Category: Social Media and Ministry

Just a reflection on a day, darlings.

As you know if you’ve been reading me for any chunk of time, I am extremely interested in clergy persona, public image, and how social media is evolving those things. Actually, scrap the passive voice: we clergy are using social media to challenge and change laypeople’s assumptions and expectations about what clergy look and sound like. Some of us are doing it intentionally, some are doing it unconsciously. Whatever the case, it is happening. We are demolishing old archetypes and making way for a ministry that is not just authentic but more soulfully engaged than the past ever allowed us to be.

On Facebook, I see women ministers using Hillary Clinton’s historic nomination as an opportunity to reflect on the stained glass ceiling, and to share stories of the ways we have been treated as women of the cloth. Female colleagues and I had fun on Facebook recently remembering all the times in our church buildings when we have been presumed to be the secretary, the “assistant,” or in some other way not the “real” minister, who must be male. Facebook is a place for conversation among friends, or at least a large circle of fond acquaintances. I have one FB account for professional contacts and local ministry so that I never have to undergo the hurtful “unfriending” process recommended by
Greater Minds than mine — and I keep one messy, crowded FB account that has friends on it from high school, theatre, random buddies from every of the nine states I’ve resided in, a bunch of colleagues and family.

And then there’s Twitter!

Twitter is a much more rough and tumble platform than Facebook (which can get pretty hairy, as you have no doubt learned). Twitter is where the revolution happens. It is where news gets out faster than mainstream media can report it, where zingers are the lingua franca, and where we try, God help us, to share important thoughts and information 140 characters at a time.

It is also where your front door is wide open to anyone with an opinion and the means to dictate or type it, and it generates a lot of heat by virtue of a tweet’s brevity and speed.

If Facebook is your own salon, where you can moderate a conversation (we’ve all gotten much better, I think, at understanding the best and worst of how to use Facebook), Twitter is a gallop across the landscape of all the most compelling and controversial news of the day, where you are Tweeting while holding onto your horse and shouting thoughts to the other riders. It’s wonderful when you get to ride along with a group of people who are heading toward the same destination, but rough when you ride into a hostile gang who tries to shoot you off your horse.

Sometimes, of course, even folks who are heading to the same distant country exchange shots.

What I have observed is that the rise of Trump has attracted a huge population of American neo-Nazis, racists and misogynists who tweet anonymously and target feminists, social justice activists and anyone with an opinion that challenges white male supremacy. These guys are needy, violent and pornographic. Researchers are learning that in real life, they are often not openly hateful and bigoted, although many are socially inept, angry and lonely characters. What is very clear is that they empower each other and specialize in highly sexualized harassment. If you don’t know about internet trolling, you need to. It is an important, and I think compulsive, phenomenon and can create a great deal of stress for those who are on the receiving end of it (and probably in some way stressful for those who do it).

While I often doubt that my Tweeting is accomplishing very much by way of disseminating helpful information or news, I never doubt that it is extremely valuable as a study in human nature and the zeitgeist. I think clergy have to be willing to excavate the human mind and heart and look it in the eye, even when it reveals itself to be offensive and obscene. One of my complaints about traditional clergy archetypes and contemporary spirituality is that it is naive, credulous, and unrealistic. If we are to make a difference in the real world, we must immerse ourselves in the gritty and the ugly side of human nature, and not just through books, movies or the occasional visit to a rough neighborhood. I believe we have got to get tougher and develop more of a sense of humor, resilience and perspective about the perversity of human nature.

I love Twitter (and even the trolls) because it pops me out of my idealistic and spiritual bubble where people in covenanted community are sincerely working to love their neighbor and to do something worthwhile with their thoughts and deeds. I appreciate the stark reminder that there is a lot of willful ignorance, prejudice and judgment that many people are holding onto with passionate commitment because it is too inconvenient or costly to learn and change, and when I see the anonymity of the account I am aware that this venom-spewing bigot might be the alter ego of that nice lady from your Zumba class. Too many clergy do not want to turn over the rock of pleasant appearances to see what wiggly worms lie beneath, but we must! We have to turn over the rock, look at the creepy crawly things and factor them into what we know and claim about God and human beings.

I am still experimenting with my response to trolls. Sometimes I respond with LOUD SARCASM. Most of the time I block them. Sometimes I fight with them. Sometimes I stay in conversation with them if I have the energy to tolerate the initial insults, and we work our way to something interesting and kind of illuminating. Sometimes I report them to Twitter, but Twitter doesn’t care.

It can get intense sometimes (although less and less so as the years go by and I see the benefits of the medium), but having access to this melee has enriched my learning, allowed me to center black perspectives and voices in my daily timeline, provided access to a fantastic wealth of resources on anti-racism and other subjects, improved my preaching, and allowed me to both witness to and be part of a generation of clergy who are transforming archetypes in real time.

A clergywoman received a letter or e-mail from someone affiliated with her congregation that provided quotes from that minister’s Facebook page that the letter writer found unbecoming of a minister, and so this minister went and deleted all of that content.

I’m sure she isn’t the only one who has had this happen to her and who made that same decision. It’s very sad.

Let’s call out that kind of fine-tooth combing of any of our writings for what it is:
obsessive behavior. Internet stalking, even.

No one healthy or fair does that.

Some folks may fall down a rabbit hole of following their minister’s writings or postings, sure. But healthy people do this out of curiosity and the desire to better understand or know someone who fascinates and influences them and they do not carry a yellow highlighter along the way, looking for offense and feeling entitled to present their findings.

I hope none of you will feel compelled to edit and delete your honest observations because someone bullies you into it.

We all say things we regret, and it may also be that we take time to develop our own social media best practices and make some mistakes along that way. So what? Are you a criminal? Are you a terrible person? Probably not. And if you are, that will be discovered by other means than stalking your Facebook page.

Being yourself in all your interesting complexity is not objectionable. Also, lest you forget, not everyone needs to like you. It’s part of this generation of ministers’ task to pop the balloon of old, outmoded clergy archetypes.

If confronted with evidence of your failure to live into someone’s Pastor Fantasy via a roster of your objectionable remarks or photographs, you might direct people to focus their laser atttention and their red pen on a more worthy set of writings than your Facebook page — say, Scripture, or the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, or the journals of May Sarton. Surely little ole you isn’t worthy of all that energy and study. Or perhaps this ultra fan might consider doing a very close reading of all your sermons: surely there’s time better spent mining the gold there than examining your Facebook posts through a microscope.

I am not surprised that this happened to a woman minister and by a woman antagonist. Quite seriously, women tone-policing and emotionally controlling other women is the great underreported abuse in the Church. There are still many women in religious communities who expect women to lift their pinky every time they dare venture an opinion, and pass a plate of brownies and praise the name of Jesus before making an observation. If you challenge them, they will attack. This is a generational form of sexism that plenty of women internalize — even women clergy.

It makes me grateful every day that I’m a Unitarian Universalist. We’ve done a lot of work confronting sexism and misogyny and our communities have alwasy encouraged and supported this strong woman. Thanking God for them tonight.