Audio only:
In this episode Trent talks about a problem he sees with the idea of a Christian “Content Creator.”
Transcription:
Trent:
Last month I spoke at the Live Action Young Leader Summit where we gave away a thousand copies of my book Persuasive Pro-Life to equip these advocates to end the scourge of abortion. Also in attendance, were a dozen Christian content creators, and I love seeing so many young people using popular media to evangelize, but something was bothering me after meeting with them. I couldn’t put my finger on it until now. So what’s the problem with Christian content creators? Well, it’s not the creators, at least not these creators. I’ve seen a lot of their work and I’m impressed with their heart and skill. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything they’ve ever said. It’s just that I’m glad to see the overall godly orientation of their craft. Instead, what bothers me is the term content creator and specifically being a Christian content creator. Now, once again, I’m not criticizing people who use this term, Kyle Whittington, who previously moderated our YouTube channel, hosts an excellent Catholic content creator conference at the St.
Paul’s Center. So I understand the utility of the term content creator, and I’m not attacking anybody for using it. I just don’t like the term because it sounds like an inhuman job in some science fiction dystopia. A content creator sounds like someone who mindlessly and inhumanly pumps out product to satisfy rampant consumers. Demand ads that promise help to quickly create monetizable content, make the internet feel like a place where barely nutritious digital gruel is dumped on your plate for you to eat. It feels like a lot of modern entertainment that has become this kind of slop or is J from Red Letter Media puts it. Don’t ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products. This content creation mindset isn’t just a temptation for Christians who have sizable YouTube channels or Instagram accounts. It’s a danger for anyone who publicly posts on social media.
Anytime you or I post on X or Instagram or Facebook, we are creating content for public consumption and social media algorithms use psychological tricks to manipulate users into creating content for companies to monetize to see how this works, think about the difference between products and users. When you buy a book, a movie ticket, a meal or a video game, it’s easy to tell the difference between the user who buys the product and the product being consumed. But what is the product we buy on social media? The 2020 documentary, the social dilemma says, if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product. The product on social media are the users. When we use social media, we become products for other people to consume and we consume other people as products. Even if we use social media for the noble goal of sharing our faith, the faith or at least our commentary on it, becomes a kind of product that these companies manipulate for advertisers.
Now, that’s not evil because if it were, I would shut down my channel, but it does call us to vigilance because these platforms spend millions of dollars to research how to manipulate us into working for them without us realizing it. One way they do that is by posting how many people view and like our content, which causes a dopamine surge in our brains. When the surge wears off, the user wants that next hit. So they try to think about what content will get similar engagement, and if they don’t get as much engagement with the next post, they keep trying like a gambling addict who can’t let go of the slot machine because they know the next spin will be the big winner if they can just hang on a little bit more. Moreover, the posts that get amplified and shared tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator among human behaviors.
This includes adult material clickbait that promises adult material and rage bait that gets engagement by just making lots of people outrage at a post or things that just appeal to our most basic emotional responses without a lot of thought put into it. When this kind of content becomes religious, I call it clicks for Christ. Consider this meme. Jesus was born for you, died for you. If you love Jesus and are not ashamed, put amen in the comments below. Now, reminding people that Jesus died for them is a good thing and the person who posted this may have good intentions, but does this really call people to repentance or to grow in the Christian life? The only thing this seems to do is create engagement by encouraging lots of comments to this post, and the poster may not even be as sincere Christian, just someone who works for a click farm in another country that does this for ad money.
This is especially common with AI slop like this fake picture of a man in a wheelchair using the following artificial intelligence prompt that’s been translated from Hindi American soldier veteran holding cardboard sign that says, today’s my birthday. Please like injured in battle, veteran war American flag. In fact, the cover picture on the Wikipedia entry for AI slop is an image of Jesus made out of a school of shrimp because reasons. Now, you might be thinking, Trent, this is bad, but the Christian content creators I know make good content, so why are you worried? Sure, nobody goes from edifying content to seafood Jesus overnight, but many people gradually get sucked into the content creation mindset that values engagement over edification. So here’s a solution I want to propose. Replace the term content creator with the term artist or digital artist. Be an artist, not a content creator.
Artificial intelligence can create content, but AI can never create art because art is a way for human beings to communicate truth through beauty, not data through pattern recognition. That’s why I’ve instructed my editors to not use AI to create religious images for thumbnails because I want to feature true religious art in my episodes, and I direct this to everyone, not just people who post online in his letter to artists. Pope St. John Paul II said, not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet as Genesis has it all, men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life in a certain sense. They are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece. Our lives are not pieces of content for other people to consume. They are works of art that reflect the beauty of our creator and the art we create doesn’t have to be complex.
A simple post on X can be art in the same way a haiku or a short poem is art. A picture on Instagram can be as artistic as an award-winning photograph. When we create something for others to read or view, we should consider it part of our vocation as a Christian artist. For most people, that’ll just be an occasional artistic venture, but some people see that God gave them an artistic gift. John Paul II writes those who perceive in themselves this kind of divine spark, which is the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, architect, musician, actor, and so on, feel at the same time the obligation not to waste this talent, but to develop it in order to put it at the service of their neighbor and of humanity as a whole. When Michelangelo sculpted the pieta, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy or Fulton Sheen preached with a chalkboard.
