Some have two social media feeds – say, Twitter. One is the public presentation of the persona — the person that person wants to be. The other is anonymous or pseudonymous and on that feed the person is who they really are. The two are not the same. The difference reveals the tension between what someone wants to be with their real name (orthonymous, btw) and the person who really exists.
If this is you, or if you know someone of whom this is the case, then have them read this chapter in Katelyn Beaty’s book, Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church,.
Photo by Antoine J. on Unsplash
This chp is a must-read for every Christian leader who is ambitious enough to build a brand, a kingdom, an empire, a church.
All that follows riffs on Beaty’s excellent analytics in this chp. Best thing I’ve read on celebrity personas on the platform.
Such persons create a spirit of fear around them and demand, require – sign an NDA up front – not to talk in public about what happens inside. The dynamics of the demand reveal a contrast between what’s seen on the platform and the reality behind closed doors. What it reveals is that persona has gone systemic in the church’s culture.
Such persons are often on the platform when they are too young and immature, and before they have matured in small spaces. Think of the many who got too big of a platform when they were too young and who collapsed because of stunted development.
Such persons attract others who gain identity by proximity to the persona/person, and who gain glory by that association. Which means the persona issue intoxicates others into the inner circle – it becomes a culture of propping up the persona.
Such persons are afflicted with a power that “crowds out love.” That is, her definition of celebrity as “social power without proximity” entails an absence of proximity that turns a person into a persona without close relationships. Plutarch wrote an important essay on this that contrasted flatterers with frankness, the latter being those major leaders need the most – and those leaders have personalities that push away frankness. Personas like this “feel love” in the adoration of the crowds, but adoration is not love. What they need are frank friends. Most of these persona types push frank friends off the stage, they discredit them, they gossip about them to others, they manipulate others to discredit them and before long the person they needed — a frank friend — is gone.
Such persons experience the paradox of loneliness. That is, surrounded by people but no one to love or who loves them because they have become isolated from others. They are “alone on an ‘island of recognition’.” Quite the expression, eh? “The more that people know of you, the less that people can know you.” Another one.
Such persons are drawn into “character splitting,” which means one person on the platform and another in real life. In some ways this is inevitable; in another sense it becomes dangerous to personal formation. But such a persona is necessary to do our work but the deeper the persona becomes the more exhausting it becomes to live up to those expectations. And right here is where burnout gets some of its explanation. It is emotionally and psychologically exhausting to maintain one’s persona when it is at a distance from one’s true self.
Such persons are also on the path to become dangerously narcissistic. I say “dangerous” because narcissism and gospel Christoformity are polar opposites. Beaty has good brief sketches of narcissism: grandiosity, lack of empathy, yearning for adoration, and broken relationships. Thus, “the narcissist doesn’t know who they are apart from what others reflect back to them” and they are “terrified to step away.”
Such persons tend to be ecclesiastical loners. Yes, nondenominationalism as well as the baptistic sense of local church autonomy are the magnets attracting them because they can be “their own man” and “do their own thing” and “do what they want.” Beware the anti-hierarchical relationships, esp when it is expressed by the pastor who loves the platform.
Such persons form parasocial relationships, and I had never heard this expression or of John Mulaney, but his story too Beaty back to this expression from a study in 1956. (There’s nothing new under the sun.) People in the audience have real relationships with the persona on the platform, relationships that are transformative and positive. But the relationship is solely in the minds of the audience. People want real relationships, they find the person on the platform what they want, though the image they have of that person is imagined – however real. The persona on that platform then becomes for them a parasocial relationship, fraught with what happens when the reality of that persona appears in the news.
Quite the chapter.
I saw all of this firsthand with Andy Wood at Echo.church. It is sad. I was that frank person who was trying to help him see, while he missed the adoration of in-person services made impossible in COVID shutdowns in San Jose. He was terrified of not having that adoration, and was willing to do whatever it took to get it back and more. Narcissism is harmful, but it is also sad. Those who enable it by giving them 20,000 people in SoCal to adore him too aren’t loving him. They are adoring the idea of him. The real Andy is fearful and broken, and he will do whatever it takes to keep his persona going- crush the whistleblowers, spread propaganda and spiritually abuse. Katelyn’s book is spot on, and this take on that chapter is as well. There’s much need for awareness about narcissism and the toxic cultures that it breeds when they are given the keys to a megachurch.
What a read. I'm left hanging for the fix. If leaders read this and feel Beaty is reading them, what are next steps toward holistic integrity? The one line is haunting – if "character splitting" is "in some ways inevitable" for entrepreneurial, nondenominational church planter types, does that mean there is a healthy level of character splitting that can be maintained? If so, how? Chuck DeGroat's "When Narcissism Comes to Church" comes to mind here too.