Platform Incentives Are Reshaping Religious Authority Online

Andrew Henry challenges the assumption that abundant religious content online amounts to a democratized public square. A small number of companies—principally YouTube, Meta, and TikTok—shape the conditions under which people find information, he argues. Users may believe they are independently choosing what to learn about Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Pentecostal Christianity, or any other tradition. But recommendation systems, search rankings, thumbnails, titles, and monetization incentives have already made consequential choices about what is most likely to appear.

Henry frames those pressures through four “dark laws of online engagement,” a set of findings he attributes to NYU psychologist Jay Van Bavel. Together, they describe a system that rewards attention-grabbing representations of religion rather than proportionate or patient ones.

The first is negativity bias. Henry cites an A/B test of 100,000 Upworthy headlines in which each additional negative word increased click-through rates by 2.3%. Words such as “wrong,” “fake,” “disgusting,” or “evil” can therefore become more useful to a creator than neutral language, regardless of whether a negative frame best represents the material.

The second is the tendency for extreme positions to be shared, especially inside a group. A user may circulate a fringe figure not because they agree with that person, but because they want others to see something shocking: “Get a load of this crazy guy.” In religious terms, the result can be a badly distorted sense of scale. Someone searching for Pentecostal Christianity, Henry says, may be far more likely to encounter videos of snake-handling congregations than material representative of the much broader Pentecostal world. The striking fringe becomes the public face of the tradition because it is more likely to travel.

Third, hostility toward an out-group generates more engagement than affirmation of one’s own side. Henry sees that dynamic in online conflicts between Christian apologists and anti-apologists: videos framed as attacks, debunkings, or rebuttals can generate the drama that explanation does not. A creator can make a historically serious argument about the Bible, he suggests, but it may be distributed differently depending on whether it is presented as a scholarly account or as an assault on an opponent.

The fourth pressure is moral-emotional language: language that makes a moral judgment while evoking a feeling. “Shameful,” “sacred,” “evil,” and “disgusting” all do this work. On short-form platforms, where the opening seconds determine whether a user stays or swipes away, such language offers an immediate emotional hook. It also gives creators a reason to continue using it.

Henry does not place himself outside the problem. He had conceived one video as a tutorial for fiction writers who wanted to create more convincing religions in novels, films, or games. A title such as “Tips for fiction writers for realistic religions,” he concluded, was unlikely to attract viewers. He retitled it “What fictional religions get wrong,” and the video performed well.

That packaging choice, in Henry’s view, was not necessarily unethical. The substance remained an accessible introduction to sociology of religion, and the more confrontational title gave viewers a reason to encounter it. But the example establishes the constraint: serious educators work inside a system where the doorway to careful material may need to be a word such as “wrong” or “fake.”

Henry compares this to the scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Miranda Priestly explains that a supposedly ordinary blue sweater is the end product of elite decisions made far upstream in fashion. The wearer experiences the sweater as a personal choice without seeing the chain of institutions and preferences that made it available. Online religious discovery works similarly, he says. A person looking for information is “downstream” of systems that have trained creators to package material in particular ways and trained audiences to respond to it.

The platform, then, does not simply make more religious knowledge available. It can change the relative visibility of traditions, practices, and arguments. Fringe communities can seem typical. Conflict can seem more central than ordinary religious life. A user seeking understanding can be led toward spectacle, animosity, and high-arousal language before reaching the material they thought they chose.

Liz Bucar argues that religious authority online is better understood as relocated than dispersed. Seminaries, dioceses, denominational presses, editorial committees, and other institutional intermediaries may no longer determine who gets heard in the same way. But authority has not been evenly distributed among countless participants. It is often concentrated in people who understand platforms, have a credible public identity, and can hold an audience’s attention.

Bucar’s own recent work illustrates a new route by which ideas can travel. After becoming more intentional about publishing on Substack and Instagram, she encountered a circulating clip from Trevor Noah’s interview with Zohran Mamdani, as she recounts it. Mamdani argued that Democrats had created an “ever lower ceiling of possibility”: a politics with little capacity to offer people an inspiring future. Noah suggested that the problem might be “the decline of religion on the left.” His co-host countered that what had declined was not religion but faith.

What interested Bucar was Noah’s account of faith. He described it not as doctrinal assent, but as the capacity to believe that one’s current condition is not the end of the story—that something better remains possible even when it cannot yet be seen.

Bucar connected that idea to David Tracy’s account of the analogical imagination and to Martin Luther King Jr.’s conception of beloved community. Her argument was that political imagination is not simply optimism or a mood. It is a learned capacity: the disciplined and creative ability to envision a future beyond present conditions.

