Opinion | The Temptations of the ‘Personal Brand’
These institutions, at their best, offer a reaffirmation that there is an internal essence of a person that can never be reduced to a brand, that we have parts of ourselves that are beyond the reach of likes. They can remind us that we are made for embodied relationships with people who are committed to us and that looking to an online crowd to fulfill our desire to be loved will most often leave us more lonely and insecure. They can assure us that we are made, as the Christian faith teaches, not to perform but to live as people known and loved by God and by others.
Faith also challenges us to exist for something higher than ourselves. A faithful understanding of vocation calls us to the common good. Jesus even spoke in the stark terms of “dying to self.” A modern paraphrase of his teaching might be, “What good is it for a person (even a congressperson) if he gains tens of thousands of followers but loses his soul?”
Yet though religious communities could offer a prophetic antidote to our infatuation with branding, platforms and personas, they often do not. In her book “Celebrities for Jesus,” Katelyn Beaty writes, “The American church has overall mimicked celebrity culture rather than challenged it.” The temptation to embrace personality-driven religious leadership runs deep in America. The historian Harry Stout, in a biography of the 18th-century American cleric George Whitfield, portrays him as the first American “religious celebrity.” Whitfield drew on his acting background to draw huge crowds and even had a publicist.
This latent tendency has run rampant in our era. First, we had the advent of the televangelist. Then the megachurch pastor. Beaty highlights the rise of now-disgraced pastor-celebrities like Mark Driscoll, Bill Hybels and Carl Lentz — Driscoll declared to his church staff in 2012, “I am the brand.” Then, with the rise of social media, came the spirituality influencer. In a 2021 essay for The Times, “The Empty Religions of Instagram,” Leigh Stein, who identified as nonreligious, called these online spiritual gurus the new televangelists. The temptation to turn ourselves into a brand can be particularly insidious in a religious context because people of faith do, of course, want to reach people with their message. I know of churches across the theological spectrum that broadcast online services explicitly in order to reach a national audience. But a local church and its mission lose something crucial when it seeks to curry national attention.
A pastor, and a church, is not a brand. A key part of religious communities is that they are not merely a spectacle or a show but are primarily a people, a community living life together. I have gotten letters from time to time from readers declaring me their pastor, and of course, I’m flattered and grateful. I hope to be of help to them, yet I cannot be their pastor. I cannot hold their hands and pray over them in the hospital. I cannot grieve with them after the loss of a loved one or rejoice when they land a job. A pastor and the work of local churches more broadly are tethered to a place, an institution and a particular people, with all the complexity, hilarity, struggle and mystery of their lives.
What we need most at the end of the day has nothing to do with influence or brands. We need quiet beauty and enduring truth that we share with those who walk this journey with us. Local faith communities and faith leaders can offer this, but only if we give up our quest for a winning brand.
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Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
