Ready? Good!
In the blue corner of the internet you have Suzie B. Pastor. A preacher from a midsized church with a midsized online following of her social media driven gospel takes and biblical interpretations. For all you feminists, frothing at the mouth, no I don’t think she should step down from ministry, just because she’s woman. For all you reformed types now frothing at the mouth because of what I said to the feminists. Sit tight, I promise you’ll enjoy the ride. Suzie’s ministry is greatly advantaged and propelled by her YouTube channel. Where she and the church media team diligently play by the rules and post along precedence and profitable strategies. Suzie is an online pastor through and through. And her ministry has receipts. She has 1000 people who attend her church, and 100,000 followers online. She has people who now come to her church that found her through clips of her ministry online. She preaches a true gospel and is doing the Lord's work, at her church. But also does so online as evidenced by the fruit that’s plain to see.
In the red corner of the internet we have Sally J. Pornstar. She is a subscription based content maker who specializes in feet. Specializes is kind of a misnomer. That’s simply the most profitable content she produces. But she still makes bank on everything else she shows. But feet are where we’ll focus. She also has 100,000 followers and a short list of 1000 regulars who pay for premium feet focused content. She has been doing this kind of sex work, as long as Suzie B. Pastor has been preaching. The two of them unknowingly went to the same seminary. She is unrepentant, thoroughly doctrine'd in the strong, independent woman who not only doesn’t need a man but regularly fleeces him for pictures of bare toes and lingerie.
Both of these ladies, arguably, make their living on the internet. Both of them use video content to do so. Both of them engage with an audience of men and women, though one would likely have more women. Both would have what would be called a brand. And both, allegedly, have the ability to affect the other's audience, if given the chance. But what does that look like?
Were Suzie to drop Sally’s name as a sermon illustration on her latest livestream, and were an unsuspecting or foolish man in the congregation to google that name, to see who his pastor was talking about, or who Sally was. Then the effect would be Sally causing the man to sin, because of the introduction, how ever well thought out or not, of the man, to Sally, from Suzie. The man is still responsible for the sin, but Suzie becomes responsible for the temptation.
The thought experiment is, do you think that street runs both ways? Could Sally ever do or say something that would take one of her fans and send him to church in a similar way, a pastor like Suzie could send a man to a porn site if she wasn’t wise enough to have sexual sin not even be named among the congregation, Ephesians 5:3.
The answer is no, Until proven otherwise, but lets explain why.
You want to say yes, but the truth is, no online pastor worth his or her salt could, nor can they imagine how they would. We can recognize the danger, abstractly, of having a pastor say in a livestream a porn star's name and the cognito hazard that kind of announcement or information is, functionally. There is no way to find out about sin without also being exposed to the temptation to participate in such sin. At least in any sufficient detail to understand what the sin is and so you can abstain from such sin. And to the chronically online church, being online itself always carries with it the possibility of being online elsewhere. Somewhere naughty even.
As the thought experiment festers a bit, lets even the odds. Suppose Suzie remembers who Sally is, because they went to seminary together. Recognizing that she herself stayed on the straight and narrow, Suzie now wants to help Sally and show the kind of humility that she thinks Christ would model. She also remembers that they are roughly the same size and that her shoes might fit her. She prepares an FedEx package with prepaid postage and during a live stream, calls out Sally for her sin, but offers to help her. She offers to lead her out of sin the way Christ did for herself. And as a token of good faith and charity, takes her own socks and shoes off, during the live stream. Aiming straight at the sinful moneymakers of her former classmate. A metaphorical first step, if you will. She packages the shoes and socks, and has the church media team follow the package out the door as it is picked up by FedEx to bring to Sally’s recording studio. Suzie then let’s her church know, that like a fleece let out for the Lord. She will remain barefoot on the stage until Sally comes to Christ. All of this done with the best SEO and keywords, hashtags, and labels to get the attention of Sally who’s about to get her gift and invitation to the gospel. The video is cross posted by dozens of Suzie' congregants. All in the hopes that Sally sees the gesture and comes to faith and repentance.
She does. See it that is.
Sally see’s her name show up in posts that don’t feature her body parts and watches the entire sermon. Sally get’s the shoes a day later. Rereads the message and call to repentance and fellowship on Suzie’s latest live stream. Then uses the free publicity and percentage of Sally’s 1000 congregants who googled her name (For research purposes only, I’m sure), and promptly puts on the shoes and removes them like she would in any other livestream she does. She then points out the obvious and watches the latest Sunday service of Suzie’s, posted for all the world to see, and comments, that while flattered, she doesn’t need competition for her cornered market of feet pics. But that Suzie is brave, even brilliant, for doing feet pics in church.