For Tracy, as Bucar presents him, that ability must be cultivated. It is not merely the feeling that things will improve. King’s hope, she argues, worked similarly: it was not naïveté or withdrawal from reality, but a disciplined hope strong enough to survive contact with what was happening and to train others in a different way of seeing.

Her Substack post on that argument circulated widely.

Bucar says the post received 13,000 likes and 3,000 restacks. But its significance lies less in reach than in what happened as other people used it. She learned through direct messages that it had been quoted from pulpits and taught in Zen Buddhist centers. A progressive Christian podcast took up the argument and introduced a term Bucar had not foregrounded: eschatology, or the idea that one’s vision of the future shapes one’s actions in the present.

Bucar then built on that addition. She applied eschatological questions to the incompatible visions of the future associated, in her account, with Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. Those visions, she argued, can make the needs of people in the present seem less urgent. That work moved again: from Substack to Instagram carousel and Reel, then into an op-ed for Time.

The circulation chain was not a straightforward transfer of information from scholar to audience. A comedian’s exchange, a Catholic theologian’s concept, King’s political theology, clergy, podcast hosts, social-media users, and a national magazine all became part of one evolving conversation. Bucar’s point is not that obscure theology became briefly fashionable. It is that theological language became useful to people trying to think about political possibility, moral responsibility, and the future.

That usefulness can produce authority, but it is a different authority from the kind exercised by a church or denomination. Bucar distinguishes coercive authority from pedagogical authority. Religious institutions have often held both: they can establish obligations, deny communion, expel members, or otherwise enforce rules. Online educators and public scholars generally cannot. Their power is pedagogical. They explain, interpret, recommend, and invite; users can always close the tab, scroll past, or find another guide.

The absence of formal coercion does not mean an absence of authority. Henry may have an audience for religious studies larger than the student body of many divinity schools, Bucar observes. That does not create thousands of equally powerful authorities. It creates a major authority with a different institutional base.

Andrew Henry accepts that he holds authority in some sense, though he prefers terms such as translator, popularizer, or “edutainer.” He has academic credentials, encounters monographs and peer-reviewed research that most non-specialists will not see, and turns that work into scripts and videos for a broad public. His ideal model is Bill Nye: not a person performing every experiment, but a communicator who makes a field intelligible and compelling.

But the authority is not established by credentials alone. Henry describes parasociality as a one-sided relationship in which viewers feel they know a public figure who does not know them personally. His audience sees a carefully managed version of him: a torso framed for the camera, a script on a teleprompter, and edits that make the delivery quicker and more direct than ordinary conversation. That familiarity can make a creator seem trustworthy. It can also make an audience receptive to people who lack scholarly credibility; Henry points to Alex Jones as a stark example.

Bucar has seen the mechanism in a more constructive form. When the Bible scholar Dan McClellan shared one of her TikTok posts, she found that the share functioned as a powerful public credential. For many viewers, his endorsement carried more immediate weight than her professorship, books, or degrees. His audience already trusted him; by sharing her work, he signaled that she was worth hearing.

Henry’s own process for deciding what to amplify remains partly institutional. Outside his specialization in ancient Roman Christianity, he looks for recognizable departments, academic presses, peer-reviewed journals, and professional networks. These are not perfect measures, but they are the heuristics available to an independent creator working across fields.

The limits show up in the channel’s coverage. It contains substantial material on Daoism partly because Jennifer Busio, a scholar of Daoism, has repeatedly written scripts for it. It has considerable material on Buddhism because scholars in Buddhist studies introduced Henry to further experts. Hinduism has been comparatively underrepresented because his network has had fewer connections in that field. Online religious authority may bypass old gatekeepers, but it still depends on finite attention, informal networks, and the uneven availability of willing collaborators.

Henry says religious studies has little infrastructure for assessing whether public-facing work actually educates. Messages from viewers who say his channel led them to major in religious studies are meaningful, he says, but anecdotal. A serious assessment would require research into comments, click-through rates, audience retention, and whether viewers reach the most consequential parts of a video.

Henry accepted that the figure was meaningful while maintaining the distinction between attention and educational effect. Reach can establish an audience; it does not by itself show what that audience has learned, retained, or changed.

That distinction has led him beyond one-way video. The Religion Department, the online learning platform he co-founded with Andrew Aghapour, is meant to occupy the space between watching a video and enrolling in a full degree program. It grew from the fact that many scholars Henry knows are doing valuable work but do not want to become influencers. They are teaching, writing, pursuing tenure, or simply unwilling to make themselves on-camera personalities.

The platform offers courses including introductory Akkadian, ancient Coptic, contemporary Paganism, and ancient magic. Henry describes it as an alternative to the choice between a YouTube video and a university program. It does not offer substitute credentials or claim to make someone as fluent as a graduate student. It offers structured instruction, questions, office hours, and direct contact with scholars.