These men were not creating content to boost engagement. They were making great art, which ironically leads to the highest forms of engagement because people desire beauty even more than they desire pleasure. That’s because God is beauty itself, and so the truly beautiful art always reflects God in some way. Christian art shouldn’t exist in a Christian ghetto where it gets a pat on the head for trying. It should reflect ancient traditional principles of beauty so that anyone, even a jaded modern person can appreciate it for more on that, see my previous episode on why liberals love ugly art and how good art lifts the human spirit to contemplate the divine. Moreover, having the mentality of an artist instead of as a content creator also leads to embracing another virtue of the artist not selling out. True artists don’t care if their work makes money, or even if lots of people like it, hence the trope of the starving artist.
They just want their art to be authentic and objectively good. It’s better to be an unknown good artist than a widely popular sellout. Being a Christian artist on social media platforms means we should choose quality over quantity. Now, that’s hard to do because algorithms like YouTube punish accounts that don’t post on a regular basis by not recommending their content, but it’s better to do that than to always scrape the bottom of the creative barrel in order to meet some arbitrary deadline. Social media imposes on us. We should also choose resting over rushing, for example. It’s really tempting to maximize engagement by being the first person to post a hot take on a widely discussed issue, but it’s better to have a prudent holy take that less people see than a viral hot take that could be wrong or even emus. The content creation mindset also makes people think that to be successful, they shouldn’t take any risks.
They should just copy successful Christian content creators, but that’s what Hollywood content creation is right now, and it’s awful, endless reboots, prequels, sequels and spinoffs of existing ips because companies know what leads to box office success, apologetics, evangelization, and catechesis don’t have to live within a prison of feisty ex posts. Long form interviews, reaction vids and video essays with a host sitting in front of a warm, inviting background talking about a subject while cool stock footage plays over him. Okay, that one feels a little bit close to home, but to be clear, those things aren’t bad. It’s just bad. If Catholics who want to publish on platforms like YouTube think they have to follow a certain mold, but if you embrace an artist’s mindset over a content creation mindset, you’re more willing to take risks to break the mold, to try something new, even if it doesn’t lead to much engagement.
I’d love to see more Catholic and Christian documentaries, oral histories, short films, animation, stop motion poetry. I mean the sky’s the limit. For example, Catholic lo-fi music is a great example of Christian art and John Kramer of the church. Lego Project shows that you can glorify God through any medium by just taking a picture or video of it and uploading it online. So how do we get this kind of inspiration? Well, the very word inspire is rooted in the word breathe like inspiration. Being inspired means God breathes into you and I divine truth, similar to what the ancient Greeks thought a muse could do in inspiring someone and whisper inspiration to them. John Paul ii put it this way, the divine artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power. I also think it’s a good sign if you have a little bit of reluctance towards being a digital artist that shows you aren’t trying to just become famous or chase a dopamine rush. You sense the great responsibility that comes with representing the faith even in social media posts, but we shouldn’t let prudent caution paralyze us inaction because we worry that we’re not skilled enough to share our faith. Here’s a two minute clip from Brian Holdsworth describing how he got started creating his YouTube channel in a way that embodies a humble, almost reluctant attitude that guards against being an annoying content creator.
CLIP:
After seeing the success of Apostle, that’s like word on fire. I wanted to encourage other preachers and teachers to do the same, and I had a clergy friend here who I thought would be great in that role. He was one of the more prominent evangelists and preachers in this archdiocese, so I kept on encouraging him. I bought all the video gear. I learned how to use it, and I tried to convince him or anyone to sit down in front of the camera so that we could take advantage of the opportunities that new media was presenting to the church’s mission as had been proven as a proof of concept by people like Bishop Barron, but I, busyness and reluctance got in the way and I couldn’t convince anyone to do it. I had this studio all set up and no talent in front of the camera, so out of restlessness and a desire to practice what I was learning and to provide a proof of concept for potential evangelists that I could work with.
I sat down in front one day and I just ranted about a topic that was being debated here in Canada, but was only getting one side of the argument, and then after turning the camera off and watching it back, I watched it and I thought, huh, that’s actually serviceable. So I somewhat reluctantly and Bashfully started posting these little sessions that I would have in front of the camera to my own YouTube channel, fully expecting that nobody was going to watch them, but that they might serve as at least a portfolio piece to show my production skills to prospective clients. And honestly, to my complete surprise, people started watching and interacting with those videos in fairly large numbers. At least it felt large to me. At one point, someone ripped one of my videos from my channel and then posted it to their Facebook page, and it ended up getting half a million views. It was at that point I realized that what I said had the potential to reach a lot of people. So as you’d expect, I decided to take it more seriously and to focus more on what I thought people needed to hear about, which was the Catholic faith.
Trent:
Finally, we should make everything we do as artists beautiful. This means surpassing objective standards for aesthetics and making the words and images that we create, even if they’re a humble posts on social media, make them of the highest quality. But that doesn’t mean everything we make has to be sunshine and rainbows. Flannery O’Connor is one of the great modern Catholic authors, and she specialized in grim sometimes violent stories that we’re still rooted in the faith without beating you over the head with the message. John Paul II says, even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption. That means it’s okay in moderation to post about bad things in the church. Michelangelo even took artistic revenge on a papal master of ceremonies who complained about nudity in the Sistine Chapel by painting that priest in hell.
But just as the Sistine Chapel has far more glory to balance out this slight, we should not disproportionately focus on the church’s warts. When a person consistently posts about the bad things in the church, it’s a sign that they’ve become a content creator, mining an addictable product, even if they don’t realize it. In this case, anger, and they’ve lost sight of the artist’s duty to save the world through beauty. I’ll leave you with these words from John Paul ii. Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden for God, which is a lover of beauty like St. Augustine could express in incomparable terms late Have I loved you? Beauty so old and so new late. Have I loved you? Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day. I.