal style, yet he’s charismatic in his own low-key way. He approach is explicitly irenic rather than confrontational. Redeemer’s appeal is to a refined, professional demographic that operates at relatively elite levels of American business and culture. Someone from that secular demographic can walk into Redeemer and find a comfortable, non-threatening environment.
Both Hillsong and Redeemer are very successful, well-patronized churches. Both of them use a memetic strategy based on communicating that “we are just like you [neutral world]” and which delivers aesthetic and programmatic excellence in markets where that’s expected. It’s a memetic strategy, blending both new and other media, that has delivered results in the neutral world.
The Negative Turn
As I previously noted, the” neutral world” church faces fundamental challenges as society transitions further into a negative world. As society becomes more hostile to Christianity, so that merely identifying as a Christian degrades status, it will be progressively more difficult for this type of church to synchronize with the culture without fatally compromising their beliefs, if they can pull it off at all.
How can the church respond to this? The challenge then is how to contextualize church for the negative world, something that has drawn little attention apart from Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Let’s be honest that contextualization is hard, but re-contexualization is even more difficult.
Keller focuses heavily on starting new churches because he observes that new churches are more effective than established ones at reaching new people. I believe part of reason is because churches are contextualized to the moment of their founding, but the world changes around them and their approach becomes gradually less effective over time. Hence it’s likely the negative world responses are being developed in smaller, newer churches and movements we don’t know about yet.
Minority Religion Memetics
In the negative world, there’s an struggle between the church and the world, whether or not the church seeks it out. There’s no prospect in sight of dominating or even much influencing the direction of secular culture. Christianity may even get reduced to a relatively small minority.
This space requires the masculine virtues because being a cultural minority requires being comfortable with something of a low status or outlier memetic that is self-consciously different. But understanding that you are in that minority position opens up tremendous cultural space too. Historically Christianity, as a default national faith, had to ensure a relatively broad based, mainstream appeal. That’s no longer a requirement. What does that give the church the freedom to do?
The memetics of other minority religions can help us understand what this future might look like. I am inspired by these guys:
Despite being a tiny minority, Hasidic Jews have immense confidence in being highly visibly distinct from mainstream society. Their very appearance (memetics) conveys that while they don’t care what you do, they are doing something different and are not ashamed of it.
Muslims are another group that figured it out. You’ve probably seen pictures of people observing the Muslim prayer times in the streets of various Western cities. Islam, as a universalist religion, is more culturally aggressive than Judaism.. Nevertheless it’s a self-confident, attractional memetic for a minority religion in Western countries. There’s a lot to learn from Muslim communities.
Christian Memetics Reconsidered
Christianity is fundamentally a religion of the Word. The gospel is Good News, not Good Aesthetics. So the logos (rational) aspect must be right. That’s a precondition to anything more.
Where memetics comes in is creating the ethos and pathos that attract people who are willing to sign up for a status lowering religion. I posit that this requires showing that the church has something you can’t get from the world and has the self-confidence to be different.
In the negative world the church has to be distinct in the manner of the early church. The early church had many distinctions from the surrounding culture: they refused to worship the culture’s gods; they avoided many of the practices approved of by the culture; and they established their own practices like refusing to abandon the sick.
They had a community that was difficult to be part of, but which generated immense value as well (in addition to possessing metaphysical truth). They did this by and large without attacking anyone else (though they did have what was essentially an intragroup feud with Jews who did not buy into Jesus as the Messiah).
I’m going to give one idea for a possible negative world move for the church: a reinvigorated and unapologetic memetic around healthy traditional families.
I noted in Masculinist #9 that that the church elite, like the secular elite, no longer preaches what it practices when it comes to marriage and family. The secular elite by and large practices traditional marriage themselves, while promoting everything but for the rest of society.
It’s a free country and people can do whatever they want. If people want to practice polyamory, that’s their right. I’m not going to stop them. I’m just saying that the church should be out promoting the traditional marriage that they practice just as much as the poly folks are out repping their lifestyle.
It’s true that the church too often has plenty of divorces, etc. That’s a problem and it needs to be addressed. But it is the case that you do often see a different family style in the church than outside of it, such as happy homeschooling families with large numbers of children.
The church, however, appears to be downplaying family these days. I notice far more articles in the Christian press complaining about how the church makes an idol of marriage than I do ones that actually idolizing it. I also read frequent complaints from various single or childless people that the church should change to better serve them. To the extent I see family extolled, it’s often in the form of some story about adoption, or about how someone with a dysfunctional family history found family in the church.
My impression is that it used to be that if you’d visit a church web site and click on the pastor’s page, you’d commonly see a picture of his family. Matt Chandler’s Village Church still does this. He and his wife are sitting with their three children in a meadow. they are smiling and perfect.
That’s a great looking family.
Today I see this less and less. Instead I commonly encounter corporate style head shots. To test this, I recently made a list of every Evangelical congregation in Manhattan below 96th St. that I could think of. I came up with 30. Then I visited their web sites and looked at the pastor page to check out the pictures. Only two of the churches (<7%) had pictures of the pastor’s family. Five others showed the pastor’s wife but not children – but three of those were churches where the husband and wife were co-pastors.
New York is a city full of lonely people, many of them singles and longing to find marriage. (America as a whole is lonely too). This was a big part of the premise behind the show “Sex and the City,” which obviously tapped into those desires. Yet the churches here in Manhattan below 96th Street aren’t showing people a picture of what that looks like or doing much to help people find it.
In 2009, New York magazine did a profile of Redeemer that used a photo montage of its members
To be clear, this was the magazine’s photo montage, not Redeemer’s. But I was really struck that it didn’t include a single picture of a traditional family (mom, dad, and children).
The traditional family is something that is attractive to a lot of people. Many women were incredibly positive, even envious, towards my wife when they found out she did not move in with me before marriage and that we did not engage in pre-marital sex. My wife was taken aback by it. It was clear to her that despite being liberated, many big city women at some level still really longed for the fairy tale of a traditional relationship, even if they weren’t making choices in that direction.
So a small step towards negative world contexualization might be stronger memetic presentation of the families you already have in your church. Folks like Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies can make logos (rationality) based appeals for marriage (e.g., demonstrating through studies that if you are single you are statistically more likely to die young), but as a scholar he’s not in a position to go beyond that. But people don’t make decisions based on facts and logic. So there’s a need for ethos and pathos as well.
Rod Dreher once linked to a tweetstorm by someone who was lamenting the social collapse of his hometown that ended like this:
There are millions of confused and worried people out there. Reach them. There are so many people in private hungry for competent, strong leadership. Be the lighthouse. The storm is here and it will only get worse.
“Be the lighthouse.” That’s a philosophy for the negative world. Find a way to build a healthy Christian family despite the legal and social encouragement of divorce. Then, make sure others can see that it’s possible, that there’s a different way to live their lives. Be the lighthouse that guides others into the same harbor. Help them find it for themselves instead of just affirming them in what they are doing when that’s taking them further from where they want to go. We’re all about helping people pick up the pieces when things go wrong. That’s a right and proper thing to do. I’ve personally benefited from that kind of help. But we far less enthusiastic about putting forth as normative paths that might lead a different direction. Being the lighthouse means more than just writing and tweeting.
Aaron M. Renn is the publisher of the Masculinist, a monthly email newsletter about the intersection of Christianity and masculinity. Read his full take on the Meme World.
