Christianity will always be new. The meme evangelists agree with Billy Graham on why: Christ is alive.
Christianity has done a great job of adapting to digital tech. videos, gifs, clips, pictures, cartoons, apps. They all offer grace to millions of people.
He is alive and we are forgiven. And the Holy Spirit moves through Instagram Reels and TikToks and YouTube Shorts and X posts.
I admire the defiance of the meme evangelists. They use social media to spread the Gospel. They do it with the peaceful devotion of the original apostles. Only their tools are Adobe Premiere and Garageband.
They craft sleek videos. The music is always intense. If I had to choose one video to represent the meme evangelist movement, I would go with this one. And this one.
They like to slow songs down. The pitch drops. This has been a fashionable method ever since rappers in Houston chopped-and-screwed. This tempo lurk makes every note sound shadowy and cool. Only what the meme evangelists produce is a dark version of a genre called Chill Vaporwave.
Sometimes the video cuts are too fast to track. But this makes the footage more captivating.
“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12).
Most of the meme evangelist accounts are Catholic or Orthodox. But Protestants are certainly not excluded. Browse the comments and you’ll find harmony among believers.
You will also encounter plenty of criticism of Catholics and Orthodox who have gone astray.
One of their heroes is Cliffe Knechtle. Cliffe is truly a servant of God. His evangelization has led many people to redemption. He serves as senior pastor at Grace Community Church, which is either nondenominational or Reformed Baptist. But that doesn’t matter. The man is a warrior for Christ, full of love and defiance.
The meme evangelists also love Billy Graham.
Their duty is to spread the message of Christ. They encourage rejection of worldliness. They unmask the evil of the world and offer the only alternative: Christ is King of the universe.
He is alive and we are forgiven. And the Holy Spirit moves through Instagram Reels and TikToks and YouTube Shorts and X posts.
The meme evangelists structure their messaging in a specific order.
First, they pray. They look to God the Father and to Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord. And pray, alone and with their families. And go to church, with their families and community.
Then they look to tradition and the Bible. “Tradition” here is open-ended. The meme evangelists know that Satan is a destroyer. He wants to ruin humanity and enslave what’s left of us. Tradition means saving human goodness.
Next, they look to their partners and their children. Then they pray some more. Then, they look to their friends. Then their neighbors. The goal is to carry love like water in a bucket through the blazes of modern life until they get to their enemy. If he’s on fire, they rescue him.
Love is the fulfillment of the law. But also sometimes love demands rejection. Jesus came bearing a sword designed to eradicate evil.
The meme evangelists decry our culture of excess and hysteria. They posit a better way. They seek monogamy and lift weights. They eat steaks and escape the ravages of broken cities. They make as many children as they can. They pray without ceasing.
Check out the song behind this video from Trad.Christian or this cut by Order of Christ.
Trad West is probably the biggest meme evangelist hub. It has 122K followers on X, 209K on Facebook, and 174K on Instagram. They live by the bottom text: “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use memes.”
Templar Pilled offers intense edits usually over a sped-up instrumental.
Soldiers for Christ boast 329K followers on Instagram. They rely on apocalyptic imagery shoved into electronica. This one uses the beat from “Oblivion” by Grimes, a song about a sexual assault.
This is a clever disharmony. The meme evangelists take dark music and slow it down. This produces a kind of sacredness. Then they take this warped perfection and fuse it with a downpour of Christian imagery.
It signifies readiness: “I won’t let bullies box me out of my culture. I will never give in to their demands.”
The meme evangelists love Bishop Fulton Sheen. They also love Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, who was recently stabbed while giving a homily. This is a memeification of his response.
The point of these accounts is not division but cohesion. Improvement. Redemption. It’s Proverbs 27:17, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”
It’s how you get alive.