Caught flat footed, Suzie find herself posting media online that matches every detail of one of Sally’s videos, just with the gospel being preached alongside the naked feet. The inverse online traffic swap happens, as the livestream of Suzie’s church now has a lot more engagement. Almost double what her previous subscribers mustered on a weekend. Did 100,000 porn users start going to a church service? Or did a church service become a porn video for the same set of users?
What just happened?
Suzie is not scandalously dressed. She merely took her shoes off. Pastors have washed feet from the pulpit thousands of times, what made this live stream different? She is not soliciting unwanted sexual attention. She’s not being provocative in a sexual way, though she is poking the bear if we’re being honest. She did nothing wrong, and arguments can be made that giving desperate sinners your clothes, is a biblical thing to do. Matthew 25:36, right!?!
Why can Sally change the nature of a church service online, but Suzie seems powerless to change the nature of a porn video? Do you think Suzie sharing pictures of Sally in seminary, from their yearbook, would discredit her as a porn star? Or would it simply invent a new niche for Sally’s porn to reside in? The same way Sally livestreaming her tithing to the church while in a state of undress would maintain porn's death grip of Suzie’s barefoot preaching. Or would it just add to the search terms of perversion that Sally seems to be a master of? At what point would Suzie's feet pics stop being porn and start being a sermon again?
We all know this is a one way street. The question remains why is it a one way street? And does it need to stay that way?
I have argued for a long time that online church is not what it seems. Both to it’s makers and to its users. Because the suspension of disbelief it takes to do online church, mirrors the suspension of disbelief it takes to use porn as a replacement for a sexual partner. Porn makers know this. To the point of commodity. They have made girlfriends obsolete. Subscribe to your search terms of choice and she’s yours to do with what you please/pay. She’ll even say your name in the chat and send you DM’s. A pastor answering super chats isn’t functionally different. What if it’s also not ontologically different? What if online church is online porn? Just not as explicit as what other forms of online porn are. This would be nearly impossible to see or notice unless something like what happened in the story above, happened. Because then it would be irreversible. Because it always was irreversible. Just like sin is.
The story isn’t fantastically unbelievable. You’re telling me there’s not a chance that an OnlyFan’s model and a female pastor knew each other before their respective online careers took off? Nothing about the fiction is even implausible. What it points out is the hidden workings of online video consumption, as a system. Not social hypotheticals. We all know that Sally could turn Suzie's online ministry into a vector for erotic content. And we are all coming to know that the mechanics of this system won't let that happen the other way. That while a ministry may be effective when secluded from it’s medium's power users, it become fuel for the message of those power users when given the smallest chance to do so. The most effective and capable content makers online, are not found where the church does online ministry. Their content is un-touchable by the church, right now, but under any provocation could taint and corrupt any online ministry with their function as sinful content.
Name a pastor who couldn’t be sidelined by the wrong kind of attention by the wrong kinds of people. Even the Life Church’s Bible App had to contend with people using it as a vector to have and share explicit images through it’s servers. To minors even. Are the myriad of content filters and website blockers, doing anything as effective and anything described above?
There comes a point where to participate in the medium means compromising on the intent of participation in the first place.
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” Matthew 7:6 KJV
Right now, online ministry works. It does what it attempts to do and exists as it’s own type of thing online. But without recognition for how any given medium of communication works, when corrupted. It will end up doing the same kinds of things that work for that corruption. That’s because like humanity, our technologies, including mediums of communication, are sinful. The hammer made for crushing rocks is not sinfully used to crush skulls. It was always sinfully ready to crush skulls. The paintbrush which could record historical scenes with an artists touch, is not sinfully used to add brush marks to the body and canvas, it was sinfully ready to do so. And the internet, while useful to the church for proclamation of the gospel, is not sinfully used to produce and transmit pornography. Instead, it is sinfully ready to do so. Because technology is sinful.
That’s why Suzie has no power over Sally’s livestream, even when she models Christ toward her. But Sally holds sway over Suzie’s livestream by the same metric and forms of communication. Christ does not use the means of sin to do his work but is showcased best in the lives of sinners where his strength is manifest over their weakness.
“And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?” Matthew 12:26 KJV
Sin is always a one way street. Walking on it is the problem. Walking down it isn’t even the question. It’s already too late if you’re on the street. You’re in danger if you think you can walk down it and just turn around when things get bad.
“And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding, Passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house,” Proverbs 7:7-8 KJV
This is why, tacitly, we all know that the only way for Sally to come to Jesus is to forsake her pornography. To take every video down, delete all back ups, change her name and contact info online, even to the point of changing her appearance offline. So she is no longer the commodified porn star, but a new creation in Christ. Recognizing that in her life will mean recognizing that in our lives. We should celebrate the gains we can make by using things like the internet and be as ready to surrender it all to destruction for the sake of Christ all the same.
A lot of churches are game for the first part.
How many would sacrifice their YouTube page to save a sinner with an OnlyFans?
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