Online sharing and co-regulating with our mini-machines is not going away. The luddite professions of the early 2000s (my own included!) of staying off and staving off social media have lost a bit of their steam—either because they’re now a high-rolling content creator making bank by encouraging people to get off their screens with the help of (insert product name here) or because they are busy refereeing their children’s screen and socials intake. If we can agree that online sharing remains both a staple in our digital diet and a pipeline for potential evangelization, then we can wield it in a deeper, more authentic way to influence the culture (or rather de-influence it, or influence it for the true, the good, and the beautiful). A hearty examination of how to be stealth ambassadors for the Lord is in order. And it begins with viral nuns.
They’re not actually nuns, these religious sisters, because nuns live in cloistered convents and don’t speak to the outside world much less podcast at and in it. Dominic Sisters Open Mic is a new podcast hosted by the Mary Mother of the Eucharist Dominican Sisters based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Over one hundred and forty of these women comprise this religious community with a charism for K-12 classroom teaching all across the country as missionaries (including at our own parochial school in St. Paul, Minnesota). The podcast host, Sr. Miriam, O.P., has been wildly popular for her affirming charm, passion for chit-chat during community ultimate frisbee games, and her phrase, “Sister, and you are so good at that.”
Why is this content viral? Women wearing a religious habit with no makeup, no products to sell, no downline or upline except to Jesus their Bridegroom? Happiness, unscriptedness, and authentic vulnerability. That’s what our hearts desire and why we keep scrolling to the point of the condition nicknamed “texting thumb,” repetitive movements putting stress on our poor under-appreciated phalanges. It’s worth it if you’ve come across these brides of Christ online!
We need the good, godly, hearty laughs of an organic back-and-forth conversation.
At risk of penning a “Woe is us! The internet used to be better back in the day” essay, social media has changed dramatically in the last handful of years with the flood of bonafide content creators for whom creating attractive and engaging content is their bread and butter, literally. It’s hard to tell if your friend loves her hand cream, or if she’s a rep for the brand, or it’s an affiliate link, or her sister owns the company (ahem, my sister’s company does make hand creams, full disclosure, but I promise this one is non-sticky). Everyone’s imagination is churning about how to capture the most valuable commodity online: attention. The platforms reward what looks like learned narcissism. And vulnerability can lead to longer views and more clicks. The uptick in women sharing how their marriages fell apart only to learn, as you scroll, that the caption promises they will send you a guide on how to navigate your abandonment if you simply comment “heartache” below. We hope to have one or two folks in our family, friend groups, or parish who could walk with us if this were our reality, not the lady online. Who knows! Maybe she has great insights, but she is not entering into a supportive relationship with you; she’s collecting your email address.
So if the Dominican Sisters or your favorite preacher online are sharing their unscripted selves, why is it that not only do you stay a while and pull up a chair in their hearts, but also feel like maybe it’s too good to keep to yourself or to be true? We need the good, godly, hearty laughs of an organic back-and-forth conversation. This is why a handful of podcasts maintain top viewership: The guests are off-script, the conversation lasts hours, and we who cannot finish a Rosary (sixteen minutes is awfully long) are committed to the ending credits because these people are not selling their story to us or our story to ourselves. It’s authentic humanity on display.
This leads to the potentiality (and actuality) of public mishaps. I remember clips I’ve seen (sorry, watched the reel, couldn’t commit to the long-form) of Theo Von. His podcast This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von regularly ranks in the top five podcasts in the world (currently number two on Spotify’s list). He is one of the most genuine, self-deprecating, and earnest conversationalists around on podcasts. His popularity is due to his heart-felt rawness, and people are hungry for that. Sometimes the clips have captured remarks lacking in charity, and he’s apologized later. The pressure to have and present a “hot take” on every item in the news cycle has presented sticky moments from some of my favorite Catholic show hosts as well. Good thing you can delete carousel images (even though the Way-Back Machine is unforgiving). I’d rather live in a world of uncurated comments in the hopes that we can hear each other as we are: beautiful, complex, messy, in need of a savior.
We desire our hearts to be cultivated for a relationship with God, not curated for it. We desire to show the world and the culture that being authentic is the first step in growth. Perhaps evangelization to bring Christ into the culture first begins with an outer reality that moves to an inner belief: I don’t have to be perfectly filtered and photoshopped, nor does my closet or my vacation or my breakfast. Joy is available for the choosing. Jesus desires to come and abide within us, imperfections and all, in order to conform our hearts more closely to his own. Letting go of outward perfection frees our energies up for inward transformation.
Religious sisters laughing uproariously over the fact that hobbies only sound like more work models this freedom from the desire to be seen as important enough to “influence” online or elsewhere. The temptation pervades our imaginations to not believe we matter outside of our performance, and we have value intrinsic to our being beloved children made in God’s image with his likeness. We cannot prove our importance with likes, comments, and reshares. God laughs in the way only a beloved can, without ridicule. How could we be anything but critically important to the one who fashioned us after his own heart—platform or no platform?
Share your joyful witness authentically in the goods and the bads, the hills and the dales. Share without concern over counting, curating, or clicking. And where you have no joy, ask God to put joy for him. Let us allow him to sing a new song over us. Bless our audiences both large and small with the gift of seeing his love beam back at them. Happy, authentic influencers teach us that it only requires freely giving the gift of yourself to influence for the true, the good, and the beautiful. And this kind of influence lasts and is truly viral.