He cited roughly 30 people signing up for introductory Akkadian and 120 for ancient Coptic—subjects for which prospective students might otherwise need to find one of the relatively few university departments offering instruction, pay tuition, or enter a degree program. Bucar’s observation is that this begins to look institutional: a channel becomes a platform that gathers instructors, recurring courses, a curriculum, norms of expertise, and sustained interaction. The alternative to an institution can become a new kind of institution.

Liz Bucar does not think the central story is religious decline. People have not stopped thinking religiously, she argues; religious thinking has moved beyond many traditional institutions and become “loose in the culture.” The more important question is what happens when people encounter religious ideas through feeds, podcasts, newsletters, short videos, and informal networks rather than through sustained communities.

The internet contains a great deal of religious information, some of it serious and useful. But Bucar does not equate information with religious literacy. For her, religious literacy means being able to understand traditions, communities, and people on their own terms. It involves curiosity without romanticization, criticism without dismissal, and an ability to encounter difference without needing either to convert or to abandon one’s own perspective.

That is more than fact acquisition. It is an intellectual and ethical disposition.

Online systems are not necessarily built to cultivate it. Bucar contrasts a mirror with a guide. An algorithm can be a mirror, reflecting a user’s current preferences and reinforcing prior assumptions. It can also direct curiosity toward spectacle—the viewer who becomes absorbed in snake-handling churches, for example, because they are strange and visually compelling. A guide does something harder: challenges the learner, corrects them, asks more of them, and sometimes tells them what they do not want to hear.

Religious traditions, Bucar argues, have not chiefly operated as information businesses. They have trained people to become certain kinds of people. They cultivate dispositions such as trust, hope, and imagination through repetition, communal practice, physical presence, and relationships in which someone knows enough about another person to offer correction.

This is why she doubts that self-curated online research and self-transformation are identical processes. A person may assemble a great deal of information and experience that as an education in religion. But formation, in Bucar’s account, can require embodied community, recurring practices, and a guide whose judgment one is willing to accept.

Her work on wellness supplies a concrete case. Bucar argues that practices marketed as spiritual wellness are often extracted from Indigenous and Asian religious communities, stripped of religious context, and sold as consumer goods. De-religion makes them easier to market: consumers can seek benefits without taking on obligations, teachers, communal discipline, or hierarchy.

But Bucar says people are increasingly asking whether something important was lost in that removal. Someone interested in psychedelics may begin by seeking an experience. Her question is what a religious setting adds: a shared framework of meaning, ethical constraints, communal interpretation, and forms of responsibility. Similar questions apply to yoga, meditation, and related practices whose consumer versions promise personal benefit while minimizing their religious histories.

Her reconsideration of manifesting follows the same pattern. Bucar initially associated it with social-media promises to acquire a desired car or handbag through intention. But after engaging scholarship on its roots in Protestant New Thought, she came to see another possible meaning: clarifying one’s core values, making decisions in line with them, and doing that work in community.

She used her daughter’s college application process to explain the distinction. “Manifesting Cornell” need not mean that Cornell admission is the only acceptable outcome. It can mean asking what Cornell represents: a particular academic program, a desired intellectual environment, a kind of student life, or an aspiration inherited from family. Once those values are clearer, a person can seek them more honestly and perhaps find them elsewhere.

Bucar recognizes why people who are deconstructing a tradition, or who have never belonged to one, may recoil from rules, hierarchy, obligation, and authority. But she resists treating all of those elements as disposable baggage. In some settings, she argues, they are part of the ethical and interpretive container that gives practices meaning.

Liz Bucar rejects the claim that public-facing work necessarily “dumbs down” scholarship. Translating research for wider audiences, she says, has made her a better thinker and writer. Academic inquiry can remain tightly organized around questions scholars themselves find compelling. Public work introduces questions from readers, viewers, journalists, direct messages, and communities outside the discipline.

Bucar began pursuing public scholarship more deliberately after an interview for a New York Times piece on hijab that, in her account, reduced women’s clothing to a crude indicator of political identity. She had spent 45 minutes speaking with the reporter and felt that the eventual article did the opposite of what she had tried to explain. The experience made her want to become more capable in interviews and to create work in forms where she could retain more control over the argument.

That did not mean treating journalists as a public-relations arm. Bucar says scholars need to understand that they will not control a story, may not see it before publication, and do not get to dictate its title. She has learned to distinguish formats by their risks and their opportunities: an op-ed allows collaboration with an editor and substantial authorial control; a live television or radio appearance leaves less room to shape the result.

