Catholic Creators: Don’t let the algorithm corrupt your faith

Catholic creators want to share the faith with as many people as possible. That is a good impulse. We want to evangelize, and the digital continent is where the people are.

But we need to listen to the warnings of a Catholic philosopher from the 1950s.

Marshall McLuhan famously argued that we often think of a medium (like TV, radio, or Instagram) as just a neutral pipe to convey a message.

“The medium is the message.”

Any medium will change the message to fit itself. Like any form of communication, social media has rules of engagement. And if we aren’t careful, we end up changing Catholicism to fit the algorithm, rather than using the algorithm to share Catholicism.

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In the 2010s, we worried about influencers turning the faith into a “lifestyle brand.” You know, the 2010s era of aesthetic coffee cups and perfect families. That criticism is a little outdated. We aren’t living in an era where a handful of influencers dominate our feeds anymore.

We are living in the era of the algorithm.

Social media feeds are now dominated by whatever the algorithm thinks you want to see. That is the medium. And it changes our message.

Our faith is becoming algorithmically optimized. We go online and we find a version of Catholicism that never challenges our priors.

We find the influencers who agree with us on liturgy, on politics, and on culture. We get a “custom-fit” religion. The danger is that our Catholicism becomes less Catholic. Less universal. We only see the sides of the faith that make us comfortable.

We are making our religion in our own image.

The only thing that can break this echo chamber is real life.

The best thing Catholic creators can do to break out of this is to go to places where there is no algorithm. You need to be rooted in the real world. You need to attend a real parish, have friends who are not online, and be around people who practice their Catholicism in the flesh, not just virtually.

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I saw a perfect example of this last year.

At the Catholic Creators Conference in Steubenville, there were two influencers who represent totally different corners of the internet. One was a “mass outfit selfie” poster, very “Catholic Inc.” The other was a “red-pilled,” heady intellectual guy.

Online, their audiences tear each other apart.

The “intellectuals” criticize the “selfie girls” for being shallow; the “vibes” crowd calls the guy misogynist, etc. But in person, they got along and took a picture together.

Both of them represent perfectly acceptable expressions of Catholic life, but they rarely see each other outside of the times the algorithm decides they should be beefing.

But being in person shatters the algorithm.

Because real life is never optimized. When we are around people in the flesh, we have to deal with the parts of them we don’t like. And when we do, if we have charity, we realize those differences don’t actually matter that much.

We get over ourselves.

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That is why I’m looking forward to the Catholic Creators Conference this May.

If you are a content creator, you need to get offline to become better online. You need to meet the people the algorithm is hiding from you.

Grab a VIP ticket (it’s the best way to experience it).

Use this link to get $100 off.