How #ChristianTikTok Users Understand and Utilize the Platform’s Algorithm

Are you reading this article right now? Maybe you found it on our website, stumbled upon it in a newsletter, or — who knows — perhaps it was delivered to you by divine intervention.

That’s one of the reasons you might see a video from “Christian TikTok,” members of the online religious community posit. New research from doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Reinis, and alum Corrina Laughlin (Ph.D. ‘18) analyzed over 500 videos from Christian TikTok users to investigate this phenomenon of spiritual conceptualizations of social media algorithms.

The paper, published in New Media & Society, reveals the different ways Christian TikTok users view their place on a platform that controls their visibility and the ways they interact with this unseen force. 

Some see the TikTok recommendation algorithm as existing in an “unseen” realm the same way a spiritual concept such as fate exists in the realm of the “unseen.” 

Subsequently, some of the Christian imaginary surrounding the TikTok algorithm frames algorithmically determined visibility as a direct expression of God’s will, according to the researchers. In one post, a user goes as far as to claim that God told him, “‘I am your algorithm, I am the one putting videos on the pages of people who need to see them.’”

For some, boosting the visibility of these videos, whether directed by the hand of God or not, is seen as a spiritual obligation. “This framing takes tenants of algorithmic optimization found in social media marketing guides and turns them into moral mandates in a grand landscape of spiritual warfare,” said Reinis and Laughlin.

The potential to boost the visibility of Christian content to the TikTok users through its algorithm is a feature that’s negotiated in different ways on Christian TikTok. 

Using the concept of “context collapse” on social media, the authors show how the “memefication” of their content by outsiders — for instance, when it reaches “the bad side of TikTok” where non-Christian audiences reside — can be an evangelizing opportunity. “‘It’s exactly why we’re here,’” one TikToker says, “‘to be the light for the lost. Even if we suffer from insults.’”

"[Among] American evangelicals, who tend to be more flexible in their evangelizing strategies than other religious traditions, there is a lot of interest in understanding how to evangelize in digital spaces,” Laughlin added.

But the algorithm is also seen by Christian TikTok as an oppositional force. While some see it as a tool for spreading the word of God, others portray the platform as part of the broader "mainstream media" ecosystem which they believe actively persecutes and suppresses Christians, the authors note.

This, however, can help users frame their own spiritual brand: “If the worldly algorithm hates them, they must be on the right track, their thinking goes.”

From this analysis, the authors introduce the idea of the “spiritual algorithmic imaginary,” showing how Christian TikTok views and interacts with platform rules and visibility by seeing the “unseen” algorithm through a spiritual lens.

“This theoretical framework, we hope, can be extended to studies focused on more than just Christian TikTok, but other spiritual communities around the world and on different platforms,” Reinis commented.