She also argues that scholars can learn the craft rather than treating it as an alien demand. Early attempts at op-ed writing taught her that an argument designed for academic prose does not automatically work in 700 words. She now regards concise public writing as a trained skill. In her account, the relevant question is not whether a short form can reproduce the work of a book or peer-reviewed article. It cannot. The question is what useful work the short form can responsibly do.

A book, a Substack post, an Instagram carousel, and a 90-second Reel do not do the same work. Bucar calls her books her best writing and does not treat a short video as a substitute for a scholarly argument. But a short piece can identify a teaching moment: one useful idea a person can grasp, carry away, and pursue further.

She gives Mary Douglas’s work on purity and impurity as an example. A piece titled “Mary Douglas Explained” may not travel far. But Douglas’s framework can become newly legible when connected to contemporary political and health discourse. Bucar says she has used it to explain what she sees as purity logic in MAGA and in RFK-related discourse. A short post can then direct interested people toward a longer essay, her book, or Douglas’s work itself.

Henry calls that smart packaging. It is a way to work with platform incentives without wholly surrendering to them. Yet he is explicit that the incentives affect subject selection as well as format. Social-media performance is momentum-driven, he says: a weak video can hurt the performance of those that follow. He sometimes makes videos on apocalypticism or the Antichrist because they reliably attract attention and allow him to take greater risks afterward.

Andrew Henry describes one such risk as a video about atheism among Māori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. He expected it to perform poorly because it was specific and niche. The video addressed, as he describes it, Māori rejection of Christianity as a colonizing religion alongside the rejection by some Māori of Indigenous spiritual claims. It performed far better than he anticipated.

The surprise does not dissolve the underlying constraint. Other risks fail. Henry is also working on a video about purity based on Mary Douglas’s scholarship and expects it to underperform if its academic subject is made too explicit in the title. Yet professors have asked for such a resource because they want to use it in classrooms. In that case, the video becomes partly a service to the discipline rather than a growth strategy.

Henry dislikes making short-form video but believes his work may not survive another 10 to 15 years if he refuses Instagram and TikTok. Bucar’s response is to build a ladder between formats: a quick post can offer an entry point, a longer Substack can expand the argument, and a book or primary text can take the reader further. The task is not to make scholarship frictionless. It is to decide what a compressed format can responsibly do, then give interested audiences somewhere more substantial to go.

Andrew Henry resists treating religion as a discrete sphere defined chiefly by metaphysical claims. Religious life also concerns whom people marry, what they eat, how they dress, and whom they spend time with, he says. Religious studies draws on anthropology, sociology, history, and even neurology; the question of what happens in a brain when someone prays or thinks about God can be part of its field.

His own method is what scholars call methodological agnosticism. A scholar may personally hold religious commitments, but when studying an event such as the resurrection of Jesus, Henry says, the task is to bracket supernatural explanation and work from empirically available evidence. That does not produce complete objectivity—scholars are not outside their own contexts—but it establishes a disciplinary approach distinct from apologetics or confessional theology.

Bucar offers a complementary explanation for why religion matters as a category. Anthropology can describe culture as a system of worldviews and ethics: ways people interpret the world and respond to it. Religion, she says, introduces questions of ultimate concern. Those may concern God, but need not. They may be embedded in an Indigenous cosmology or in a framework that challenges the separation of human life from plants, mountains, or other forms of life.

For Bucar, this is why the study of religion can ask questions that exceed description alone: what human flourishing or well-being looks like, what is at stake in present choices, and how people ought to respond to the world. She does not claim to have her own metaphysics settled. But she finds it useful to engage communities that do, because their accounts of reality can alter how they understand obligation, future possibilities, and the present.

Both speakers caution against a narrow understanding of religion as private belief. Bucar calls that framing both Protestant and anemic: not every religion is theistic, and not every tradition makes inner belief the central measure of a religious life. Practices can come first. Someone may recite the shahada before fully believing it, she says, or dress modestly before becoming modest.

That wider frame also changes what journalists and readers may notice in public life. Bucar argues that religion is relevant not only to Christian white nationalism, though she does not minimize that subject. Religion is also “in the room” in debates over health care, immigration, prosperity, gender, food, wellness, and economic life. Henry similarly points to gender roles, purity and cleansing practices, and the ways people understand media, marriage, and food.

Their claim is not that every social practice should be casually relabeled religion. Henry is skeptical of the reflex that calls a sports fandom or a cultural preference “a religion” merely because it resembles a church. He prefers reversing the comparison: instead of asking whether a football stadium is a church, ask whether Sunday worship is Christianity’s version of game day. That reversal makes religion less exotic and more continuous with ordinary human practices of collective gathering, special persons, habits, and meaning-making.